‘Better for you beverages’: How functional drinks are fizzing while carbonated and energy sectors fall flat
Trend: Non-alcoholic beverage trends
Both the APAC soft drinks and energy drinks markets are amongst the largest worldwide, but rising health and sugar reduction trends within the industry have dealt mighty blows to both beverage categories. In the June edition of the FNA Deep Dive, we took a closer look at how beverage firms are innovating to survive these changes - or risk getting overtaken by newer players.
Asia has always been a major consumer market for soft drinks, and the traditional energy drinks market has been a very dominant player in Australia and also China which has seen rapid growth in the category over the past decade.
But as consumer awareness about health and sugar reduction rises in the region, both these drink categories were found to face major challenges in their traditional product offerings which mostly need to be high in sugar to taste good.
“The soft drink market in particular is a very, very mature category here in the APAC region, and has been on end-decline when it comes to consumption-per-capita for years now,” then-Kanguru Asia Pacific President David Westall, who also used to bed the CEO of Coca-Cola Korea Bottling and Pepsi Cola Bottling Central Asia, told FoodNavigator-Asia.
“It’s managed to remain hidden behind things like price increases and package size changes, but the number of consumption occasions, which is what we in the industry use to measure consumption, is actually significantly lower now than it has ever been in history.”
Read the full story here.
