Soft Drinks Report 2006

Related tags Soft drinks Alcoholic beverage

What are soft drinks for? It sounds like a daft question, but if you haven't thought too deeply about the role that soft drinks play at your pub you...

What are soft drinks for? It sounds like a daft question, but if you haven't thought too deeply about the role that soft drinks play at your pub you could be missing a profitable trick.

Traditionally, the soft drinks shelf was an ancillary service rather than fully a part of a pub's profit stream. You sold a tonic to go in a gin, a dash of lime to top a lager, an orange juice to the driver, a glass of lemonade for the kid sitting on the front step. You even gave away the soda water, the customers squirting it into their whisky themselves, from a syphon on the bar.

Of course, you take your soft drinks much more seriously these days. But are you taking them as seriously as your customers do?

The UK has seen a steady growth in soft drinks sales over decades now, of course. Latest figures show the overall value of the market up five per cent in the year, a healthy increase, although the volume increase is a more modest two per cent.

It is the qualitative changes that lie behind this quantitative measure that should be of most interest to licensees, though. People are not only drinking more, they are drinking better, in several respects.

What are soft drinks for? Are they merely there to dilute a spirit and give a customer who doesn't want alcohol something to hold and sip while they watch their mates enjoying themselves? That's no longer how consumers see them.

Over those decades of growth, soft drinks have become a postive choice in their own right, not just a distress purchase. Check out your local supermarket, or even corner shop, and you'll see that people have a massive choice of flavours, textures even. You can no longer argue that soft drinks are primarily about refreshment. People are looking for a particular experience.

Is this what you give them at your pub? Obviously you can't offer a supermarket range, but can it be right that more than half the soft drinks sold in pubs are cola?

And if you're selling someone a cola are they being served a proper drink or are they looking across at someone's foaming pint of sparkling ale and feeling just a little cheated?

There has been a lot of talk lately about consumer demand for "functional" drinks. But perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of functional drinking rather than cordoning off a separate group of products that might give you more energy or bring health benefits.

Perhaps giving pleasure is a function, and in that soft drinks are no different to alcoholic drinks. If you have got to the point where you're happy that the beer you serve offers people a broad choice, is properly chilled, in the right glass and a full pint, now you can start doing the same for your softs.

Inside Soft Drinks Report 2006