北京便利店老板跟我说 甜水和碳酸饮料卖不动了

This article shares the latest consumption shifts in China’s current beverage market, helping ordinary consumers understand industry trends and choose drinks that better fit their needs.

1. The core trend of China’s current beverage consumption is healthification. Sugary drinks and carbonated sodas are losing market traction, while sugar-free, no-addition teas such as Nongfu Spring’s Oriental Leaf have seen explosive sales growth. This shift is mainly driven by Generation X (born in the 1980s), once the core consumer group for sugary drinks, who are now entering middle age, have growing health awareness, and developed health anxiety from abnormal health check-up results, creating demand for low-burden beverages.

2. Ordinary consumers should develop the habit of checking the ingredient label first when buying drinks, and avoid falling for brands’ concept marketing. Many brands now mislead consumers with false claims such as "zero addition," and only products with clean ingredients are worth purchasing.

3. It is more reliable to choose brands that deliver honest products. These brands do not cut corners or secretly add sugar, so consumers can drink with peace of mind while meeting their health needs.

A clear new trend of health-oriented consumption has emerged in China’s beverage industry, offering important insights for brands to adjust product strategies and guide R&D and marketing efforts.

1. Consumption trend: Consumer health awareness has risen comprehensively. Demand for sugary drinks continues to decline, while demand for sugar-free, no-addition beverages with clean ingredients is growing rapidly. The trend also shows clear geographic characteristics: cities with stricter public smoking bans see higher sales of sugar-free beverages. The core driver is the 1980s-born core consumer cohort entering middle age, where health anxiety is pushing demand upgrading.

2. Product R&D direction: Consumers now actively check ingredient labels and have extremely low tolerance for brand deception. One brand scandal will be permanently archived online by consumers, making recovery extremely difficult. Therefore, brands must launch products with authentic, clean ingredients and cannot rely on misleading concepts to attract consumers.

3. Case reference: Nongfu Spring spent seven years cultivating the Oriental Leaf brand, and the product is now the company’s largest star single product. Long-term investment in honest product development has finally paid off in the market, while the sugar-containing categories of traditional sugary beverage brands continue to see shrinking market share.

This article sorts out the latest consumption shifts in the beverage category, delivering clear opportunity alerts and risk warnings for offline convenience stores and offline retail sellers that can be directly used to adjust operating strategies.

1. Demand shift: Demand for sugary drinks and carbonated sodas continues to decline, while sugar-free, no-addition teas are growing extremely fast. In top-tier convenience stores in first-tier cities, Oriental Leaf is restocked far more frequently than Coca-Cola, and has taken up an increasing share of freezer display space. Sellers can adjust their display structure to allocate more shelf space to sugar-free beverages with clean ingredients.

2. Risk warning: Do not reserve too much inventory or display space for traditional sugary drinks that rely on misleading concepts and have messy ingredients. These products will continue to decline in demand, easily leading to inventory waste and hurting operating profits.

3. Opportunity alert: Sugar-free beverages that meet health demands and have clean ingredients will be the core growth category over the next few years. Adjusting category structure early will allow sellers to capture the dividend of this round of consumption upgrading and boost overall store revenue.

The new beverage consumption trend revealed in this article points to new product directions and business opportunities for beverage manufacturers, offering important reference for factories to adjust production strategies and lay out new tracks.

1. Shifts in product manufacturing and design demand: Consumers no longer favor high-sugar beverages; instead, they prefer sugar-free teas with no unnecessary additives and simple, clean ingredients that require fully transparent ingredient labels. Therefore, manufacturers need to adjust their formulas and upgrade toward sugar-free, no-addition formulations, and should no longer produce products that secretly add extra sugar and rely on packaging concepts.

2. Business opportunities: The market share of traditional sugary drinks is being freed up rapidly, creating growth space for new factories and new brands. As long as a factory can produce high-quality sugar-free beverages with clean ingredients, it can capture market share without relying too heavily on heavy marketing spending.

3. Development insight: Consumers now value brand and product integrity more than ever. Factories should shift their focus to raw material quality control, just as Oriental Leaf conducts multiple rounds of strict testing when sourcing raw materials. This commitment to quality will eventually translate into consumer trust and drive long-term repeat purchases.

This article sorts out the logic of the ongoing consumption transformation in China’s beverage industry, providing clear industry direction for various service providers serving the beverage sector to help them identify client pain points and launch tailored solutions.

1. Industry development trend: The entire beverage industry is going through a sugar-free revolution and an ingredient label revolution. The core of this shift is the awakening of consumer health awareness and near-zero tolerance for dishonest brands. The old business model of profiting from information asymmetry can no longer sustain, and the entire industry is shifting toward honest operation.

2. Client pain points: The core pain point for brands now is how to adapt to new consumer demands and rebuild consumer trust. The traditional growth model that relies on heavy marketing spending and channel expansion is delivering increasingly poor results, as consumers now value the product itself and ingredient transparency far more.

3. Solution direction: Service providers can leverage brands’ demand to offer sugar-free formulation upgrading services, while helping brands communicate their advantages in raw material quality control and ingredient transparency to consumers, helping brands build user trust and adapt to the new competitive landscape.

The new beverage consumption trend mentioned in this article offers important guiding significance for offline retail platforms and e-commerce platforms to adjust investment attraction strategies and optimize operation management, helping platforms capture growth opportunities and avoid operational risks.

1. Demand shift: Consumer demand for sugar-free beverages with clean ingredients is surging, while demand for traditional sugary drinks continues to decline. Platforms need to adjust their merchant recruitment and category planning in a timely manner, step up efforts to attract sugar-free, no-addition beverage brands, and allocate more traffic support and display resources to these high-quality products.

2. Operation management adjustment: Platforms can guide offline stores and online sellers that have entered the platform to adjust product display positions, placing high-growth sugar-free beverages in more prominent locations to align with consumer shopping habits, boost overall category turnover, and increase the platform’s total revenue.

3. Risk mitigation: Platforms should reduce resource support for brands that rely on concept marketing and falsify ingredients. These brands are prone to trust scandals that can hurt the platform’s overall reputation. Platforms should prioritize onboarding brands that deliver honest, high-quality products to avoid reputational risks.

Based on field research at offline convenience stores, this article outlines the latest trends in China’s new consumption sector, providing a wealth of first-hand reference information worthy of research and summary for scholars in the new consumption field.

1. New industry trends: China’s beverage industry is undergoing two revolutions: the sugar-free revolution and the ingredient label revolution. The core driver is that the 1980s-born generation, the core consumer group of the first generation of sugary drinks, is entering middle age, and health anxiety has driven demand changes. At the same time, the popularity of social media allows consumers to permanently preserve records of brand scandals, which has reshaped the relationship between brands and consumers.

2. New industry problems: The old business model for Chinese consumer brands, which relied on information asymmetry, concept marketing and channel monopoly to generate profits, is no longer viable. Consumers have extremely low tolerance for brand deception—one scandal will get a brand permanently remembered by the public. Brand trust has replaced marketing and channels to become the core competitive advantage for brands.

3. Direction of new business models: The competitive logic for consumer brands has changed. Brands that make long-term investments in product quality and adhere to honest operation will eventually win market rewards. The case of Nongfu Spring, which spent seven years cultivating Oriental Leaf that is now its largest single product, validates this new competitive logic and is worthy of in-depth research.