Gerry’s Insights: Modern Art

As one who’s been active in advocating for safer streets around my home town, New York, I remembered being surprised a few years ago to hear about a new initiative that was being prioritized by the group I helped out, Transportation Alternatives: getting policymakers, the media and just people in general to stop using the word “accident” to describe cases where, say, a car rear-ends another car or sends a cyclist hurtling to the pavement. From now on, the idea was, everyone should start calling them “crashes.”

I was a bit skeptical. After all, we already had our hands full lobbying for policy changes like speed cameras near schools and protected bike lanes. Why distract everybody haggling over mere nomenclature?

As I came to realize, TA was on to something. Those destructive confrontations are almost never an accident. They are the result of bad decisions made by drivers of cars, e-bikes, regular bikes and other vehicles. Calling them accidents is a way of implicitly absolving the perpetrators of responsibility, as if the carnage they create by running red lights and speeding is an act of God. To my surprise, the word change stuck. Though I still sometimes find myself slipping (accidentally!) into using “accident,” the words “crash” and “collision” have become the standard choices now for journalists, politicians and others in discussing these incidents that take the lives of hundreds of New Yorkers a year and maim thousands more. While it’s impossible to gauge precisely how much of an effect this has had on changing the timbre of discussion around street-safety issues, I’m convinced it’s done much to cement the notion that these casualties are entirely preventable. That in turn has helped usher in beneficial laws, regulations and street redesigns.

So sometimes nomenclature can matter in framing things in a new way that opens minds and makes progress possible. Which brings me to “modern soda.” It’s been kind of remarkable how quickly the trade has embraced this term conjured up, apparently, by Walmart merchandisers looking for a catchy way to highlight the exciting, above-premium sparklers that have been showing up on the scene.

“Modern soda” is brilliant on several levels. For one, it creates a great catch-all not just for so-called gut pops like Olipop, Poppi and Culture Pop but for other sparklers that take the category in a new, nominally healthier direction, such as the stevia-sweetened Zevia brand that makes no claims to any functionality. (It also seems to exclude a prior generation of altsodas like Reed’s, Jones and Grown Up Soda that may have set some new directions but didn’t necessarily frame the category in a new light.) As for the gut pops themselves, it takes pressure off their leaning too heavily on prebiotic or probiotic identities that may or may not stand up to real clinical scrutiny, an evolution those brands were likely to take on their own anyway.

Of course we see this in politics all the time. Trump does it in an infantile way with name-calling like “Sleepy Joe” and “Shifty Schiff” and “Crooked Hillary,” though I have to admit it seems effective, at least among his MAGA adorers. And it cuts the other way too. I’m seeing an increasing number of commentators now starting to refer to Trump’s tariffs not just as “tariffs” or “levies” but also as “taxes,” which of course is exactly what they are. Will that help tilt the debate in favor of pulling back this poorly thought-out policy (which, who knows, might be history by the time you read this)?

Unlike, say, “Gulf of America,” “modern soda” didn’t come out of nowhere: it’s entirely in sync with the directions several of the leading brands, like Olipop, Poppi and Zevia, have been taking in their marketing, positioning conventional CSDs as boring and out of touch. It’s a marked contrast from the more tempered – all right, timid – tack taken by earlier altsodas that were wary of poking the big bears, content to squirm into a defensible niche without taking the giants head-on. (Recall that most didn’t even venture their own ginger ale and cola styles for years out of a desire to stay in their own lanes.)

Taking a longer-term perspective, the advent of “modern soda” as a category simply follows in the path that iced teas, bottled waters and natural sodas took a few decades ago in describing themselves as “new-age beverages” to signal that they represented a decisive break with what had gone before and thereby were deserving of being merchandised in their own distinct store area. Among their innovations, new-age brands like Snapple included the first hotfill entries to reach scale, offering a more natural alternative to preservatives. Going back further, Pepsi-Cola once took a similar tack in contrasting itself to Coca-Cola by describing itself as “the choice of a new generation” in seeking to relegate the market leader to the dustbin of history. (That worked in getting Pepsi back in the game, though last I checked, Coca-Cola still seems to be around. I think I just saw some in aisle 4 at Duane Reade.)

In fact, “modern soda” is so clean and crisp in making a break that it’s not surprising to see others trying to run with it for their categories. For instance, I recently heard the Celsius energy CEO describe his breed of sleek-can, zero-sugar, thermogenic energizers as “modern energy,” though it can be hard to put your finger on what the line is that divides challengers like Celsius and Alani from the leaders he’s implicitly challenging, Monster and Red Bull. Will we soon be hearing about “modern protein” and “modern iced tea” and, I don’t know, “modern water”? OK, I admit it, modern water sounds absurd. Still, I felt the same way years ago when water was suddenly being defined as “new age.” So, hey – why not?

Longtime beverage-watcher Gerry Khermouch is executive editor of Beverage Business Insights, a twice-weekly e-newsletter covering the nonalcoholic beverage sector.