Why Certain Beverage Flavors Find the Limelight

Analyzing beverage flavor trends these days is like reading a good mystery novel: You never quite know what new twists you’re going to see next, or what impact these twists will have on the rest of the plot—in this case, the shaping of future development and marketing of beverages.

Take, for instance, some of the recent line extensions appearing in the United States. From PepsiCo, we saw two new versions of Mountain Dew—grape-flavored, dark-colored Pitch Black, and orange-flavored LiveWire—as wel…