Carbonated Soft Drinks here denote all artificially sweetened and carbonated Non-Alcoholic Drinks. This encompasses cola beverages, tonic waters, and lemonades. The added carbon dioxide gas provides the sparkling taste of these beverages and also prevents spoilage. While the category is still emerging in the rapidly developing markets of the Asia-Pacific region, it has already surpassed its apex in the mature markets of the West. In the home country of Coca-Cola, soda sales, while still the highest in the world, have declined for more than ten years in a row now. The main challenge for the industry in the coming years will be to react to consumers‘ growing sophistication and stricter regulation as more and more states and municipal governments are imposing soda or sugar taxes to curb consumption. The focus on the development of new artifical sweeteners like Stevia are testament to this development. A possible alternative course of action would be a shift to beverage categories that rely less on sugar for flavouring like ready-to-drink (RTD) tea and coffee beverages.
The market for Non-Alcoholic Drinks is structured into retail sales for at home consumption and on-premise or foodservice sales for out-of-home consumption. The at-home market, also called off-trade market, covers all retail sales via super- and hypermarkets, convenience stores or similar sales channels. The out-of-home market, also called on-trade market, away-from-home market or HORECA encompasses all sales to hotels, restaurants, catering, cafés, bars and similar hospitality service establishments. Both the at-home and the out-of-home market are valued at retail selling prices including all sales and consumption taxes. The valuation of the out-of-home segment at retail prices means a significant change of the market definition in comparison to earlier iterations of the Consumer Market Outlook, as out-of-home consumption was valued at wholesale prices before. This means, market totals are not comparable to published data from prior years.
