There's good news on the health front today. An article in Take Part reports that soda sales in the U.S. have dropped eight years in a row. The Wall Street Journal reports that the industry's revenues are now dropping too. They had offset slumping sales by simply raising prices, but that started to backfire in 2012, when sales and revenues continued to fall even during the year end holiday period. Formerly, people tended to stock up regardless of price in that period.
It seems the health message is definitely starting to get through. The link between excessive sugar, including high fructose corn syrup, obesity and diabetes is becoming ever clearer, and even the launching of hundreds of millions of dollars in ad campaigns, including $50 million at the last Super Bowl alone, and endorsement contracts by such mega stars such as Beyonce Knowles have been unable to turn the tide. The Journal offers the assessment that this may be "the new normal" for the soda pop industry. It's amazing what a trickle of facts can sometimes do against an avalanche of propaganda.
Baby boomers are aging and getting more health conscious, and the primary target group, young people, are gravitating toward waters, energy drinks and coffee rather than sugary sodas these days. Still, don't expect the three biggest players, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Snapple to ride off quietly into the sunset. They continue to work on low-calorie sweeteners and have diversified into more types of drinks. Finally, they are playing their ace in the whole: a new emphasis on "opening new markets," or, in other words, expanding aggressively into places like China and Brazil, where they can repeat their former American success by hooking hundreds of millions of new and less informed customers, thereby creating an obesity and diabetes crisis there that they won't have to deal with for perhaps another couple of decades.
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