AI Research for Beverage Brands

In the spring of 2024, Coca-Cola launched Spiced, its first permanent new flavour in three years. The company had spent months on development. It had invested in marketing creative, retail distribution agreements, and a positioning strategy aimed squarely at Gen Z consumers who had been drifting toward functional sodas like Olipop and Poppi. By September, the product was dead. Six months from launch to discontinuation. The name "Spiced" had created an expectation of heat that the product, which contained raspberry and warm spice notes, never delivered. Consumers expecting something peppery found a mildly fruity cola that tasted like neither one thing nor the other. The Gen Z audience Coca-Cola was courting had, by then, already decided that Coca-Cola was not the brand they wanted to be seen holding.

What makes the Spiced failure particularly instructive for the beverage industry is not its cost, which was substantial, or its speed, which was embarrassing. It is the specific nature of the miscalculation. Coca-Cola got the flavour wrong, the name wrong, the positioning wrong, and the competitive read wrong, all simultaneously. Each of those errors could have been identified by asking a handful of target consumers a single well-constructed question. "What does 'Coca-Cola Spiced' make you think the product will taste like?" would have exposed the naming gap. "If you currently buy Olipop or Poppi, what would make you switch back to a Coca-Cola product?" would have revealed that reformulating an existing brand was not the answer to a fundamentally different consumer desire.

The beverage industry, more than perhaps any other consumer category, is built on subjective experience. You cannot send a data sheet to a consumer and convince them that a drink tastes good. You cannot demonstrate, through specifications, that a can design feels premium in the hand. You cannot prove, through competitive analysis, that a price point feels fair for what the liquid inside delivers. Beverages are sensory, emotional, and deeply habitual. And yet, the industry's approach to pre-launch research remains disproportionately focused on trend data, competitive benchmarking, and internal tasting panels staffed by people whose palates are professionally calibrated and therefore unrepresentative of anyone who actually buys the product.

This article examines how synthetic research, powered by AI-generated consumer personas, addresses the specific challenges that beverage brands face when developing, positioning, and pricing new products. It draws on documented failures, emerging use cases, and the capabilities of platforms operating in this space. It is, necessarily, an argument for a particular approach to consumer research. It is also, I believe, an argument that the evidence supports.

The Beverage Industry's Particular Vulnerabilities

Every consumer category has its blind spots. Beverage has more than most.

The first is subjectivity of taste. A beverage brand cannot prototype in the way that a technology company or even a packaged food company can. A new app feature can be tested through a clickable prototype. A new snack can be described in terms of texture, crunch, and flavour profile with reasonable fidelity. But the experience of drinking something, the way a liquid feels in the mouth, the interplay between sweetness and acidity, the sensation of carbonation against the tongue, is almost impossible to convey through description alone. This makes concept testing both more important and more difficult. You must find ways to test the idea of a beverage, the positioning and the promise, before consumers ever taste the liquid. Because by the time the liquid exists, you have already spent the development money.

The second vulnerability is the visual primacy of packaging. Beverages are, in many retail environments, chosen by their packaging before they are chosen by their contents. A can on a shelf has roughly two seconds to communicate what the product is, who it is for, and why it deserves attention. The craft beer revolution was, in many respects, a packaging revolution first and a flavour revolution second. The same is true of the functional beverage category, where brands like Olipop, Poppi, and Athletic Brewing Company have succeeded in part because their cans look like they belong in a different section of the store from the products they compete with. Packaging research in beverages is not a nice-to-have. It is an existential requirement.

The third vulnerability is channel-dependent pricing. A 330ml can of craft cola might sell for 89p in a supermarket multipack, £1.80 as a single in a convenience store, £3.50 in a restaurant, and £5.00 in a cocktail bar where it serves as a premium mixer. The same liquid, in the same can, at five different price points, each of which must feel fair to the consumer in that specific context. Pricing research for beverages is inherently more complex than for products sold through a single channel at a single price. The question is not "What would you pay for this?" but "What would you pay for this, here, in this moment, with these alternatives available?"

The fourth vulnerability is seasonality and occasion dependency. Beverages are consumed in contexts that shift with the calendar, the weather, the time of day, and the social setting. A hard seltzer brand that tests brilliantly in June may find its audience evaporates by October. A hot coffee variant that resonates in January testing may feel irrelevant by the time it reaches shelves in March. Understanding when and where a beverage will be consumed, not merely whether it will be consumed, is critical to accurate demand forecasting.

Finally, there is the sheer velocity of product turnover. The beverage industry launches and kills products at a pace that would be considered reckless in almost any other category. Coca-Cola alone has discontinued more than a dozen flavour innovations since 2020: Starlight, Dreamworld, Move, Spiced, Coffee, Energy, Orange Vanilla. PepsiCo's record is comparable. The craft and functional beverage space is, if anything, even more prolific and even more ruthless. In a category where product lifecycles are measured in months, the cost of a bad launch is not merely the write-off on unsold inventory. It is the opportunity cost of the shelf space, the distributor relationship, and the consumer attention that could have been allocated to a product that actually worked.

Five Use Cases for Synthetic Research in Beverages

The vulnerabilities described above map directly to research use cases where synthetic consumer panels offer distinct advantages over traditional methods.

Flavour Concept Testing

The most intuitive use case, and the one where the gap between current practice and best practice is widest. Most beverage companies test flavour concepts through internal tasting panels, trade show sampling, or small-scale consumer trials. These methods share a common limitation: they test the product after it has been produced. The investment in formulation, ingredient sourcing, and pilot manufacturing has already been made.

Synthetic research enables concept testing before the liquid exists. A panel of AI-generated personas, calibrated to represent the target demographic for a new flavour, can evaluate the concept, the description, the positioning, and the expected taste profile. "We are developing a sparkling water with yuzu and black pepper. What is your immediate reaction?" is a question that surfaces enthusiasm, confusion, or rejection in minutes. It does not replace a physical taste test, but it does tell you whether the concept is worth developing to the point where a taste test is warranted.

Consider Nitro Pepsi, PepsiCo's nitrogen-infused cola launched in 2022 and discontinued in January 2025. The product borrowed widget technology from Guinness to deliver softer, creamier carbonation. The engineering was impressive. The consumer response was not. Cola drinkers expect aggressive fizz. Soft nitrogen bubbles that work beautifully in a stout felt flat and wrong in a cola. A concept study presenting the Nitro Pepsi proposition to synthetic cola drinkers would have surfaced this mismatch immediately. The fundamental insight, that carbonation expectations differ categorically between beer and cola, required no physical product to discover. It required only asking the question.

Packaging Design Feedback

Packaging research is one of the areas where synthetic panels are most immediately useful, because the stimulus is visual rather than sensory. You can present a packaging design, a label, a colour palette, a can shape, or a shelf placement mockup to a synthetic consumer panel and receive responses that address visibility, brand communication, premium perception, and purchase intent.

The Tropicana bottle redesign of 2024 is the cautionary tale that every beverage brand should have memorised. Tropicana introduced slimmer bottles containing 46 ounces instead of the previous 52 ounces. Consumers noticed the volume reduction instantly. Sales fell 19%. It was Tropicana's second packaging catastrophe in fifteen years, the first having produced a 20% sales drop in 2009 when the company replaced its iconic orange-with-straw imagery with a generic glass of juice. In both cases, a packaging study presenting the old and new designs to loyal Tropicana buyers would have flagged the issue before a single bottle reached the shelf.

For craft and premium beverage brands, packaging research has an additional dimension: differentiation. The craft beer shelf is a visual cacophony. Standing out requires not merely an attractive design but a design that communicates the brand's positioning in two seconds from three feet away. Synthetic research can evaluate whether a proposed design achieves this by presenting it alongside competitor packaging and asking, "Which of these would you pick up first? Why?"

Pricing Elasticity Across Channels

The channel-dependent pricing challenge described earlier makes beverages an ideal candidate for synthetic pricing research. The Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, which asks consumers to identify prices they consider too cheap, a bargain, getting expensive, and too expensive, can be administered to synthetic panels segmented by purchase context: supermarket, convenience store, on-premise, e-commerce.

This produces a pricing map that shows not merely the optimal price point but how that point shifts across channels and occasions. A functional beverage brand might discover that its supermarket price ceiling is £1.60 per can, its convenience price ceiling is £2.20, and its on-premise ceiling is £4.00. These are not theoretical numbers. They are the boundaries within which the brand can price without triggering the "not worth it" response that kills trial and, more importantly, repeat purchase.

For alcoholic beverages, pricing research carries additional complexity because of the relationship between price and perceived quality. In wine, spirits, and craft beer, consumers use price as a quality signal to a degree that is uncommon in most other categories. A synthetic study can test whether a proposed price point communicates "premium" or "overpriced," a distinction that is entirely subjective, entirely contextual, and entirely critical to commercial success.

Brand Positioning and Messaging

The functional beverage category offers a useful illustration of why positioning research matters. The market is crowded with brands claiming to offer gut health, focus, energy, relaxation, or immunity benefits. The messaging often sounds interchangeable. "Powered by prebiotics." "Naturally energising." "Clinically supported ingredients." When every brand is making functionally identical claims, the differentiator becomes tone, personality, and emotional resonance rather than ingredient lists.

Synthetic research can test positioning statements, taglines, and brand narratives with target demographics before committing to a creative direction. "Which of these three brand descriptions makes you most likely to try this product?" is a question that takes moments to answer and produces immediately actionable data. It can also test whether a positioning resonates differently across age groups, income brackets, or consumption occasions, revealing whether a unified message works or whether the brand needs segment-specific communication.

New Product Concept Validation

Perhaps the highest-stakes use case. Launching a new beverage product, whether a line extension, a new brand, or an entry into an adjacent category, represents a significant capital commitment. Ingredient sourcing, formulation, manufacturing setup, packaging production, distributor agreements, and marketing all require investment before a single unit is sold.

Synthetic concept testing allows a brand to screen multiple product ideas simultaneously, evaluating each against a panel of target consumers before any physical development begins. A coffee brand considering a move into ready-to-drink cold brew, a sparkling coffee, and a coffee-flavoured energy drink can test all three concepts in parallel, identifying which generates the strongest purchase intent, which triggers the most concern, and which aligns best with the existing brand.

Suntory, the Japanese beverage conglomerate, is among the notable companies that have adopted synthetic research through Simile (FishDog's enterprise platform). For a company operating across spirits, beer, soft drinks, coffee, and functional beverages in markets as diverse as Japan, the United States, and Europe, the ability to test concepts rapidly across different consumer segments and cultural contexts has obvious strategic value. The traditional alternative, commissioning separate research programmes in each market for each product category, is not merely expensive but slow in a way that is increasingly incompatible with the pace at which beverage markets move.

The Graveyard of Beverages That Should Have Been Tested

The examples cited throughout this article are not isolated incidents. They are representative of a pattern that repeats across the beverage industry with depressing regularity.

Starbucks Oleato, Howard Schultz's olive oil-infused coffee, was conceived after the former CEO visited an Italian olive farm. He was personally convinced it represented the future of coffee. Consumers described the drinks as "too overpowering and heavy." Reports of stomach issues circulated widely. When Brian Niccol replaced Schultz, Oleato was one of the first menu items eliminated. The product was a textbook case of executive conviction overriding consumer desire, an outcome that a concept study among regular Starbucks customers would have predicted with near-certainty.

Bud Light's 2023 marketing crisis, triggered by a single Instagram collaboration with Dylan Mulvaney, demonstrates how little beverage brands sometimes understand about their own consumer base. The backlash cost Bud Light its position as America's best-selling beer, a title it had held for over two decades. Sales fell 26% year-on-year. Parent company AB InBev's US revenues declined by hundreds of millions. A brand perception study among Bud Light's core demographic, which skewed conservative, male, and rural, would have flagged the risk of the partnership before it was executed. The issue was not the collaboration itself but the failure to anticipate how it would be received by the people who actually buy the product.

The hard seltzer collapse of 2022 to 2024 mirrors the plant-based meat trajectory in consumer packaged goods. White Claw and Truly created a category that peaked at $4.4 billion in 2021. By 2023, sales had declined 10%. Dozens of entrants, including established beer brands that had launched their own seltzers, were losing money. The category did not die, but it contracted sharply as the novelty wore off and consumers who had tried hard seltzers returned to their habitual drinks. The question that nobody asked, at the height of the boom, was whether trial consumers would become loyal consumers. Longitudinal synthetic studies, tracking purchase intent over simulated time periods, would have shown the trial-to-loyalty gap that the category eventually demonstrated in real sales data.

Even successful beverage brands make research errors that synthetic testing could prevent. Monster Energy's foray into alcoholic beverages with The Beast Unleashed launched into a market that was already consolidating after the hard seltzer correction. A concept study asking Monster's core audience, young men aged 18 to 34 who consume energy drinks, whether they would buy an alcoholic product from Monster would have provided useful data on brand extension credibility before the considerable investment in brewing partnerships and distribution was committed.

What Synthetic Research Cannot Do for Beverage Brands

It would be dishonest to suggest that synthetic research resolves every challenge in beverage product development. It does not.

It cannot replicate the physical sensation of drinking. No AI persona can tell you whether a cold brew coffee has too much acidity or whether a sparkling water's carbonation level is pleasant. Physical product testing remains essential for any beverage that progresses past the concept stage. Synthetic research screens concepts before development, not products after development. It is a filter, not a substitute.

It cannot predict supply chain disruptions, ingredient cost fluctuations, or regulatory changes. A synthetic study might confirm that consumers love the concept of a CBD-infused sparkling water, but it cannot tell you whether your state will legalise it, whether your ingredient supplier will remain solvent, or whether a contamination event will force a recall.

It cannot fully account for the social dynamics of beverage consumption. Drinks are shared, ordered in rounds, chosen to signal identity, and consumed in contexts where peer influence matters enormously. A synthetic persona can tell you its individual preference. It cannot simulate the moment when someone at a table orders something and three others follow suit.

What it can do, reliably, is identify the concepts that will fail before they consume development resources. It can test whether a name creates the right expectation, whether a price feels fair, whether a brand has permission to enter an adjacent category, and whether a packaging design communicates what it needs to communicate. These are the questions that, when unanswered, produce the failures catalogued above.

The Economics of Getting It Right

The arithmetic is not complicated.

A new beverage product launch, from concept through formulation, packaging design, manufacturing setup, distributor agreements, and initial marketing, typically costs between $500,000 and $5 million depending on the scale of the brand and the ambition of the launch. For a major company like Coca-Cola or PepsiCo, the figure is considerably higher. Coca-Cola Spiced's total investment, including marketing, is estimated to have exceeded $50 million.

A synthetic research programme covering concept testing, packaging evaluation, pricing analysis, and brand positioning research costs a few thousand dollars and delivers results in days. Even an unusually comprehensive programme, testing a dozen concepts across multiple demographics and channels, would struggle to exceed $10,000.

The return on investment calculation is not a comparison of cost to benefit. It is a comparison of cost to cost-avoided. Every concept that synthetic research identifies as likely to fail before development begins represents the full launch cost saved. One prevented failure per year more than justifies a decade of synthetic research spend.

The beverage industry, to its credit, is beginning to recognise this. The adoption of synthetic research by companies like Suntory through Simile suggests that the largest players are moving beyond internal tasting panels and toward scalable, rapid concept testing. Smaller craft and functional beverage brands, for whom a single failed launch can be existential rather than merely expensive, arguably have even more to gain.

The question for the industry is not whether synthetic consumer research works. The evidence from documented failures suggests, persuasively, that it would have prevented many of them. The question is whether beverage brands will adopt it proactively, as part of their standard development process, or continue to learn the same lessons through expensive repetition.

The graveyard of discontinued beverages grows larger every quarter. Most of its occupants were never tested against the people they were meant for. That, more than any failure of formulation or marketing, is the problem that needs solving.