With nearly one in five U.S. adult consumers now purchasing or consuming products tagged as gluten-free, sales of gluten-free foods and beverages are expected to reach $4.2 billion in 2012, according to a new report from Packaged Facts. As consumers increasingly shift toward healthier lifestyles and become more aware of gluten-free offerings, the category has risen at a compound annual growth rate of 28 percent over the past four year period.

Controversy is not a word often used to describe legendary golfers and AriZona brand partners Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. No, if anything, the two men offer consumers a warm and fuzzy feeling of classic, elegant Americana and the entirely uncontroversial refreshment of iced teas and lemonades. Nevertheless, it appears that AriZona is ready celebrate the last throes of its 20th year anniversary with a bang loud enough to have the two men grabbing their chests, tickers aflutter.

As the beverage landscape in America continues to shift toward an emphasis on health and wellness, the use of high pressure processing (HPP), a technology that, unlike pasteurization, uses high pressure instead of heat to inhibit bacteria growth in raw foods and beverages, is eliciting interest among a growing number of entrepreneurs and existing beverage manufacturers.

Nestle doesn’t take incursions onto its watery turf lightly, so getting strong play at the NWNA booth at NACS was a relative newcomer: Resource. The company has tasked a pair of branding aces (pulling them in from runaway success Pure Life and stalwart eco-brand Keeper Springs) with the unenviable chore of establishing Nestle as a player in the Smartwater crowd, and they are using Resource (labeled with a Smartwater-like lowercase "r") as the brand to do it.