AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The beverage aisle at the grocery store is kind of wild these days. It's filled with seltzers and sodas and energy drinks, all with futuristic fonts and bright colors. So Planet Money's Jeff Guo wondered why. And where are these new drinks even coming from? Here's what he found.
JEFF GUO, BYLINE: There is a laboratory in Louisville, Kentucky, where all along the walls, the shelves are stacked with thousands of these little brown bottles.
TOM GIBSON: We're looking at some different essential oils, some different aroma chemicals that are part of all different kinds of flavors.
GUO: Tom Gibson is the chief flavorist at a company called Flavorman. Behind the scenes, they are the ones secretly designing beverages for a lot of the brands that you may have heard of. And here in Tom's lab, I learned why we're seeing so many weird new flavors these days - you know, like acai, dragonberry, Cosmic Vibe. He told me, 10, 20 years ago, a lot of the aroma chemicals on the shelves here didn't exist on the market. But now, Tom's able to combine these new flavor components in a bunch of interesting ways. For instance, he says, some of the tastiest fruit flavors often contain unexpected notes. He opened one of the bottles for me to smell.
Oh, my God, no.
GIBSON: Come on. That's not that bad.
GUO: This is so bad.
GIBSON: That's only - that's Level 1.
GUO: This is like stinky cheese.
GIBSON: Isn't that nice, though?
GUO: No, it is not nice.
GIBSON: What flavor do you think this might go into that would be fantastic?
GUO: Tom says this aroma I was smelling is a key component in milks and cheeses. Also shows up in sweat and vomit. But also...
GIBSON: You might find it a little bit in, like, say, a ripe berry. When you're eating strawberry in the morning, perhaps you're getting a little bit of that.
GUO: Oh, and so if that weren't there, then the berry flavor might be...
GIBSON: Meh. Yeah, just a...
GUO: Just be flat.
GIBSON: Yeah, just kind of flat.
GUO: Tom says, every year, scientists are discovering new interesting flavor compounds, new building blocks for him to play with. That's thanks to new scientific techniques and new kinds of flavor-analyzing machines. But it's not just a lot of new flavors that we're seeing in the beverage aisle. There are also a lot of new types of beverages now - you know, the protein seltzers, the carbonated teas, those really popular fiber gut-health sodas. Kristen Wemer is the chief technical officer at Flavorman. She is in charge of developing a lot of these new types of beverages. She let us taste one of her recent projects.
KRISTEN WEMER: This one is a really cool one that we just finished. It is a hydration broth, a sports broth.
GUO: What?
WEMER: Right?
GUO: This drink was yellow, like brownish Gatorade yellow. And it was sweet.
It's - I don't know how to describe this.
WEMER: (Laughter).
GUO: It's pineapple-flavored.
WEMER: Yeah.
GUO: You said broth.
WEMER: Tropical. There's beef broth in it.
GUO: No.
WEMER: (Laughter).
GUO: I'm drinking beef broth right now?
WEMER: Yeah.
GUO: Pineapple-flavored beef.
WEMER: It's great that you don't even know.
GUO: The beverage industry keeps inventing new types of beverages because it's trying to invent new reasons for us to buy beverages. And this strategy has worked. Americans are now spending more money on beverages than ever before. As for why all this is happening now, that has to do with how the business of beverages itself has changed. David Dafoe founded Flavorman back in the '90s. He says, back then, it used to be really hard for start-ups to get into the beverage industry.
DAVID DAFOE: In the old days, as I call it, it was dominated by big companies. It was really just Coke and Pepsi for soft drinks.
GUO: There especially weren't a lot of options for getting your drink manufactured. But then, around the 2010s...
DAFOE: All of a sudden, you know, there were all these small breweries popping up all over. All these...
GUO: The microbrewery trend.
DAFOE: The microbreweries, the brewpubs.
GUO: There were thousands of these new craft beer microbreweries, and a lot of them were happy to rent out their bottling or canning lines for small jobs, even more so now that people are drinking less alcohol. So, Dave says, there are now plenty of places, not just microbreweries, who are willing to do a small run for a new drink start-up. So...
DAFOE: The barrier to entry has lowered significantly.
GUO: And when barriers to entry fall, what we consumers get is more variety, more choices. And in this case, some interesting new sodas. Jeff Guo, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAFT PUNK SONG, "INSTANT CRUSH (FT. JULIAN CASABLANCAS)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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