The Functional Beverage Category Is Quietly Changing

Most functional beverage brands think they’re competing on ingredients.

They’re not. They’re competing on relevance — and many are losing without noticing.

We’ve just published a new Category Brief™: Functional Beverages, looking at how customer choice is shifting across North America and Europe. Not trends. Not tactics. The mechanics of why people choose one drink over another — and why so many brands are becoming interchangeable.

A few nuggets from the Brief:

• Function is everywhere. Meaning is scarce.
  Ingredients no longer differentiate. Felt benefit and identity fit do.
• Consumers aren’t choosing categories — they’re choosing moments.
  Your real competitors may be supplements, coffee rituals, sleep aids, or doing nothing.
• Wellness has fragmented.
  Calm, focus, discipline, softness, performance — there is no single “healthy” narrative anymore.
• Premium survives only when value is emotionally justified.
  Clean labels aren’t enough. People need to feel the benefit — fast.
  
  This free Brief is a short-form intelligence snapshot — designed to help leaders see where the Relevance Gap™ is opening in the category.

For clients, we go much further.

Our Strategic Intelligence subscription includes:

• In-depth category and demand-side reports
• A specific lens on your brand, your offering, and your ideal customer profiles
• Ongoing signal monitoring across our Five Forces
• Live briefing sessions with leadership teams
• And strategic interventions when relevance, growth, or positioning is at risk

The free Brief shows how we think.
The paid work is where this thinking gets applied — continuously, contextually, and decisively. We offer both one-off diagnosis and strategic interventions, as well as an ongoing "demand radar", complemented with monthly briefs and interventions.

👉 Read the free Category Brief here

And if you’re responsible for growth, relevance, or long-term advantage — you’ll recognize why this matters now.

Clarity beats activity.
Judgment beats more data.
Choice beats noise.

— Tobias, Original Minds