With its specialty food focus, Fancy Food is not known as a platform for energy drink launches. But it served as showcase this week for Florida-based brand called VALR that unusually employs nitro widget to lend smooth mouthfeel to noncarb liquids like Orange Cream, Blueberries & Cream and Berries & Cream. Line packed in 10.5-oz sleek cans carries 175 mg of caffeine from green tea along with Hyperzine A, L-theanine and B and C vitamins but no added sugar. It's priced at $2.99, promoted at 2 for $5. It's signed on as a sponsor of Professional Fighters League, which will earn it airtime on ESPN. Team operates out of 7,000-sq-ft strength & conditioning center in S Florida that will be churning out digital content.

More folks were already thinking about cutting back on their drinking even before the flood of headlines about potential health risks that arrived early this mo. But it ain't just health concerns driving the pull back, results from a pair of surveys released today suggest. Throughout 2024, a third of 21+ adults surveyed by YouGov reported decreased consumption vs the prior yr, while reports of any drinking dropped from 69% in March to 59% in Dec. Meanwhile, almost half of a separate sample of 1,100+ legal age adults said they plan to drink less alcohol this yr, according to results of a Dec survey conducted by NCSolutions (NCS). That's up from 41% in 2024 and 34% in 2023. The high figure is driven by majorities of Gen Z (65%) and millennials (57%) reporting plans to cut back. Just like many folks say they drink less than they actually do, there's a big difference between what people say they'd like to do and what they end up doing. But these sizable increases reflect ongoing changes in attitudes towards alcohol, at least.

As an AB "megabrand," Kona Big Wave doubled volume in the past 5 yrs and is now "at an inflection point," high end prexy Andy Thomas highlighted at co's SAMCOM meeting in Nashville last wk. Already the #9 tap handle in the US, it's showing momentum in every region and growing twice as fast as the national trend in mkts with over 10% draft distribution. So after a big 3x step up in media investment last year, Big Wave will see a 33% media increase in 2025 with a product-focused campaign to help it become the "leading lifestyle brand of tomorrow," proclaimed premium brands mktg veep Chris Jones.

The rhetoric used to describe the findings of a second government report on alcohol and health designed to inform federal drinking guidance nudges up against the argument that there is "no safe level" of alcohol consumption. But as is often the case with research used to advocate that position, the data doesn't quite support it as directly as the authors suggest. That is, if the data can be trusted in the first place.

Constellation posted top growth in beer by a longshot in 2024. But recent slowdowns had The Street panicking and industry observers raising all kinds of questions about the company's future growth prospects as it reported fiscal Q3 earnings late last week. In the fiscal qtr thru Nov, Constellation beer shipments grew just 1.6% and depletions up 3.2% with revs up 3.3% and oper profit up 1.6% for the qtr. That was a marked slowdown and caused co to revise its guidance on beer to net sales +4-7% while anticipating 1-2% price increase. Revision suggests a very wide range of potential outcomes in fiscal Q4, anywhere from shipments down ~5% to up ~9%, as JP Morgan analyst Andrea Teixeira pointed out on co's earnings call. That's anywhere from down ~300K-bbls to up ~600K bbls.