Soft Drinks

The market segment Soft Drinks covers all types of water-based Non-Alcoholic Drinks with added sugar. This includes Carbonated Soft Drinks like cola, lemonade and energy and sports drinks on the one hand, and Non-Carbonated Soft Drinks like fruit nectars, fruit juice drinks, flavored water and ready-to-drink (RTD) tea and coffee on the other. While Carbonated Soft Drinks have been on the wane for quite some time now as health-oriented consumers shift to low-sugar diets, smaller segments of Non-Carbonated Drinks like RTD tea and coffee especially have taken up some of this slack.

The most important brand manufacturers in the Soft Drinks category are the Coca-Cola Corporation, PepsiCo, Suntory, Red Bull and Keurig Dr Pepper.

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. The price per unit always references liters as a base unit. One liter of Soft Drinks roughly equals 2 to 3 servings (of 0.5 or 0.33 liters each).