The Australian palate is evolving and we’re seeing overwhelming demand for healthy alternatives. This can be said for many food categories but holds particularly true for beverages.
Over the past decade, drinks such as coconut water and then kombucha have emerged as ‘healthy’ drinks. The market has responded to this trend with hundreds of ‘healthy’ products now on offer.
Chloe Rush, co-founder and Director of The Natural Beverage Company, manufacturer of Kréol, says this boom can be attributed in part to a new wave of healthy living, wellness, sugar awareness and reduced alcohol consumption, mostly driven by young people.
“But what was once a point of difference that cut through and disrupted the market is now a cluttered and crowded space,” she says.
“Premium-ness and craft is also a very big trend across consumer products. In beverages you see this in the alcohol space but you don’t see it in non-alc as much.”
The Local Drinks Co Margaret River, formerly The Margaret River Kombucha Co, rode the rise of the kombucha category with its rok brand. Since then, it has expanded into the functional beverage space with rok+ (a range with clinically backed nutraceuticals, nootropics and adaptogens promoted as delivering health benefits to the consumer) in 2021, and this year launched an all-natural, ‘lo-cal’, handcrafted soda range, Waves & Caves.
The Local Drinks co-founder and Managing Director Amanda Carroll says the trends now shaping the beverage market are’ better for you’, functional, and lower/zero sugar, with the smaller players making the biggest waves in this space.
“Being a smaller brand gives you the opportunity to move quickly on new trends and offer the market something new, unique and handcrafted,” she says. “The better-for-you segment is still relatively new, and the smaller brands are the ones jumping in to offer consumers more natural, premium choices in the beverage space.”
Ms Rush says cafes have been a great way to help launch the Kréol brand, while convenience retailers have also become far more accepting and supportive of emerging brands in recent years.
“We’ve had some amazing long-term partnerships with cafes, and more recently with larger convenience retailers,” she says. “Although it can still be difficult to win space and ranging, the broader acceptance of emerging products is exciting.”
Read more about new wave sodas in the August issue of Convenience World.
