Matt Casey

Anheuser-Busch has done a 180 on 180.
The brewer’s non-alcoholic distribution arm, 9th Street Beverages, will roll out a reformulated and repackaged version of its 180 energy drink this month, and the new product veers away from the original.
The brand traded extreme sports-style graphics for a clean package and logo that would look at home in a natural food store – which matches the drink’s new formulation.
180′s nutrition panel now includes fiber in addition to the B- and C- vitamins included in the original, and 9th Street Director Tom Burkemper boasts that the product uses natural colors, natural…

I have two “Eco-Fina” bottles on my desk right now. One stands about eight inches tall. The other, crushed into a lump of twisted plastic, stands about two and a half inches high. The entire mess – save for the cap and neck, fits in the palm of my hand and weighs about the same as two quarters.
This is the water bottle of the future.
For now, at least.
PepsiCo’s light-weighted bottle for its Aquafina brand weighs in at half that of its 2002 predecessor, and PepsiCo boasts that the new package will save 75 million pounds of plastic…

Jumping from one multinational beverage company to its fiercest rival, Rockstar energy drink has signed a distribution agreement with PepsiCo Inc. that will end its deal with The Coca-Cola Company. Both companies hope the deal will give the country’s number-three brand more consistent coverage across the U.S. and increase PepsiCo’s presence in the energy drink category.
PepsiCo spokesman Larry Jabbonsky said the deal, announced Thursday, will more than double PepsiCo’s share of the energy category. He said he expects Rockstar to mesh well with the company’s other key energy offerings: Amp, No Fear and a collection of energy drinks co-marketed…

Bombilla closed its doors this week, three years after the promising young company – run by three 20-somethings from New Jersey – debuted its mate brand.
Co-founders Ariel Nelson, Noah Krinick and Thomas Wollmann earned the respect of their peers through hard work, but Seth Goldman, president and CEO of Honest Tea, said the brand failed to find its own niche and he wasn’t surprised that the company closed after failing to find more funding.
The brand initially offered mate teas (competing directly with better-established Guayaki), expanded into Asian teas (well covered by Ito En and others) and then into…

Apparently, the gravitational pull of the sun, the Mona Lisa, the exponential growth of the universe, Earth’s magnetic field and Pepsi’s new logos all have something in common – at least if you believe the design agency that created it.

Companies connected to the beverage industry have been accused of bringing all kinds of ills on the U.S. populace – diabetes, heart attacks, New Coke – but flavor company Frutarom has now been accused of the dastardly deed of bringing sweetness to the Big Apple.

Beverage firms at the 2009 Winter Fancy Food Show at the Moscone Center in San Francisco continue to delve deeper into worldwide tea traditions.
Banner brand Honest Tea unveiled a new Honest Mate… line at the show, which marks the first time that a brand affiliated with Coca-Cola or PepsiCo has produced an RTD in the South American yerba mate tradition. Honest Mate differs from other mate brands, according to Melanie Knitzer, Honest Tea’s vice president of sales for natural and specialty foods, because it’s brewed from un-smoked tea leaves. The three-SKU line focuses on South American flavors – including

A pair of recent studies found mercury contamination in high-fructose corn syrup and products containing the sweetener, USA Today reported Tuesday, but several groups question the studies’ relevance.
The studies, performed by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found detectable mercury levels in nine of 20 commercial sources of high-fructose corn syrup, and in nearly a third of 55 brand-name foods. The toxic heavy metal appeared most commonly in dairy products, dressings and condiments that contain HFCS.
USA Today reported that the source of the contamination is a reagent called caustic soda – used to produce HFCS – that…

Jones Soda Co. will launch a beverage built around Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a calm- and focus-inducing neutraceutical, this spring, and they’ll be the only beverage firm to offer the ingredient in the near future.
The beverage firm, best known for its quirky soda labels emblazoned with photographs, signaled last year that they were working on a GABA beverage, but Jones Brand Manager Mike Ginal said the company has now finalized the flavors and packaging, and is working on getting it to market.
The beverage will take the form of a tea/juice blend in four flavors: Lemon Honey, Grapefruit, Nectarine and…

Fast-growing enhanced water brand Function Drinks has fired five members of its sales staff in the new year to tune its organization for 2009 and take advantage of a fertile period for hiring beverage business professionals, said Chairman and CEO Dayton Miller.
Miller said the firings, which amount to less than 10 percent of the company’s 60-person workforce, were not linked to financial distress. He said the company grew by just over 200 percent in 2008, and he projected a growth rate of 100 to 200 percent in 2009. Instead, he called them a routine matter, similar to firing rounds…

and Jeff Klineman
Coca-Cola will release a trio of stevia-sweetened Odwalla beverages this week, according to the Wall Street Journal, pre-empting a kind of tacit approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Coca-Cola and Cargill submitted research to the FDA in May that asserted that their variation on stevia, called Truvia, should be granted generally recognized as safe (GRAS) status. The FDA website said that it tries to respond to most petitions within 180 days, but the agency does not require firms to wait for official approval before releasing products believed to be safe.
The FDA could still withdraw support…

In an illustration of the explosive growth of the energy shot market, workers at NVE Pharmaceuticals’ Andover, N.J. plant are currently assembling the co-packer’s fourth energy shot filling line.
NVE has notable experience with energy products, according to company president Bob Occhifinto. The pharmaceutical-turned-nutraceutical company fills and labels a wide array of energy drinks for smaller firms, and produced ephedra products before the Food and Drug Administration outlawed the substance in 2004. NVE’s executive vice president Walter Orcutt said the company entered the energy shot co-packing market when it installed its first shot-filling line a little over two years ago.…

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Economic commentators frequently point to thriving dollar store sales as a symptom of a suffering economy, and the surging supply chain that carries energy drinks to those stores may suggest coming bad news for producers of caffeine-laden beverages.
Jon Auspitz, president of Wham Food and Beverage Company, said his company buys food and beverage products nearing their expiration dates at fire-sale prices, and then sells them to charities or discount stores.
“Basically, when they have nowhere to turn, when they were going to have to pay to destroy their product, they have us pay them for the product and get…

and Jeff Klineman
One of the most powerful forces in the beverage industry this week declared that products in the rapidly-expanding 4 oz. or less shot market are not beverages.
The decision means, in a sense, that energy shots, whose sales are expected to approach $1 billion this year, have arrived as a product category and not simply a derivative of energy drinks. They will no longer have to share the floor of the NACS Show with beverages – instead residing in the Health and Beauty Care section – and therefore will not, in most instances, be fighting it out…

Looking for a real estate deal? Talk to Rockstar Energy – or at least its CEO, Russell Weiner.
Maybe it’s due to the flagging housing market. Maybe it’s due to the distribution deal Rockstar distributor Coca-Cola signed with Monster, but, either way, Weiner is selling his California home for the low, low discount price of just under $3 million.
Okay, you’re probably not going to find that kind of change by returning soda cans, but the Los Angeles Times reports that that price tag for the elevator-equipped 4,414-square-foot home just above the Sunset Strip fell by $2 million.
Interesting that…

PureSport, a powdered sports drink brand, launched in a Sports Authority in Chicago last week, and they brought their new spokesman: Michael Phelps.
More than 1500 fans turned out to meet the eight-time gold medal winner, but the story here is that Phelps signed on to promote a relatively small brand instead of a category standard-bearer like Gatorade.
Phelps has already appeared in a number of promotions not typical of Olympians – like Frosted Flakes, AT&T Wireless internet connection cards and Rosetta Stone language learning software. Phelps said he personally used Rosetta Stone to learn Chinese prior to the Beijing…

, Assistant Editor
Red Bull will enter the fast-growing energy shot market in 2009, according to Patrice Radden, spokeswoman for Red Bull North America.
“We recognize that some consumers are interested in a smaller package to deliver their energy needs in the form of an energy shot,” Radden said in a statement. “Currently, there is not a premium brand in this fast-growing segment. Red Bull plans to fill this void and offer Red Bull Energy Drink in a shot format in 2009.”
The move into the relatively-new energy shot category marks a departure for Red Bull. The product debuted on…

, Assistant Editor
Washington politicians are questioning the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s handling of a chemical used in beverage can linings.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) separately and Reps. John Dingell (D-MI) and Bart Stupak (D-MI) jointly sent letters to the FDA recently, asking about the agency’s report. Dingell and Stupak tried to determine why the Administration hired a private consulting group with industry ties to perform its analyses on the chemical Bisphenol-A, also known as BPA.
The company that performed the analysis, ICF International, says it works on hundreds of contracts per year, and conducts its projects under strict…

This one may just right the economy. Or kill Dr Pepper. Or Both.
Axl Rose finally set a date – November 23… – for the release of his 17-year-in-the-making album Chinese Democracy. His managers said that they’d launch the album with a monumental promotion campaign. Maybe the combination of promotional money hitting record stores and hard rock nostalgia on Wall Street will be enough to return the economy to the tech-boom state that accompanied the release of Guns N’ Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident in 1993, but if that’s not enough, Dr Pepper is there to help.
The Dr Pepper Snapple

, Assistant Editor
PepsiCo unveiled plans at this week’s National Association of Convenience Stores show in Chicago that mark a change in course for Gatorade, the hydration category’s marquee brand.
After four decades of doing one thing and one thing only, pending Gatorade line extensions and reformulations will include functional ingredients.
Sub-line Tiger will undergo a reformulation while its eponymous spokesman is out of commission. The re-launched Tiger will be subtitled “Focus” and include functional ingredients to enhance mental acuity.
The current formulation of Tiger debuted in March and differs from core Gatorade only by including more electrolytes. Tiger and…

, Assistant Editor
AriZona delivered on a promise made in August this week at the National Association of Convenience Stores show when the company unveiled a flurry of new products that will make forays into the enhanced water, energy shot, flavored water and organic markets.
The company showed off several organic lines including their “Tea Water” produced in cooperation with Nestle. The product comes in 20 oz. pet bottles and contains 20 calories per serving as well as a dose of antioxidants. In addition, they announced two organic green tea lines. The first, Organic AriZona, will come in original, yumberry…

, Assistant Editor
When Jon Olafsson and his sons “pushed the button” Friday at their new Icelandic Glacial bottling facility, the first motion on the automated line dumped a heap of thumb-sized plastic test tubes into a loading bin.
That cascade of plastic “pre-forms” not only put Icelandic Glacial in the same class as the majority of bottled water companies across the globe, who finalize their bottles on-site, but it also represented a big environmental step for a company that has cut its reputation via its carbon-neutral status.
To receive the CarbonNeutral seal from The Carbon Neutral Company, firms offset…

, Assistant Editor
A small beverage company has filed a trademark suit against Coca-Cola and asked a judge to order the beverage giant to remove Vault from the market.
High Voltage Beverages LLC produces Volt – primarily caffeine-enhanced sports drinks – and alleges that Vault violates their trademark because the two words sound and appear similar. Their suit, filed August 12 in the U.S. district court for the Western district of North Carolina, asks that Coke render any profits from Vault to HVB, remove Vault from the market, transfer drinkvault.com to HVB and pay for the costs of an advertising…

Bottled water in the U.S. could include more on-package documentation if a bill proposed by U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) becomes law.
The bill, called the “Bottled Water Safety and Right-to-Know Act,” would require bottled water companies to display – on each bottle – where the water came from, how it was treated, and the quantity of contaminants in the bottle.
Tom Lauria, a spokesman for the International Bottled Water Association, said most bottled water companies already address these issues. They print the source of the water on the label, he said, along with an 800 number to call for…