GlobalData – a market research agency founded in 2016, combining several smaller such firms, and headquartered in London – has released a report titled Energy and Sports Nutrition Market – Overview, Consumer Behavior and Market Trends. According to this report, the pandemic depressed the near totality of the market for non-alcoholic beverages, with only one category, energy drinks, proving resilient in both volume or sales. In GlobalData’s scheme “energy drinks” (which are caffeinated, for example like Red Bull and Monster Energy) make up the largest of three segments in the same category, the others being “sports drinks” (with sweeteners and electrolytes, as in Gatorade) and “enhanced water” (with vitamins and minerals, as in Vitaminwater and certain varieties of Aquafina).
The agency expects all categories to grow over the next few years but projects that energy drinks will pull ahead and make up more than half of the market. By 2025, energy drinks could be moving somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 billion liters for a total turnover of $100 billion. By comparison, sports drinks and enhanced water, respectively, should be at around 40 billion and 10 billion liters for $12 billion and $5 billion.
Asia and North America are clearly the top markets for sports beverages in general, but they differ both in terms of consumption profiles and operations. Asia favors energy drinks, North America sports drinks. According to GlobalData, North America’s “volume sales will be sluggish while sales in terms of value will thrive until 2025, indicating that premiumization is trending in the category.” Enhanced water, meanwhile, “will grow strongly in Asia in the coming years, particularly in value sales.”
Besides Red Bull and Monster, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Clif Bar & Company, Monster Energy, Nestlé and Kellogg are among the producers covered in the report.
