Why everyone’s launching a beverage brand
It’s easy to enter, hard to win, and the prize is huge. Sounds like Powerball, but it’s the $250+ billion US beverage market.
Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. Ça va?
Quick note: I’ll be co-hosting a free online event in a couple of weeks with Consumer Edge, looking at consumer spending in the beauty vertical, including a bunch of new charts based on their panels of US and UK credit and debit card transaction data. It’s on Wednesday, May 27 at 11am ET. Join us!
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Twenty weeks into 2026, there have already been dozens of new beverage brands, companies, and products launched in the US alone.
Just this week, my inbox alerts include a new “juicy sparkling drink for kids” startup, a new hop seltzer from a weed soda brand “designed to deliver calm, focused alertness,” and something from Starbucks called “Tropical Butterfly Refreshers” that sounds like it was invented by ChatGPT: “An all-natural blend of guava and passionfruit flavors with mango-pineapple flavored popping pearls and a splash of vibrant butterfly pea flower infusion.”
Not a bubble — just how this market works.
Entry is cheap
The barrier to entry in the beverage market is low. As a would-be founder, you don’t even need to know how to make anything: There’s a large, mature marketplace of co-manufacturers, flavor suppliers, canners and bottlers, packaging suppliers, brokers, and distributors.
It’s real work to learn and navigate this maze — and to come up with something new and different — but it’s doable. You can start small with hand-labeled blanks, launch at a farmer’s market, and level up as you go. Amazon, TikTok Shop, Instacart, DoorDash, and GoPuff give you proof-of-concept channels that didn’t exist a decade ago — and targeted advertising with sales attribution.
Many of the best brands, large and small, have something unique to their process, provenance, or formulation, such as Olipop’s proprietary blend of fiber and prebiotics, Kimino’s supply chain for Japanese yuzu, and Unified Ferments’ life-changing artisanal kombuchas that focus on the tea.
But if you have an idea for a beverage product — sparkling espresso sodas, low-sugar classic sodas with “no fake stuff” and your famous name on the can, mini Spindrifts for kids, or luxury water that’s tested for microplastics — you can get it made without much upfront domain expertise or capital.
People want to try new drinks all the time
Beverage trial is an essential part of modern life — everyone has to drink multiple times per day. And right now, a lot of people want to drink differently than they have been.
When we asked 3,000 US consumers in our latest Consumer Trends survey to write the three things they want to consume less of this year, soda ranked third — behind only sugar and salt, and mentioned three times as often as alcohol. Yet the soda market is growing again.
Many people also genuinely enjoy the process of finding new options, especially younger consumers.
The majority of Gen. Z and Millennials — 71% — say they “love” trying and drinking different beverages. (That compares to 42% of those Gen. X and older.) Nearly 60% of Gen. Z and Millennials agree that “trying new beverages is a fun part of my routine” — almost twice as high as older generations.
(These stats come from our new Consumer Trends Food & Beverage Special, published in partnership with Coefficient Capital. It’s a good one — check it out.)
So today’s grocery stores devote a large section to beverage discovery, and keep new SKUs rotating in and out frequently.
