While LifeAID’s new beverage is focusing on one very specific target audience, one of the beverage category’s biggest successes of recent years is expanding its focus beyond beverages entirely.
On October 25, 2011, the White House First Lady Michelle Obama traveled to her Chicago hometown to discuss the need for healthy foods in underprivileged communities. The event took place at a local redesigned Walgreens store on the city’s Southside, in an area known as a “desert community.”
In other research, scientists explored the effects of noise on the perception of alcoholic beverages’ sweetness. The admittedly small control group (80 participants) at the University of Portsmouth had to rate the alcohol strength, sweetness and bitterness of a selection of drinks while they were exposed to different distractions, such as music, hearing and repeating a news story, both music and news, and silence.
Energy drinks are certainly not listless in terms of new product development, and beverage makers are taking proactive stances to address the controversy.
SensoryEffects, provider of value-added food and beverage ingredients and products, is celebrating its 5-year anniversary. Founder Charles Nicolais’ vision was to create a company that offers superior custom ingredients, cutting-edge innovations, technical excellence and state-of-the-art manufacturing.
Consumers are more sophisticated than ever in their ingredient knowledge, and Cargill feels the industry must respond “by providing beverages made with high-quality products that deliver on promises.”
New Beer Institute data shows that retail beer sales rose more than 2% in 2011, highlighting beer’s continued strength within the alcohol beverage sector.
Beverages, like all product categories in the U.S. market, have had a bit of an up-and-down time in recent years, at least in terms of new product introductions. In non-alcoholic beverages, the U.S. market experienced a significant drop in new product introductions in 2009.