Give Me More & More & More

The hyper-rise of functional beverages, with and without the absence of fun. The beverage category that continues to grow and grow while appetites shrink and shrink.

I interviewed Becs from Good Sh*t Soda on the podcast last week and it’s really had me thinking. Listen here to the Interview.

Remember when the idea of a functional drink was simple? It meant mainlining coffee or energy drinks until you got the jitters, perhaps a cup of sleepy tea and occasionally dropping a fizz-bomb Berocca or electrolytes into a glass of tap water. As we hit the 2000s, vitamin loaded water and smoothies loaded with extra green or ginger shots started to multiply in the drinks fridge. But now? Squeezing as much function as possible into everything that passes your lips is the food trend of the moment. Whether it’s the rise of GLP-1s and an incessant need for protein, or a symptom of the starving rich - we’re making every morsel of food over-deliver in nutrition. In the irony of the wellness age, UPFs (ultra-processed foods) are in high growth mode as we continually reach past the whole foods on our plate for a beverage that is loaded with added benefits.

You can’t ignore the GLP-1 effect

If you are a woman aged 30 - 55 years, according to those I know, we’re being targeted with GLP-1 ads, supplemental beverages and a variety of protein shakes, smoothies and everything-in-one-pouch ads every twice for every three minutes we spend on social media. Sure, it’s an anecdote but I woke up the other morning actually wondering, ‘is the Algorithm trying to sell to me or is it actually trying to heal me? Maybe I do need that (insert supplement here).”

If you’ve seen those ads, then you already know the wellness (cough, weightloss) world is all about protein and nutrientmaxxing, minimal calories and maximum input. GLP-1s tell your brain you’re full before you’ve actually eaten much. Appetite drops, portions shrink, and so does nutritional intake. Overseas, restaurants are running ‘smaller appetite’ or bariatric menus for patients, bars are shrinking drinks because of reduced alcohol tolerance. And one look at the beverage aisle tells you that if you’re eating less, everything you do eat or drink has to work harder.

In the US, GLP-1 usage climbed from 2% to 18% of the population from 2019 to 2026. It’s still climbing, and it’s about to get a lot bigger once oral GLP-1s and softer pricing bring the entry point down from eye-watering to merely expensive. To give you a reference point, in Australia and New Zealand, we are sitting right at 2% of the population and growing each month. So buckle up, because the drinks list is about to get to work.

Form and function

I cracked open a can of Good Sh*t Soda with co-founder Becs Caughey and the orchard-fresh apple aroma hits you upfront. It’s their newest flavour and it’s right on the money. Good Sh*t Soda has always obsessed over perfecting the nose as well as the palate, because the nose is what draws you in, regardless of whether you’re drinking it for your health.

For a long time, health drinks and fizzy were two different things. The treat lived in one fridge, the virtue lived in another, and you picked your fridge depending on the kind of day you were having. Soda, proper soda, belonged firmly to the treat fridge, a small bit of fun in a can. Nobody opened a Coke expecting it to do anything for their gut.

Now, you can open a can of Good Sh*t Soda Cola and feel just as refreshed, with the added benefit of knowing you’ve just put a ton of fibre into your gut. Which is important, if you’re needing more than just fun and flavour from your beverage choice.

Appetite-suppressing weight loss drugs are rewiring how a meaningful chunk of people experience hunger and think about constructing their daily macros. It’s not just personal, but the concept of appetite and nutrition is changing shape in public, in real time, in a way that will inevitably bleed into how large parts of the population eat and drink, based purely on how the food and beverage industry will change to absorb and meet this new version of a consumer. And that consumer wants their drinks to be more efficient at being good for us, in the same breath as wanting them to be more delicious than ever. Not instead of fun. As well as fun.

There’s another false wellness-morality creeping in too, I think. Particularly those of us sitting in the right demographic for the algorithm. We’ve stopped being satisfied with a drink that’s simply not bad for us and we’re increasingly programmed that everything needs to be doing something extra. Not just makeup, but skincare! Not just water, but added protein! It’s one more step in the 5am Club protocol or the 10-step Korean skin care routine.

Wellness used to mean restraint. Now it means more and more and more. More actives, more vitamins, more nutrients and powders. More performance, even in a can of fizzy. You’re choosing the version that’s supposed to be working on your behalf while you’re not looking, fixing something, building something, fending something off. That’s a lot to ask of 330ml of bubbles, and yet here we all are, asking it, and meaning it.

We’re Fizzy for Fizzy.

We’ve always had a soft spot for good soda that borders on the sentimental, the kind of loyalty that turns Foxton Fizz and Karma Cola into genuine institutions. Watching that same fizzy obsession quietly absorb a wellness brief, rather than get replaced by one, makes sense here. Especially when it suits our trademark cheeky humour with a ‘poop-on-the-can’ logo. But this isn’t about supplements dressed up in a soda can. I’m not sure anyone really wants to drink a supplement.The whole point of Good Sh*t, is that the fun and the function have to arrive in the same sip or it simply doesn’t hit the mark of what we want. You can have all the fibre and probiotics in the world sitting in that can and it will not matter one bit if the second sip isn’t just as fun and delicious as the first.

I’ve been saying this in booze for the last 18 months. The world is a pretty bonkers and occasionally dark place these days. And when people walk down the beverage aisle, the scan data tells us they are looking for fun, looking for fizzy and looking for approachable flavour. If it comes with a side of ‘oh, I can feel less bad about things’, that’s a real bonus. Most of the beverage aisle is having a hard run. Beer’s been soft for years now, RTDs are slowly correcting (which no-one is talking about), wine’s fighting for attention to grasp a new generation of drinkers. And then there’s this pocket of fun and functional drinks, that just keeps growing, here and overseas, while everything around it goes flat or backwards.

So no, this column isn’t really about appetite drugs, or gut bacteria, or any of the science-y stuff (although Good Sh*t are very careful to be transparent about the nutritional content only and to let you and your bathroom tell the impact story) sitting on the can.

For most of fizzy drink history, the job of a soda was singular: be a treat, taste good, full stop. Good Sh*t’s whole proposition rests on something Becs puts plainly: wellness doesn’t need to be beige. It doesn’t have to come in a powder. The question of why Fizzy-and-functional is the one growing pocket in this market begins to answer itself. It’s the fun part.

Fun-ctional.

Not all functional beverages are created equal. And if we’re honest, really, the idea of drinking our way to health is largely because it’s perceivably the easier option. Need your greens? Don’t eat them, that would take forever. Just put’em in a smoothie and sip them down.

There are plenty of examples of green powder, mood powder, protein powder, vitamin powder and even supplement powders promising to correct your hormones. Lots of them New Zealand owned and operated. Then there are the nootropic beverages (again, we’ll talk about what you can and can’t say on the label another time). But suffice to say, as long as all you put on the label is the nutrition content, you can imply almost anything else in your marketing. Of course, more powder = more processing. But powder seems to be the one UPF that everyone is okay with right now.

I think the closest to fun they get is the promise of a sleepytime hot chocolate. But that’s going to have a hard time competing with my nightcap, sorry. When it comes to competing for buzz, it ain’t cutting it.

Which brings me to the other functional beverages pushing growth offshore and unlikely to be viable opportunity for producers (or consumers) here anytime soon.

In the US and UK, CBD beverages sit on open shelves: hemp-derived, low-dose, parked next to the kombucha. You can’t buy a CBD soda or iced tea at a dairy in Auckland, and you can’t import one for personal use either. That’s a regulatory wall that appears pretty solid, despite substantial growth and research bases overseas. Proof we really are on the conservative side of innovators. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve roadtested a bunch of these and honestly, left me uninspired.

Mushroom and nootropic beverages are a different story and we’re maybe actually behind on. Lion’s mane for focus, reishi for stress, cordyceps for energy: overseas mushrooms are moving out of powder tins into ready-to-drink cans and shots at serious pace. There’s minimal regulatory hurdles and nobody’s built the definitive Australasian version of that category yet, it’s all still sitting on health store shelves or stalls at your local Fieldays or Home & Garden show. Maybe room for innovation? Maybe not. A month of mushie alternative coffee didn’t do much for me. Where’s the fun? Caffeine is fun.

So what

The deeper point here isn’t about a drug class, a social impact or that Good Sh*t is delicious. It’s not about who will be next to add a macro-nutrient to their fizzy (or their mushroom coffee). It’s not even about who will win commercially in the beverage aisle because there are so many functional beverage niches, there’s almost room for everyone. It’s more that hey, who can blame us for wanting a little fun and fizz in our health choices. If it means I don’t have to feel bad about that fizzy fridge cigarette, in fact, maybe I can feel a little bit good about it – then yeah. Tonight, I’m trading the broccoli.

And when I pour a whiskey-and-apple tonight, I will smile sweetly to myself that it came with added fibre.