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The Finnish Long Drink tripled in size since 2022 while the broader RTD category hit a wall. Today Mark Anthony Brands acquired it for $325 million. The story of how Evan Burns and his co-founders built a brand worth buying in the hardest environment the category has ever faced is one every RTD founder should read carefully.

Most CPG brands grow by adding products. AG1 grew by refusing to. One product, one price, one channel, $600 million in revenue. The strategic logic behind that decision is one of the most instructive frameworks available to any founder building a functional brand today.

The beverage alcohol industry spent a decade building for demand that no longer exists in the form it was projected. Now it is sitting on $22 billion in unsold inventory, pulling vines from the ground, and pausing distillery production. Here is what the correction actually means for every brand watching.

For the first time in decades, the US Dietary Guidelines no longer tell Americans how much alcohol is safe to drink. That change is smaller than the industry hoped and larger than it wanted to admit.

2025 was the year the beverage and CPG industry stopped being able to blame external disruption for structural problems. The data was clear, the consumer had changed, and the brands that acted on that clarity built something durable. Here is what the year produced.

A softening market does not compress opportunity equally across every brand in a category. It concentrates it. The brands that understand what a contracting environment actually makes possible are the ones that come out of it with more than they had going in.

Liquid Death built a billion dollar brand selling water in beer cans by ignoring every conventional rule in the beverage playbook. The first chapter was about proving the concept. The second chapter is harder because it requires building a business that justifies the belief.

The when of drinking is shifting as fast as the what. CGA data from 2025 shows midday cocktail consumption up 19% while late night drops 10%. For every brand with on-premise distribution, that shift has direct implications for which accounts matter most and how to activate in them.

In 2014 Fairlife had $10 million in retail sales. By 2024 it had nearly $4 billion. Coca-Cola acquired it and then did something most large companies cannot do with a small brand: they left it alone long enough to find out what it actually was.

Diageo built the most powerful spirits portfolio in the world and then watched it contract. The reasons why, and what the company is doing about it, contain lessons that apply directly to every founder building a premium beverage brand today.

Hispanic households formed 43% of all new US households in 2024 and outpaced every other demographic in CPG spending growth. Then 2025 happened. Here is what the data shows and what it means for every brand that built its growth model around demographic tailwinds.

Poppi was turned down on Shark Tank, nearly ran out of money, and spent years building in a category nobody believed in. Then PepsiCo paid $1.95 billion for it. The story of how it got there is one of the most instructive brand building narratives in recent beverage history.

Constellation Brands spent two decades acquiring some of the most recognizable wine brands in America. In early 2025 it began selling all of them. Here is what that decision reveals about the beverage landscape every founder is building into.

Constellation Brands brews 100% of its beer in Mexico. When tariffs hit in March 2025, that single-source dependency became a critical vulnerability overnight. Here is what every beverage founder should take from what happened.

Tens of millions of Americans are on or cycling through GLP-1 medications. The consumer coming out the other side thinks differently about food and drink than the one who went in. Here is what that means for every brand in the market.

Every few years the industry calls something a trend and waits for it to peak. Health and wellness in CPG is not peaking. The data from 2024 makes clear it is reorganizing the entire consumer goods landscape from the ground up.

2024 did not deliver the recovery the beverage industry was waiting for. It delivered something more useful: clarity. Here is what the year's biggest stories actually mean for every brand building into 2025.

When Tilray's alcohol revenue surpassed its cannabis revenue for the first time, it was not a footnote. It was a signal about where the cannabis industry is heading and what the convergence of cannabis and beverage alcohol actually looks like in practice.

Topo Chico did not build its brand through advertising, influencer campaigns, or distribution pushes. It built it through product quality and cultural authenticity over 130 years. Coca-Cola noticed. Here is what every brand builder should take from that.

The industry spent years building wellness-driven strategies to win back younger drinkers. The problem is that wellness was never the real reason they left. The real reason is economic and the strategic response is completely different.