The Hidden Choice Shift Reshaping Growth
Most analysis of functional beverages focuses on ingredients, formats, and innovation.
This brief looks at something more fundamental: how customer choice itself is changing — and what that means for growth, relevance, and risk.
As health anxiety rises, trust fragments, and categories blur, functional beverages are no longer competing on what they do, but on what they represent at the moment of choice. The result: brands that look busy, innovative, and well-funded — yet quietly lose pricing power, frequency, or future permission.
This Monthly Category Brief distills the most important shifts shaping the category right now, through a clear decision lens:
- How choice behavior is evolving beneath stable topline numbers
- Where brands are becoming interchangeable without realizing it
- Why functional claims are losing power — and what’s replacing them
- What this means for brand portfolios, innovation bets, and growth strategy
This is not a trend report.
It’s not a playbook.
And it’s not written only for marketers.
It’s written for leaders who own growth decisions — brand houses, portfolio operators, founders, and investors — who need to see risk and opportunity before performance metrics move.
For our clients, we provide monthly briefs where we deliver insights from our always-on Market Radar - and combine it with brand and customer-specific insights, shifts, and recommendations for how to drive growth through choice.
👉 Register to download the brief.
Original Minds helps brands, growth companies, and private equity firms win where growth is actually decided: customer choice.
We diagnose relevance, proposition, and execution against how markets, customers, and competitors are really moving.
The result is sharper growth decisions, stronger pricing power, and higher-quality earnings.
Hire us for one-off projects and interventions, or for annual, always on intelligence and growth advisory.
