As energy drinks continue to take heat from politicians and federal agencies for their caffeine content and labeling, the sales growth of Monster Energy and Red Bull has slightly decelerated, according to a consumer price index (CPI) report released Friday by Morgan Stanley.
As far as bottled water is concerned, high pH (aka alkalinized) water is certainly all the rage right now, at least in terms of new product introductions. And for many of the high pH brands that have been around for a while, rebranding efforts are underway. That’s exactly the case for Essentia, which has gone from being a brand that could blend in with the spring water masses to something that is attempting to establish itself as modern and sporty.
KeVita is launching a new product exclusively in Whole Foods after the first of the year, debuting its first entry into the hot “cleanse” category with KeVita Daily Cleanse. And it’s happening at the same time that the company is plowing new ground in mainstream channels.
As we come to the close of what has been a tumultuous year, I want to take stock of some of the issues that have dominated the news recently. The events of the past few weeks in my home city of New York are staggering and overwhelming. The efforts to recover and rebuild have been exemplary. It’s a stark contrast to an issue that has dominated our beverage universe – the controversy surrounding an unjust wrongful death lawsuit filed against Monster Energy.
The PepsiCo shuffle continues. After revealing a multi-million dollar marketing partnership with Beyonce and recent plans to “drinkify” snacks, the carbonated soft drink giant announced that it has added another sweetener to Diet Pepsi, according to the Associated Press.
A Chicago-area business has filed a class action lawsuit against Nestlé Waters North America Inc. (NWNA) claiming that five-gallon jugs of its Ice Mountain Water brand are falsely advertised as containing spring water when in actuality the water comes from a municipal source.
Much like the bevy of other sports/hydration drinks on the market, enterade is marketed as a dietary supplement for "hydration during stressful exercise and endurance sports." However, unlike competing brands, enterade contains a bare bones formulation of water, natural flavor, and sodium bicarbonate that makes the product rather unpleasant to consume.
As an investment banker with Silverwood Partners working in the healthy/active living consumer packaged goods (CPG) space, I’ve often said that the joke about investors is true – they enter the room walking backwards with their eye on the exit. Perhaps entrepreneurs and founders should, as well. Unless you are building a company to comfortably live off of cash flows, you will need to sell your company at some time.
Start with some capital, any capital at all, and so long as your brand has growth potential, you could be the next Starbucks or Rockstar. This message was repeated on the second day of BevNET Live Winter 12 in Santa Monica, CA, as representatives from big-time brands shared their paths from humble beginnings to current prestige before a bevy of note-taking startups.
An new online petition is calling for PepsiCo to stop formulating its Gatorade line of sports drinks with brominated vegetable oil, an ingredient tied to flame retardant chemicals, according to The New York Times.
As those of you who’ve learned to skip right over them will know, I often start my columns with an amusing or revealing anecdote, or even sometimes a mordant joke. You won’t get that this month, because that certainly isn’t appropriate when the topic of the column is the killer in our midst: Energy drinks.
BevNET’s Supplier and Services Guide is an annual resource to the 1,000+ beverage companies that turn to BevNET each year to identify and source vendors. The guide will be included in the Jan-Feb issue of BevNET Magazine, which is sent to 19,000 subscribers, and available online to BevNET’s 100,000+ monthly viewers.
For those of you who dream nightly about this kind of thing – and yes, the BevNET crew is part of that group, don’t you doubt it – we recently got some spectacular news. Symphony IRI Group, the company that provides our awesome brand sales data, has updated its information to include Wal-Mart.
In a bid to reassure shareholders and investors about safety of its products as well as the current and future growth potential of its flagship energy drink, Monster Beverage Corp. issued a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that included a 61 slide presentation that began with the statement, “Monster Energy Products Are Safe.”
