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. Popularity becomes saturation. And saturation signals the end.
Many trends do follow this path. Hard seltzer saw it. Protein drinks are seeing it now. Prebiotic sodas, RTDs, and tequila; each wave brings a surge of “me too” entrants chasing the same momentum. Most will fail. But the failure of brands doesn’t always mean the failure of the category because not all growth is created equal. Some innovation is situational, driven by curiosity, marketing, or format novelty. It spikes quickly and fades just as fast. Other innovation is structural – it changes behavior. It embeds into routines. It removes effort from the consumer experience, not just adds variety. Situational growth inflates. Structural growth integrates. Integrated growth doesn’t come down. It resets the baseline.
Energy is the clearest example. For more than two decades, the category has grown through cycles, competition, and saturation. There have been slowdowns but no structural reversal. That’s not because energy stayed trendy. It’s because it became useful. Energy delivers productivity, performance, and alertness, but more importantly, it became ritualized: morning routines, afternoon resets, pre-workout triggers. These aren’t novelty driven occasions; they are behavior driven needs. Energy didn’t escape the cycle. It became part of how consumers operate within it.
RTD spirits are now under the same scrutiny. The question sounds familiar: when will it come down? But that’s the wrong question. The better question is what would prevent it from coming down. RTDs are not just riding a trend – they are solving a problem. They remove the work from cocktails. They expand where and when cocktails can be consumed. They open the category to a broader set of consumers. When a category removes friction and expands occasions, it begins to build infrastructure, not just momentum. That’s what stabilizes growth.
Compare that to hard seltzer. It simplified alcohol, but it didn’t meaningfully deepen the occasion. It rode a wave of substitution, not transformation. RTDs represent the next phase in that evolution is moving from simplification to integration. This is where most beverage companies get stuck. They are forced to balance where the market is today with where it might be in two or three years. Too often, that leads to chasing visible growth rather than understanding its foundation.
The result is predictable: dozens of protein drinks, endless prebiotic variations, a flood of RTD brands, and the tequila boom. We’ve seen this before, hard seltzer five years ago, sparkling water ten years ago and bottled water before that. The pattern repeats. Most brands fail. But the categories don’t disappear; they evolve, consolidate, and persist. The real question isn’t whether something is growing, but what kind of growth it is.
Many of today’s “new” trends aren’t new at all: fitness moved from aerobics and jogging to Peloton and CrossFit. Better-for-you shifted from diet soda and light beer to zero sugar and protein. Moderation evolved from anti DUI campaigns to Dry January and mindful drinking. Consumer motivations persist. They reappear in new forms. What changes is not the why; it’s the how.
At the same time, the system around the consumer is transforming. Spirits distributors are buying beer distributors. Beer networks are expanding into spirits. Beer distributors are becoming bottlers for soft drink companies. Route-to-market is converging, even as categories appear to fragment. And in parallel, categories once considered declining, like carbonated soft drinks or juice, are finding new relevance. So while one part of the market cycles, another restructures.
The mistake is assuming the market moves in a simple arc: up then down. But innovation doesn’t behave like a single curve. It behaves like a system. Some ideas rise and fall. Some rise and settle. Some rise and rebuild the foundation beneath them. The job isn’t to predict when something will collapse. It’s to determine whether it is inflating or integrating.
“What goes up must come down” is a useful rule until it isn’t. In beverages, the more important signal isn’t growth. It’s integration. Because when innovation becomes part of how people live, not just what they try, it doesn’t come down. It resets the market.
