Niche drinks

This section examines various beverage types outside the mainstream of soft drinks. 

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We may end up recommending a formulation for a low-priced drinking water under the house brand of the local supermarket, which is manufactured with simple separation steps from tap water. It will certainly be esthetically more pleasing than tap water, with or without carbon dioxide to give it the fizz, and it will have less objectionable appearance and smell than tap water. It is aimed at a market niche of people who are willing to pay a little more than tap water to ensure health, but not enough for Evian and Perrier. We will discuss the quantitative methods of evaluation and selection in section 11.6, and the presentation of the recommendations as a business plan in section 11.7. 

Consumption in 2002 grew in diese markets by 11% to over 12 billion litres. Functional soft drinks now account for 6% of all soft drinks consumption by volume in these markets, up from just 4% in 1998 (see Figures 12.1 and 12.2). It follows diat herbal extracts have a role to play in this increasingly important soft drinks sector, which can no longer be seen as an insignificant niche market. 

The last quadrant in Figure 16 shows the areas for eventual product diversification from energy and/or liquid biofuel vectors. Although these do not appear to offer great market potential they can address niche markets for the production of bio-chemicals and/or the recovery of the valuable products such as the monomer from waste polymers and aluminium from drink packaging. 

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