What you need to know

The non-alcoholic drink sector experienced stable but moderate growth in 2020. The robust product innovation from freshly made drinks sets up a high standard for consumption experience and challenges packaged products. Blurring will be an important innovation direction to please consumers’ spoiled taste and drive the non-alcoholic drink market’s growth. Diversified consumption purposes also mean brands could leap out from traditional categories and develop blurred solutions to serve consumers’ diversified demand.

Covered in this Report

This Report provides an overview of the various non-alcoholic beverage categories and the crossover sub-segments within the market as they relate to cross-category beverages (hybrid drinks) or fusion drinks. The Report does not focus on brands or specific product categories; rather, it delves into the mindset and attitudes of non-alcoholic beverage consumers and the impact cross-category beverages have on consumer preferences and purchases. This Report will focus mainly on packaged products, though products from on-premise may be used as examples. Non-alcoholic drinks include juice, CSD, tea, dairy drinks, coffee, plant-based drinks, etc.

Market sizing of the non-alcoholic drinks sector includes juice, carbonated soft drinks, coffee (fresh coffee – ground/roasted coffee and beans, coffee capsules and coffee pods; instant coffee and ready-to-drink coffee), sports drinks, energy drinks, plant protein drinks, ready-to-drink tea, tea and infusions, bottled water and other soft beverages. Though included in the consumer research and discussed in the consumer sections, milk and yogurt are not covered in the sizing.

Definition

For the purpose of this Report, Mintel has defined those consuming non-alcoholic drinks ‘once a day or more’ as daily drinkers, and those more than ‘once a week’ as frequent drinkers.

Mintel divides consumers into three groups based on their Monthly Personal Income.

High personal income is defined as MPI above RMB10,000 in tier one cities, or above RMB9,000 in tier two cities or below;

Middle personal income is defined as MPI of RMB6,000-10,000 in tier one cities, or RMB5,000-9,000 in tier two cities or below;

Low personal income is defined as MPI below RMB6,000 in tier one cities, or below RMB5,000 in tier two cities or below.

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