Drinks are a good place to be in right now: Fruit juice and dairy products are rising 18% a year in consumption, much faster than the 15% for the beverage industry overall, according to figures from the SoftDrinkIndustry Association (Asrim).
Consider that soft-drink makers today enjoy some of the highest operating profit margins in the food industry, even though some have reduced their calorie footprint (the average calories sold per capita) by a quarter over the last decade.
Mr. KELLY BROWNELL (Director, Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Yale University): Both the dairy and the softdrink industries are notorious for giving investigators money to do studies that typically find things favorable to the industry.
The promise of "energy" has been a big seller in the beverage industry in recent years, with the energy drink market increasing 17 percent in 2011 even as broader softdrink consumption has continued to decline, according to Beverage Digest.