By: Brian Sudano and Leigh Wilkins Why Some Beverage Trends Don’t Come Down We treat beverage innovation like physics. What goes up must come down. In the beverage industry, it’s practically doctrine. A category spikes, innovation floods in, shelves fill up and decline is inevitable. The only question is when. But what if that assumption is wrong? Growth becomes novelty.…
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Recasting Our Point of Reference February 28, 2026 By Brian Sudano The beverage marketplace has gone through repeated cycles of fragmentation, reinvention, and rediscovery. Not long ago, the narrative was that big brands were finished and the future belonged to endless niche innovation. That belief drove large companies to build incubators like Coke’s VEB and Pepsi’s…
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Gloom and Doom vs. Irrational Exuberance November 24, 2025 Recently much has been written about brand successes in RTD Spirits; with the explosive growth of Long Drinks, Surfside, Beatbox and Buzz Balls, to name a few. Not to mention the extremely fast rise of White Claw, to over 3% share of beer, and High Noon,…
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The Last Mile Part 2 October 30, 2025 Evaluating Route to Market In part 1, we discussed the three primary routes to market for beverages along with the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. We briefly identified the RTM evolution of two highly successful beverage brands since 2020 and honed in on brands that have…
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The Beverage Alcohol Shuffle By: Brian Sudano Alternative adult beverages are at the forefront of the beverage alcohol market, constituting 15% of the volume with cannabis beverages and 13% without. This shift raises the question: what is the fate of traditional beverages? Current trends show that traditional beer consumption remains steady, while the market share…
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Hemp Beverages at “The Okay Corral” By: Brian Sudano The Hemp Beverage Industry was dealt a major setback with the Farm Bill loophole for intoxicating hemp ingredients being closed. A one-year grace period allows the sector to propose potential solutions for protecting consumers. The industry is estimated to reach $4B by 2028, according to Euromonitor(1),…
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The Last Mile October 22, 2025 “The Last Mile” is the term used to define the movement of product to where consumers purchase or receive products. In this piece, we will review the three primary approaches, Direct to Consumer (DTC), Warehouse Direct to Retailer (WD) and Direct Store Delivery (DSD). Each has advantages and disadvantages…
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By Brian Sudano CEO, S&D Insights, LLC For over 20 years we have spoken about the growing trend toward easier to drink beverage alcohol products. We tracked them as AAB, Alternative Alcoholic Beverage, products across all non-traditional alcohol forms to include: Flavored malt / sugar based products, spirit RTDs, Wine RTDs, Hard Cider and wine…
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