Tiny Adults: Emerging Kids’ Drink Brands Look to Grown-Up Inspiration

Whether it’s the things a parent says or the things a parent drinks, children want what adults have.

Beverage companies are starting to use that insight to build a different type of drink aimed at kids to compete with the juice boxes and high-sugar drink pouches that have long dominated the market.

Historically, the children’s drink segment has been dominated by high-sugar fruit juices that have used splashy colors or cartoon characters to encourage little hands to grab them from shelves. But, just like their parents, children have become increasingly aware of what they are putting into their bodies and are mimicking adults in their own refreshment choices.

Although legacy drink brands like Capri Sun or Coca-Cola’s Hi-C still dominate the juice aisles of grocery stores, new entrants and more established beverage companies are seeing an opportunity in the segment. They’re reformulating existing products, deploying new packaging and playing to consumer trends like zero sugar and functional ingredients.

Slimming Sweeteners

Larger beverage corporations are taking notice of the shifting sands in the kids category and strengthening their positions accordingly. Zero added sugar Honest Kids was kept alive despite Coke’s discontinuation of its parent brand Honest Tea, signaling the beverage giant’s confidence in the children’s juice label.

Harvest Hill Beverage Company jumped into organic juice in 2018 by launching Juicy Juice Splashers which offered no high fructose corn syrup. In July, Kraft Heinz upped the ante by announcing it was reformulating Capri Sun juice pouches to cut out about 40% of the sugar content by using monk fruit as a sweetener.

The trend towards zero sugar sweeteners is gaining momentum. According to product intelligence data from SPINS, over the last 52 weeks, beverage brands with a “kid claim” or that have a “kid position” and are using a natural low-calorie sweetener are seeing about 50% growth in both the conventional and natural retail channels.

SPINS noted that stevia is one of the top growing sweeteners in the category.

Uncle Matt’s Organic has been using stevia leaf (specifically Reb M Stevia) as a sugar substitute in many of its products for a while. After getting many requests from customers, it “made perfect sense to be part of the lunchbox,” said founder and CEO Matt McLean, so the brand repackaged the Lemonade and Strawberry Lemonade into 6.75 oz. boxes.

“The juice box is a sleepy segment. It’s just kind of ripe for innovation,” he continued.

That potential is easy to imagine when there wasn’t much that the company had to change to produce the new kid-oriented drinks. Uncle Matt’s was already making a No Sugar Added Lemonade using stevia. The only difference between juice boxes and the standard 52 oz. refrigerated lemonades were the aseptic containers. That, and the juice boxes are fortified with immunity
boosting ingredients like zinc, vitamin D and vitamin C from the acerola plant.

McLean said that the advantage of built-in brand recognition is that Uncle Matt’s can also tap into its distribution network easier. So far, the juice boxes are being distributed in Fresh Market, Wegmans and Fresh Thyme Markets as well as rolling out nationwide in Whole Foods and Sprouts in September.

“Being there for 23 years customers already know us as the premium, premier, leading organic juice company so there’s an obvious opportunity,” he said. “That’s kind of the beauty of it. We don’t really have to change anything. It’s who we are.”

Dressing Younger

SPINS has shelf-stable juices with a kid-positioning as growing 80% year-over-year in the conventional channel and 13% in the natural channel. Uncle Matt’s is not the only brand finding a lot of white space to work withe. Especially if repackaging an existing product into a kid-friendly format is all it takes to open new opportunities for a beverage brand.

ShineWater took a similar approach by repackaging four of their flavors (Fruit Punch, Watermelon Blackberry, Strawberry Lemon and Mixed Berry Acai) into 6 oz. pouches. Similar to Uncle Matt’s, ShineWater stevia-sweetened pouches have zero added sugar and are packed with Vitamin D, Vitamin B12, Zinc and Calcium.

The brand was founded by FDA physician Dr. Phillip Davis as a flavorful, nutrient-rich water that provided a healthy dose of Vitamin D. The vitamin is naturally synthesized in the body through exposure to sunlight, but about 42% of the U.S. population is vitamin D deficient; that number rises over 80% for children, people of color and the elderly, said CMO Ryan Coon.

“You’ve got little kids, they go outside and you put sunblock on, which you’re supposed to do because that prevents a lot of other problems,” he said. “But that blocks vitamin D absorption completely. And so that’s why young children have such a high propensity for vitamin D deficiency.”

ShineWater launched the pouches in April after eight months of research and development. The functional water maker realized that it was an opportune time to launch into the segment because many large retailers had been reporting supply shortages since the pandemic began.

“That was our ‘a-ha moment’ because we knew kids loved it,” Coon said. “There’s a lot of brands in the nutrient-dense water but nothing is in the kid space. It’s either a watered down version of a fruit juice, or just a straight flavored product, or perhaps maybe some vitamin C in there, but nothing really beyond that.”

So far “orders are coming in fast and furious,” Coon continued, and the early reports from Walmart, where the brand began distributing in August, were positive.

The decision to go with pouches was not to go directly at Capri Sun but to find packaging that had as little waste as possible. It also comes down to portability and the company’s internal research said that children not only favored pouches but it provided a new opportunity for ShineWater in stores.

“The top couple dogs have done a great job and they monopolize 90% of that shelf space. And when they had a hiccup in their supply chain, the whole system collapses,” Coon said. What we’re hearing from buyers more and more now is that they don’t want to go back to that reliance. That’s a big risk for them. They want to diversify their sets more and we’re more than willing.”

The decision to expand ShineWater into the kid space was also based on the idea that kids can and want to consume what they
see adults eating and drinking.

“You don’t have to have a product specialized for kids. Kids can consume adult foods. They’re not just these little chicken nugget/chocolate milk monsters,” Coon joked.

Little Hands

This is true across the board. More and more brands are seeing that – with the obvious exception of alcohol or cannabis – children are looking for brands that mimic what they see in the hands of their adult counterparts.

Other brands have built on this idea. Tickle Water launched their sparkling water in 2016 targeting parents looking for a fun alternative to sugar-laden kids drinks. In 2018, RETHINK Brands launched a kid-specific flavored boxed water to complement its boxed water portfolio. It later expanded into a monk fruit-sweetened Juice Splash line that boasted one gram of natural sugar.

It was this belief in building kid-specific versions of adult drinks that led Liz Seelye and Erin Fasano to found Starryside Company and launch its first product: Star Water. The flavored water sweetened with monk fruit is fortified with vitamins C, D, and Zinc and contains zero calories and zero sugar. The initial release of Star Water comes in three flavors: Rockin’ Root Beer, Beachy Peachy Strawberry, and Magical Mango Pineapple.

The brand is targeting families who have left the more traditional kids juice aisle because there aren’t enough low-sugar, functional hydration options for kids. Early on, packaging became a big part of Star Water evolution. When Seelye and Fasano started testing juice boxes with their children at birthday parties and the kids complained that the boxes were not recyclable, the two founders had the realization that Star Water would be packaged in six-ounce aluminum cans.

“The key was putting them in little cans for little hands,” Seelye said.

Seelye founded a brand consultancy firm Starry-Eyed Strategy to capitalize on her experience working in the CPG industry. She is using her institutional knowledge to pitch Star Water as not only an immunity-boosting, flavored water for kids but also a means to empower children to be more creative. She sees a clear link between nutrition and imagination and is building the brand around that idea.

“We’re dreaming up drinks and snacks to ensure kids’ creativity lasts,” she said. “Then it comes down to how do we compare with what’s on the shelves now. How do we break it down by the packaging, the calorie content, the ingredients and prove that it’s a better option.”

Currently, the brand is sold primarily D2C but is in talks with major retailers as it tries to break into brick-and-mortar. Seelye hopes that using a sustainability angle will help push Star Water onto the shelves of retailers like Kroger which has its Zero Hero recycling program.

Beverage brands are seeing that it isn’t just the ingredient list and the price point that is pushing parents to try something new for their children’s school lunches. Brands need to offer a total package to conscious consumers who are searching for something familiar but innovative when they walk the kids beverage aisle.

Most importantly, it needs to be something those little hands love to grab.