With continued shift towards wellness across the industry, it’s no surprise shoppers are searching for food and beverages that ‘taste’ healthy too. According to Flavorman’s 2023 Beverage Trend report, citrus flavours are on the rise, along with floral and botanical ingredients that link functionality and flavour. Abi Millar talks to leading brands to find out more.

The beverage world has changed significantly in recent years. Brightly coloured, sugary sodas are out, while functional drinks such as kombucha and immunity-boosting ginger shots are in. At least, that’s the verdict from Flavorman’s latest Beverage Trend Report, which analyses flavour and technological trends across the market.

According to the beverage developer, our drinks preferences this year indicate a shift away from ‘COVID-19’s challenging years’ towards a ‘future of simplicity, functionality, environmental consciousness, and authenticity’.

The report adds that, with new beverages hitting the shelves every day, ‘shoppers are shifting towards products with more natural components and coloring’. Whereas last year’s consumers ‘wanted bolder ingredients for nostalgic flavors with guilt-free indulgence’, this year ‘we’re seeing a shift to a more balanced, health-conscious trend’. Brands are eschewing artificial flavorings and colourings, replacing added sugars with natural fruit sugars, and developing drinks that marry flavour with functional benefits.

“Seventy per cent of consumers are looking for functional benefits in their drinks, such as immune boosting benefits, energy, protein, etc,” says a spokesperson for the California-based brand wildwonder. “People don’t like empty calories these days. With gut health being the fastest growing health trend, we see a bigger demand for probiotics and prebiotics in delicious and convenient form factors such as beverages.”

Ian Hadley, commercial director of Remedy UK, adds that there’s a gap in the market for low-sugar energy drinks in particular. “The UK sports and energy drinks market size increased by over 22% in 2022, however the category is dominated by drinks featuring excessive sugar and artificial ingredients, at a time when three quarters of the UK population are looking to reduce or avoid sugar in their diet and are becoming increasingly aware of the potential negative implications of artificial sweeteners,” he says.

The shift towards wellness

On the face of things, what people are drinking in any given year may not be all that illuminating. Fads come and go, consumer preferences can be fickle, and we can’t necessarily derive a deeper meaning from every fluctuation in the market. 

That said, consumer preferences can often provide an interesting bellwether of social trends.

The real story here is one that’s been playing out for a while. That’s the continued shift towards ‘wellness’ – a diffuse concept that consumers are coming to understand in a nuanced and sophisticated way. According to McKinsey’s Future of Wellness Survey, conducted in 2020, 79% of respondents across six countries said they believed wellness is important, while 42% considered it a top priority. Those figures had risen significantly over the past two to three years in every market they researched.[1]

That trend has continued post-Covid. According to Mintel’s The Future of Nutrition, Health and Wellness 2023 report, the pandemic has nudged consumers towards taking a more holistic approach to their health. This has led to more conscientious consumption, along with ‘a growing trend of using food as medicine to promote physical and mental wellbeing, as well as preventative health’.[2]

That means, while countertrends have come and gone – Flavorman’s 2022 report talked about full-sugar beverages seeing a resurgence in the premium market – the general trajectory is clear. Consumers are interested in healthy beverages that don’t compromise on taste. They’re also becoming more discerning about what healthy means, with artificial sweeteners and even heavy use of fruit sugars no longer passing muster.

To cite a few prominent examples, MOJU Drinks sells a range of ‘shots’ designed for various functional benefits (energy, immunity, gut health etc), with no added sugar and a range of ‘punchy’ flavours. Dash Drinks eliminates ‘fake flavours’ with simple fruit-infused water, while Acti-Vit’s fruit-flavoured water is packed with supplemental vitamins. Nexba claims that its range of kombucha, energy drinks and nootropics have eliminated over 7bn grams of sugar from global diets to date.

Then there’s wildwonder, which is doing wonders for consumers’ gut health. Founder and CEO Rosa Li was inspired by the healing drinks of her Chinese heritage – tonics filled with wild herbs and botanicals. Each can contains 1bn live probiotics and 5g of prebiotic fibre, supported by functional herbs and fruits.

“As the first sparkling beverage to combine both prebiotics and probiotics, wildwonder is the culmination of Eastern herbal philosophy and modern taste,” says the wildwonder spokesperson. “The five effervescent flavours provide a simple solution to gut health that’s free from the vinegary flavour of kombucha and bitter taste of traditional medicine.”

A boost for kombucha

Remedy Drinks, a leading UK- and Australia-based kombucha brand, has been well-positioned to take advantage of this shift. Its founders, Sarah and Emmet Condon, started brewing kombucha in their kitchen in Melbourne, and loved how the fermented concoction made them feel – not to mention how it tasted. That set them thinking about all the drinks in the supermarket that claimed to be healthy but really weren’t, fruit juice itself being a prime example.

“They saw this as an opportunity to make it right, and although Remedy has grown massively since it was founded in 2012, expanding into markets across the globe, it remains true to the authentic brewing techniques the founders started with in their kitchen,” says Hadley.

Remedy drinks are live, unfiltered, and unpasteurised, meaning they are full of live cultures and antioxidants. Just as important is what they leave out. The drinks are free from artificial sweeteners, and although sugar is used in production, none remains by the time it reaches the consumer – it’s converted into organic acids during the long-age brewing process.

The brand also offers a line of energy drinks, which deliver the same caffeine levels as the big players in the market, albeit with all the brand’s usual health benefits.  “We’ve used natural ingredients such as green tea, raw coffee bean extract and ginseng, delivering an exciting alternative to traditional sugary energy drinks,” says Hadley. 

While the UK’s kombucha market is still relatively undeveloped, it is entering a rapid growth phase. Hadley says that grocery kombucha sales will exceed £20m this year, growing at 23% year on-year, and that Remedy has driven more growth in the category over the past year than all the other brands put together.

Elsewhere in the world, the market is more developed, not least in the US, Canada, and Remedy’s home market of Australia. If the UK’s consumption per capita reached Australian levels, the category would already be worth £250m. “In the UK, a greater focus on health and wellness is pushing kombucha into the mainstream, and this will continue to grow,” says Hadley.

Botanicals and citrus are in

A challenge for any functional drinks producer is ensuring that the beverages taste good too. Hadley says that Remedy purposefully crafts its drinks to be accessible to the mainstream soft drink consumer, making them a simple swap for anyone trying to improve their health and wellbeing.

“It’s not as simple as creating a product that has little or no sugar – it must taste great to keep customers coming back for more,” he says. “We are proud to offer kombucha that isn’t an ‘acquired taste’, with flavours such Raspberry Lemonade and Ginger Lemon delivering a complex blend of sweet and sour notes that are perfectly balanced by our chief brewer. Our newest launch, Orange Squeeze, delivers a healthier version of an orange fizzy drink that is hugely resonating with UK audiences.”

Wildwonder maintains that its botanical flavours are a clear differentiator for its brand, mixing subtler tastes like ginger, turmeric and elderberry with the boldness of a California fruit stand. “The brand’s best-selling flavor is Strawberry Passion, but their recent launch of Pineapple Paradise quickly brought the new flavor to the top 3 best seller at Sprouts and online,” says the spokesperson. 

Both these brands intersect nicely with the Flavorman report, which says that citrus flavours are this year’s most prominent flavour trend. Generally, consumers are looking for ‘uncomplicated citruses with growing interest in orange, grapefruit, lime and other berry blends’, while other popular flavour extracts include ‘botanicals such as butterfly pea flower, black tea and chamomile.’

On top of that, consumers are seeking ‘herbal ingredients such as ginseng root to strengthen immune systems, ginger for cognitive energy and pain relief, and pepper flavors that provide a functional mouthfeel’ – in other words, drinks that not only are healthy, but which taste healthy too. As a new generation of consumers are realising, that doesn’t have to mean punishing. 

Hadley says that Remedy will continue to focus on developing consumer awareness and understanding, with a particular emphasis on sampling to showcase its flavours. “Some people have a hard time believing healthy can also taste good, but we are noticing this is becoming less and less of a barrier,” he says. 

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[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/feeling-good-the-future-of-the-1-5-trillion-wellness-market

[2] https://store.mintel.com/report/the-future-of-nutrition-health-and-wellness-market-report

This article appears in the 2023 vol 2 edition of Ingredients Insight