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If you’ve been in a grocery store in the past few months, you’ve probably experienced a strange sensation. It starts normally, as any humdrum trip to the grocery stores does. You begin your normal route, maybe perusing the produce or checking out whatever the bakery has going on. But the feeling gets colder—literally and figuratively—as you approach the refrigerated section. The sensation moves from your brain down your spine in a chilling way, the same as when you find yourself in an unfamiliar land with no road map for getting out. At this point, a pervasive thought lodges itself into your psyche, the root of all this discomfort. What the hell are these beverages? It’s no longer as straightforward as water, soda, and juice. There’s prebiotics and probiotics, all sorts of carbonated elixirs laced with magnesium and adaptogens, yassified energy drinks that promise to accelerate your metabolism, and some that will even get you ferociously stoned. The word “infused” has completely taken over. It no longer suffices for a beverage to quench your thirst or jolt you awake. It should also heal you—whether with an obscure vitamin or mineral, or vibes conveyed in an overdesigned container. These beverages exist, in part, because of the finicky American consumer, who’s thirsty for something new. Since 2001, alcohol consumption and social gathering have steadily declined among the 18-to-34 age demographic. Things like widespread marijuana legalization, the ability to connect with peers on the internet rather than in real life, and the collective realization that alcohol is bad for your health are all culprits. But beyond that, studies have also shown that Americans are no longer gulping down soda with the same fervor that they were in previous decades. Whereas your parents might have been kicking back with a Bud Light or Coke after work, the younger generation is now looking beyond the mass appeal of legacy brands. A 2025 trend report published by Keurig Dr. Pepper found that consumers want to drink things that reflect their mood, and “look for beverages to meet physical and mental well-being while not wanting to sacrifice taste for function,” adding that “personalization is becoming central to how people drink.” As a result, beverage developers have pounced on the opportunity to introduce newer, softer drinks to the public. Their efforts have spawned inventive categories: alcohol alternatives, low-sugar sodas, and a grip of so-called functional offshoots. With their colorful motifs, lofty mission statements, and novel ingredients, these refreshments have taken on a far bigger role than their predecessors. In 2025 a person’s beverage choice is also part of their identity. “Beverages have become almost like an accessory,” says Kyle Watson, chief brand officer of Celsius, the ascendant energy drink with roughly twice the amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee. “People carry them around, they carry them proud, they want this connection to what they're putting in their body. They want to feel like it also represents them.” Now a collection of ambitious companies like Olipop, Cann, and Recess are vying to win the hearts of consumers by lodging themselves into your quintessence. But is that enough to unseat global companies with immeasurable name recognition? Or are our new personalities-in-a-bottle doomed to go the way of Surge? When Jake Bullock set out to found a new beverage company in the late 2010s, he and his team first had to pay a visit to the mecca: Erewhon, the Los Angeles–based upscale grocery store known for it's celebrity-branded smoothies and health-forward offerings. It was there that they realized that the beverage industry had not only jumped the shark but had started doing backflips. “We walked into the beverage aisle, and we were just blown away,” says Bullock, cofounder and CEO of Cann, about that formative field trip. “We would stand in front of it, turning products, being like, ‘Is this real? What the fuck is this?’” The Cann contingent left Erewhon with a few core ideas that it would eventually bring to the company. One was that people don’t like to drink things that contain ingredients they don’t understand. The other was that their product needed to feel adult, which meant they could play around with refined flavors like cardamom, and leave played-out profiles like grape and orange in the dust. “We were never going to be like, ‘Oh, it's beer with weed in it,’ or, ‘It's LaCroix, but with weed in it,’” Bullock says. “That didn't make sense to us. What made sense to us is, we're creating a new category, so we have license to create new flavor profiles.” The company wanted to feel in vogue and party-adjacent without being a buzzkill, and, as Bullock says, they were inspired by the vibrant colors and fun-loving nature of cocktails. The end result was a line of beverages that come in inviting pastel-colored cans and sold in local grocery stores, beverage depots, and at Total Wine. Cann is in the unique position of being a product with real effects—it gets you high, in quantities of 2, 5, or 10 milligrams of THC per can. Bullock says the inspiration for creating Cann came from getting older and slowly succumbing to the physical effects of alcohol, but still wanting to party with his friends. “Two-day debilitating hangovers, I couldn't really pull off,” he says. From there, he became determined to give people an alternative to beer, wine, or liquor to bring to the function while still catching a buzz and not feeling subhuman the next morning. In the broader wellness space, there’s been a massive shift—some might even call it an obsession—with longevity. Whether it’s via the Mediterranean diet, a precisely calibrated morning routine, or daily squats and lunges, people are looking for any way to stay alive longer, while also, crucially, not feeling like shit all the time. Forget about booze for a second; artificial sweeteners are just as scary to some. That’s where Recess—the no-alcohol, no-THC beverage that wants you to chillax, decompress, and achieve a higher level of clarity—comes into play. Of all the fizz that has secured shelf real estate in the past few years, Recess is perhaps the most wellness-coded. It’s not just the magnesium and adaptogens that are advertised on each can, or its “made with real fruit and no fake stuff” promise. It’s also the cloud iconography, the line of mood drinks designed to help you unwind, and the website that reads (in an aloof, lowercase style, naturally) “we all have too many tabs open in our browsers & our brains. that’s why we made Recess.” According to Ben Witte, the cofounder and CEO, Recess has found its base, which is “70% female, 30% male,” with an army of “older women, moms, and people shifting towards Recess instead of a weeknight glass of wine.” Something to take the edge off but also keep the doctor at bay, essentially. “Wellness is such an abstract term,” Witte says. “I think people are looking for better-for-you options. There's this question, when someone's drinking a new wellness brand, what are they drinking it instead of?” Witte likes to use the phrase “mood-enhancing” to describe Recess, which hit the market in 2019 and is now available at Target. If the company’s Instagram grid is any indication, Recess absolutely views itself as something that enhances your mood in a cool kid type of way, with influencer posts about grabbing a Recess and going on a hot girl walk or clutching one at a stylish sunset party with Offset. Even soda and energy drinks are courting an aura of wellness. Olipop, a soda that advertises ingredients like prebiotics and fiber packed into its super-Instagrammable cans, has positioned itself as a more healthful choice than a Coke or Sprite. When Olipop debuted in 2018, cofounder and CEO Ben Goodwin says, the main branding challenge it faced was helping Americans understand that soda doesn’t have to be a complete sugar bomb. Full-sugar soda was a go-to beverage for over 150 years. Even if the customer base for the drink had been slowly declining over the past decade, a drink like Coca-Cola was practically synonymous with American culture. Goodwin knew Olipop would be up against “some of the strongest brands in human history.” “I had trusted advisers with multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses tell me that I was totally fucking crazy if I went in this healthy soda direction,” Goodwin says. To fight back against the entrenched behemoths of yesteryear, the thinking goes, one must connect with the youth. Most of the brain trust at these upstart companies all seem to have the same idea: If our product is going to reach young people, it needs to talk like young people. Cann has a quirky and playful website that caters to the under-30, hyper-online crowd, with its agave nectar explainer (“It’s like sugar but also not? Accepting no further questions at this time”) and “About Us” section that starts with “High!” instead of “Hi!” Part of that, Bullock says, is a calculated effort to make a THC product less intimidating. He, along with everyone else who works at Cann, knows that some people were forever turned off all things weed by that cursed pot brownie they ate in college. Getting them back in, while also trying to attract zoomers, requires some cheekiness. “Just trying to be a little bit on the nose, culturally, as a way of making what we're doing feel more familiar,” Bullock says. “Hopefully, that translates over to the product like, ‘This can't be a scary thing. Cann's so funny. It sounds like my friend!’” Olipop’s Goodwin echoes Bullock: “We really try to be our customer's friend. We're just like, look, we made this taste like a soda because we don't expect you to drink an $8 kale smoothie.” Watson said that Celsius’s slim, white cans and fruit-forward design were born out of a desire to create something “that feels more approachable” and make “people feel good about drinking it.” She said her customer’s relationship to the wildly popular energy drink “is an extension of themselves.” That can have its downsides, though. When everyone gets in on a trend, it’s no longer novel. Olipop is a Walmart brand now, which is great for sales but bad for their hip, alternative status. What happens when a beverage whose major selling point is aesthetics and cultural clout goes from the hot, innovative item to old-hat industry mainstay? There will always be some new liquid in development somewhere, and as the established forebears continue to add new ingredients, tweak their logos, and tinker with the things that made them successful in the first place, it throws their identity into flux. With the entire American identity, really, also in flux, everyone from politicians to people that work for beverage companies have to stay on their toes. “The beverage landscape is amazing right now. It doesn't allow anyone to get complacent,” Watson, the brand officer at Celsius, says. “Consumers are picky, they know what they want, and they want brands that they feel connected to.” Watson understands that Red Bull is both the gold standard and patient zero of energy drinks, while Celsius is its prospering child. But if you expand that universe to include everything caffeinated, she notes that even the java world has undergone a miniature transformation recently thanks to innovations like mushroom, protein, and cloud coffee. To her, that means there’s always room to grow, and that all of these competing concoctions can coexist with one another. Just make sure your product has the juice—figuratively, not necessarily literally—to be part of consumers’ everyday rotation. “If that product doesn't taste great, you don't want to drink it, and you don't want to make it part of your routine every day, I just don't think it stays around,” Watson says. That doesn’t always mean the companies’ consumer bases match their initial marketing plans. Celsius originally established itself in the fitness community as a portable, non-sugary, caffeine-packed energy drink to slam before a workout. But Watson says she’s been fascinated to see it evolve into more of a lifestyle drink. Soccer moms drive around with it in the cupholder, college kids use it to cram for tests, and office workers everywhere reach for a Celsius to stave off post-lunch sleepiness. She references a “cult-like excitement” from the Celsius hive, which includes athletes like Juan Soto, Charles Leclerc, and Jayden Daniels, but also folks from outside the fitness world like country singer Kelsea Ballerini. In my personal experience—commuting to the office four days a week on the New York City subway—I see an equal amount of people drinking an early-morning Celsius on their way to work than I do on the way home, when they’re presumably getting jazzed up for whatever social commitment awaits. While (I presume) none of us are using the energy boost to go hit home runs, race a car at hundreds of miles per hour, or perform a concert for throngs of devoted fans like the brand’s ambassadors, we still share an identity. Whenever I lock eyes with a fellow Celsius enjoyer sipping their preferred flavor on-the-go, I know who we’re all trying to be in that moment: a person simply trying to get through the day, with a little help from our friend.
