2015 Top 10 Beverage Companies

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Consumer tastes continue to change across the Beverage market. Within the non-alcoholic sector, global soft drinks value sales grew by more than 6 percent to reach $867.4 billion in 2014, according to Euromonitor.

Energy drinks and bottled water emerged as top performers, expanding 9.8 percent and 6.1 percent, respectively, amidst growing consumer concerns about sugar content, price and artificial flavors. Thus, majors in the space are feeling pressure to adapt and reformulate carbonated and juice products to meet new consumer demands, with Pepsi unveiling aspartame-free Diet Pepsi in August 2015.

In 2014, The Coca-Cola Company launched Coca-Cola Life, its first reduced-calorie sparkling beverage sweetened with cane sugar and stevia leaf extract, but the company has no plans to alter its No. 1 selling brand Diet Coke a la Diet Pepsi just yet. Rather, Coca-Cola NA President Alexander Douglas Jr. said that the company is looking at multiple programs to not only strengthen Diet Coke, but to offer consumers adjacent innovation in the Diet Coke franchise during a company earnings call in July 2015.

Meanwhile, the consumer’s obsession with single-serve coffee is growing and is now poised to take over the cold beverage market with the recent launch of Keurig KOLD from Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. According to Mintel, single-cup coffee is forecast to see 19.6 percent sales gains, the greatest gains of all coffee segments in 2015, reaching $4.3 billion. It remains to be seen if increasing concerns over the environmental impact from single-serve packaging waste will stunt this growth trajectory.

In the alcoholic beverage sector, distilled spirits continued a track record of steady sales growth, beating out beer’s market share for the fifth straight year. The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States reported that supplier sales were up 4 percent in 2014 to $23.1 billion. It was estimated that overall retail sales of distilled spirits in the U.S. market was nearly $70 billion, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs in the hospitality industry and producing more than $20 billion in tax revenues for all levels of government.

But beer makers aren’t quick to admit defeat. There will be a new super brewery in town once Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $104 billion acquisition of SABMiller is complete. The firm will be the world’s largest beer maker by far.

To see the Top 10 Beverage Companies, click on the attachment below.