Get ready, people.
With the release of Enviga, a new calorie-
burning tea from the Coca-Cola/Nestle
partnership known as Beverage Partners Worldwide,
the functional beverage movement has
gone mainstream.
The rubber is meeting the road. How should
you react? Are you going to have to stock up
on products that flush the system, fill the tank,
shine up the human hood?
What changes will be wrought in your cooler
by the Enviga Effect?
Well, for starters, you’ve got to weave through
a lot of traffic chasing after Enviga for the calorie
burning space. Already, Elite Fx, the company
that first marketed a calorie-burning formula in
Celsius, has ramped up its advertising and is
pressing for increased distribution, claiming
that the release of the Coke/Nestle calorie-burning
tea legitimizes the category they pioneered.
PepsiCo has its own plans to release Tava, a
soda that also supposedly ramps up calorie
burning via the mineral Chromium. Snapple,
which has a growing green tea brand, will add
label language indicating that it, too, boosts the
metabolism. Companies like Fuze and Airforce
NutriSoda, both of which have products with
appetite-suppressing super-Citrimax, are ready
to push for more space.
It’s important to note that all of these
products are only chasing one thing: thin.
Here’s the skinny: thin is the Killer App in
the food and drink business. If people think a
drink will help them lose weight, they’ll buy it.
A recent survey by the drug company Glaxo-
SmithKline PLC showed that 33 percent of
Americans who are trying to lose weight have
tried dietary supplements with no proven
benefit. AC Nielsen recently reported that 15
percent of U.S. households have bought weight
loss products in the last year. The market is there
for a mainstream product that purports to have
a slimming effect.
But at the same time, if it doesn’t work, there
are plenty of other products – be they beverages
or other consumer goods – that are available to
take their place in the weight loss market. That’s
the game that Coke and Nestle started playing
when they showed the Enviga card.
BEYOND SKINNY
Despite the potential gold mine awaiting an
effective weight loss beverage, when it comes
to functionality, Enviga had better not be the
only card in the deck, according to Kaumil
Gajrawala, a beverage analyst with UBS.
“It’s a long-term trend,” Gajrawala says.
“Coke has said publicly that they want to
better leverage their research and development
to develop more of these kinds of products.
You’re seeing it across all CPGs (Consumer Packaged
Goods) as well. Cheerios has labels that
relates to how it affects your heart. Someone else
just launched a chocolate bar that’s supposed
to be good for your heart. So they’re all going
in pretty deep.”
That’s not to say you should expect to
stock racks of functional sodas; according to
Gajrawala, that particular beverage category is
drowning in too many line extensions already.
But in those categories whose shelf presence
is already growing – tea, water, sports drinks
– functionality is going to accompany them
hand in hand.
“Efficacy will become important,” says Debbie
Wildrick, the beverage portfolio manager
at 7-Eleven. “Consumers already have given
the industry ‘permission’ to put additives in
their beverage, but it’s not enough to have just
a splash of a special ingredient in the drink.
Consumers want more from enhanced beverages
and will expect to feel a difference after
consuming these products.”
Natural and New Age food manufacturers
realize what consumers want: at the Expo East
Convention in October, tea and juice lines
like Pure Fruit were defined as much by what
they are expected to do as by their flavor. Fuze
Beverages, which has recently taken nine of
the top 50 supermarket SKUs in the New Age
category, are nearly entirely dependent on a mix
of products that promise various functions, from
appetite suppression to free radical scavenging.
Last year, Ito En presented the Sencha Shot, a
triple strong bullet of green tea that, if antioxidant
research is correct, contains the equivalent
of a mortar attack on free radicals. And if Enviga
takes off, expect some of those companies to
introduce packaging that evokes their latent
qualities as much as it does their natural or
organic origins. After all, the levels of green
tea catechins and caffeine present in Enviga’s
“proprietary blend” of calorie burning ingredients
are very similar to those present in a
well-brewed green tea, in similar ratios.