This past year has seen a great deal of innovation in beverages for a variety of reasons. Getting customers to upgrade from tap water can be a challenging task, but if you succeed it’s an incremental and highly profitable sale.
Also, drinks are, for whatever reason, very popular on social media.
Among young people, what they drink and how they customize it is often a surprisingly important part of their identity, or at least that’s how they present themselves via Instagram, TikTok and other platforms.
There has also been a great deal of beverage activity in the ready-to-drink segment, with more RTD cocktails, energy drinks, new-age sodas often supplemented with vitamins or caffeine and other stimulants, coffee, and tea.
It stands to reason that restaurants would respond to that with upgraded coffee, in-house energy drinks, lemonade with added fruit flavor (or caffeine), tea with increasingly popular boba or other textural elements such as gummy cubes, and cold foam, the aerated and sweetened dairy (or sometimes non-dairy substitutes), that can now be scooped on top of drinks at most major coffeehouse chains.
Read on to see some of the highlights of beverage innovation in the past year, presented in the order they were introduced.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]