Blog Entries in Category: General Blogs

Packaging of Tomorrow

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: packaging, Disney World, RFID tags

I found it fitting that Disney World, home of Tomorrowland, recently announced one of the more futuristic uses of radio frequency identification technology (perhaps better known by its acronym: RFID). For those of you not familiar with RFID, it’s a technology that uses small tags on items to beam signals back and forth to readers. The result is the ability to easily track products as they pass by the readers, like in the beverage warehouse, for instance.

The interesting Disney twist is that the RFID chip won’t be placed on any of the company’s products, but on people. That’s right, the park’s guests will be given what are called “MagicBands” containing RFID tags that will serve as a guest’s room key, theme park ticket, access to FastPass+ selections, PhotoPass card and optional payment account all rolled into one.

This innovative use of the technology reminded me of all the promises we’ve heard about RFID and other advanced technology over the years. Several years ago, the vision was that RFID tags would get to be so inexpensive that they could be placed on individual items, such as cans of soda. We’re not quite there yet, but as the Disney MagicBands bear out, we might be getting closer.

Just consider the possibilities. Individual packages of soda, beer or other beverages containing the tiny tags could one day be part of an advanced “smart home” system. Every time the consumer finishes drinking a bottle of Coke, for instance, disposing the empty package would trigger a reader that automatically orders them another one as part of their next home delivery from the local supermarket.

The possibilities of such technology are really endless. The only limitations so far have been the cost of the RFID tags, which until now have been too expensive for individual items.

RFID is just one technology that has the potential to revolutionize beverage packaging. Others are already in use, such as QR codes that enable consumers to scan the package label with their smart phones, linking to websites or videos with more information or special promotions.

David Turner, principal and founder, Turner Duckworth Design, recently emailed me his 2013 predictions for beverage packaging. He started by pointing out that beverage packaging really hasn’t changed very much in the past 100 years or so. So are we overdue for a major change? He believes so. “Not to the form of packaging, but to its role,” he said. “Packaging is the one part of a beverage brand’s marketing that’s guaranteed to reach the consumer. With the advent of image recognition technologies, the package can come to life through mobile devices as an interactive hub for information and entertainment.”

Now that sounds just about as innovative as Disney’s MagicBands. The beverage package’s role has remained unchanged for decades. All it needs are these emerging technologies to give it that extra layer of functionality.

So who knows what the future will hold. But if Turner is right, we may be entering a new era where the beverage package takes on even greater importance than it’s had until now. It truly will be the packaging of tomorrow.

What’s in a Name?

Category: General Blogs

I attended a professional women’s networking group last month that focuses on empowering women in their profession. Our group leader brought up attending a seminar on branding: How to successfully brand yourself to help you get the position you desire.

The group of 10, ranging in age from recently graduated college to early 40s, was keen on finding out more about how to successfully brand themselves to send out the right message. I immediately thought of successful beverages that have found success with their branding.

In the beverage world, we are always circling the importance of branding and how the right branding can help you gain consumers for life, while the wrong branding could turn off consumers entirely to your product.

Ironically, our meeting was held in a Starbucks in central London. And Starbucks is a great example of brand image that worked. The small coffee house’s green mermaid image has become so synonymous with the brand that its white cups don’t even bear the name Starbucks any more. Then, I noticed the napkin I had gotten with my tall, spiced vanilla latte wasn’t the recycled-colored brown paper napkin with green emblem. It was a crisp, white, paper napkin with a bold “Starbucks” written across the side in big, black, capital letters—black and white; statement; simple—I liked the new look.

On my journey back toward the tube to head home I started to take notice of other impactful brand imagery—the London underground symbol, the golden McDonald’s arches, the bitten apple for Apple computers. What makes these symbols so impactful and iconic that they can stand by themselves, without any words? That’s a question that new beverage brands ask themselves when creating a strategy on how best to get consumers to notice and resonate with their brand.

Walking down the beverage aisles at Tesco the successful beverage brands that have gotten it right pop off the shelf, like Coca-Cola’s white Spencerian script, Pepsi’s round, red, white and blue symbol, Heineken’s red star, Bacardi’s black bat. All longstanding brands that keep it simple, but keep it consistent.

Other longstanding brands, UK-based, that also are known for their branding is Fuller’s beer brand, which has big, capital, golden letters on a bright red background and standing on top, a Griffin with one leg on a barrel of beer. Dating back to 1845, Fuller’s Griffin Brewery is an independent family brewery that continues to offer a wide range of beers including seasonal and limited edition brews.

Another is Ribena, a line of fruit-based soft drinks, juice drinks and fruit concentrates, which has been in existence since 1938. A product of GlaxoSmithKline, Ribena has bright red lettering on a white background almost illuminating the product name and then images of the fruit inside the beverage front and center on the package.  Simple, but colorful and fun at the same time.

The beverage brands that speak to you with their branding might have something to do with your personality. Are you a clean, crisp and simple? Or are you an in your face, multi-colored and bold? There’s no concrete answer to what makes a successful brand image, but staying true to the brand is the best way to connect with your desired consumer.

Let the Games Begin: BevStar 2013 Call for Entries

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: beer, brewing, craft beer, beverage, alcohol, brew, awards, soft drink, soda, tea, cider, sake, mead, wine, spirits, liquor, functional, sports drink, water, bottled water, enhanced water, coffee, innovation, energy

With the dawn of a new year comes a new chance for your brand to shine. Whether you're playing in the alcohol or non-alcohol space (or both even), you are cordially invited to submit your product to our third-annual BevStar Awards competition. It's our annual celebration of innovation across all of the major beverage categories. And the best part? It's absolutely free to enter, aside from whatever shipping costs you need to incur to get a sample of your product to our judging team.

Since this is about innovation, we ask that your product be new(ish). That means it should have been launched no earlier than Sept. 2011. If it hasn't been launched yet, that's fine. As long as you've got a product, a package and a plan to roll it out before summer 2013, it's eligible. (The product has to exist. Ideation is great, but execution is critical.)

Once again, we'll be awarding gold, silver and bronze awards in the following categories:

• Carbonated Soft Drinks

• Water/Enhanced Water

• Functional Beverages (including sports drinks, but not including energy drinks—those get their own category. We got a ton of energy entries last year.)

• Energy Drinks

• Beer

• Mead, Cider and Sake

• Wine

• Spirits

• Ready-to-Drink Tea & Coffee

We'll also present special achievement awards for marketing innovation, social media initiatives and environmental sustainability.

To enter, please e-mail the following to bevstar@beverageworld.com :

1. Product Name

2. Parent Company Name

3. Contact Info (address, phone & e-mail)

4. High-resolution product image

5. A brief description of the product and why you believe it should win a BevStar award.

6. The names of any packaging, label design, ingredient and branding companies or individuals that helped develop or market your product.

If your product passes the written test, we'll send you instructions on where to ship product samples for the practical test. We ask that you limit the samples to one bottle/can/carton/etc. per product entered.

Keep in mind, tasting is only one component of our selection process. Your product has to offer the whole package, which includes, well, the package and its overall market positioning.

The submission deadline is March 1. Winners will be notified by June 1 and we'll showcase winning products in the July 2013 issue of Beverage World.

If you've got any questions you can e-mail me directly.

We're looking forward to your entries!

Cocktailing

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: alcohol, spirits, cocktails

I love that cocktails spark conversations.

Where did the name cocktail come from? My boyfriend recently asked me that question as we were making plans to visit Milk & Honey, the speakeasy-inspired cocktail bar and members club, which has locations in London and New York. 

I didn’t know the answer to that question, but thought a simple Google search would produce one easily enough. 

I thought wrong.

It turns out there are a number of theories as to where the name cocktail came from. (In 1806, the editor of The Balance and Columbian Repository defined a cocktail as “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits and any kind, sugar, water and bitters.”)

Some say that the word originated in the 1800s when a tavern keeper north of New York City served mixed alcohol drinks garnished with feathers from a cock’s tail. Another reference to the tail feather of a rooster has been published in a British publication, Bartender, which says in 1936 English soldiers in Mexico were served drinks stirred with a Cola de Gallo (cock’s tail). Other references include horse tails. The word could have stemmed from a horse breeder’s term for a mixed breed—cock-tails.

Another thought is that the word cocktail came from cock tailings, what was found at the bottom of a cask of ale. The cock tailings from spirits would be mixed together and then sold at a lower price. 

Among the more interesting explanations of how cocktail came about is in George Bishop’s “The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of Man in His Cups,” which says that the word comes from the term cock-tail used in the mid 1800s to describe a woman who was “of easy virtue desirable but impure…and applied to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice.”

Well, at the Milk & Honey in London, some of the cocktails did come with ice—large cubes so as to not dilute the drinks—(no feathers though) and were mixed with great detail. 

The cocktail has been around for a long time and bars like Milk & Honey are paying homage to the classics, but with a twist. The El Diablo, for example, used fresh ginger and soda as opposed to ginger ale. Other “restorative” drinks on the menu included a Prescription Julep (cognac, rye, sugar, mint), an Aviation No. 1 (calvados, cassis, absinthe, lime) and a Moscow Mule (vodka, ginger, lime, sugar, soda). 

The downstairs bar had a speakeasy vibe—small booths and tables, dark wood and leather furniture, candle light, embossed metal detailing around the bar and 1920s-style music playing in the background. It could have been a scene out of “Boardwalk Empire” with waiters and bartenders dressed in pinstriped collared shirts and suspenders.  

As the trend of reinventing or revisiting classic cocktails of the past continues, bars like Milk & Honey are taking a fresh approach—literally. The quality of ingredients used to mix with the alcohol is just as important as the quality of the spirit itself. Milk & Honey makes fresh mixers daily and says it doesn’t use any juice or extract they didn’t make themselves.

The quality is noticeably reflected in the cocktails.  

Reverse Consolidation?

Category: General Blogs  |  Tags: beer, brewing, craft beer, brew

In the course of putting together our annual Forecast issue (the fun begins with the rather foreboding cover item on energy drinks on page 32), it’s often a tricky task to put a fresh spin on certain categories that, year after year, seem to have been performing more or less the same, give or take a volume percentage point here or there. And when the outlook for the coming year is for more of the same, it’s a mixed blessing: It’s a good thing because those doing the forecasting have a smaller chance of being wrong when performance has been so consistent and bad because those of us tasked with writing about such projections have to figure out a way to not keep repeating ourselves.

The category of which I speak, of course, is beer. To borrow a phrase from Led Zeppelin, the song remains the same: Beer’s going to keep losing alcohol share to wine and spirits, the overall market’s going to be flat or, at best, grow at a dying snail’s pace, but the craft segment’s going to continue to enjoy low double-digit growth in both volume and dollar sales.

However, a potential new twist on what’s happening in the market is that a strange dichotomy has emerged. At the top of the market, where the large multinational brewers roam (and on the distribution tier, for that matter— but that’s another story), consolidation is the driving dynamic. AB InBev is buying Modelo—a handful of years after InBev bought Anheuser-Busch to form the gargantuan entity we’ve come to know and love—Heineken’s expected to take control of Asia Pacific Breweries and there are always rumors and rumblings that AB InBev might even merge with SABMiller to give new meaning to the word ‘formidable.’

But on the small brewer side, domain of the crafts, you’ve got the reverse happening. There are already more than 2,100 small, independent brewers in the country, up several hundred from just a year ago. With more than 1,300 breweries in planning at last tally, that number could hit 2,500 in 2013. Sure there’s some consolidation happening with a couple of brewers here and there merging or giants scooping them up—à la AB InBev-Goose Island—but, relative to the number of newbies popping up, those instances are few and far between, the exceptions rather than the rule. It’s almost as if the market as a whole has gotten so consolidated that the pendulum has swung toward the exact opposite of consolidation, as far as craft brewing is concerned.

It’s a phenomenon that’s carrying over into spirits, as our November 2012 cover story could attest. It’s also happening in the non-alcohol realm among segments like artisanal sodas.

Will this reverse consolidation eventually slow down and become the reverse of reverse consolidation (aka ‘consolidation’)? Of course, that’s ultimately the market trajectory that history favors. However, 100 or so years from now, couldn’t the cycle start anew yet again? Even more recent history favors that scenario. It’s a pendulum effect and, pendula are, after all, controlled by gravity—a force not unlike consumer demand.