Parent companies Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo also rely less on cola today than they did in the 1980s, especially PepsiCo, which runs a massive snacks division. Today, about half of PepsiCo’s U.S. revenue comes from its Frito-Lay and Quaker foods businesses.
“Do we still have the cola wars? At the store level, where the merchandisers and bottlers are fighting it out, it’s trench warfare,” said Duane Stanford, editor and publisher of the beverage industry trade brand Beverage Digest, in an interview. “The cola wars are very much alive in the convenience stores and the grocery store aisles. When you raise up the ladder though, the cola wars are definitely less significant.”
“The cola wars still exist but there tends to be fewer, bigger battles. They are not fighting every month, rather, just around big consumption events,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director, Strategic Growth Partners.
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One former beverage industry executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested that “the only people who care about cola wars is the media. Consumers don’t care—they’d rather they come together and learn to use less plastic and less water. Retailers want the companies to build the category, not steal share from each other in a declining category, and so the cola wars are an antiquated concept. It was about seizing upside of a growing category. That is not the case anymore.”
But there are still billions of dollars of cola sales up for grabs—not to mention massive opportunities for ad agencies and ad sellers that still rely on the category for significant revenue.
Below, a closer look at how the cola wars have evolved, including changing innovation, media and marketing priorities:
The latest on the Cola Wars
The U.S. cola category generated $48 billion in sales in 2023, according to Beverage Digest’s all-channel data, which includes retail, fountain/foodservice and vending. Coke trademark brands (Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Coke Zero Sugar and others) controlled 69% of the segment while Pepsi (Pepsi-Cola, Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Zero Sugar) captured 27%. Cola accounted for half of the $96 billion that U.S. consumers spent on all soft drinks in 2023, Beverage Digest figures show.
Over the last decades, a barrage of beverage options—many guided by Coke or Pepsi—have knocked colas out of occasions they once had to themselves. There was a time when athletes drank colas, before the morning was conquered by Starbucks, and before the mid-afternoon pick-me-up belonged to energy drinks. The health and wellness megatrend helped to effect these changes while reflecting quite poorly on sugary colas.
These factors have left Coke and Pepsi struggling to maintain their domestic cola sales base, while reaching for new consumers through flavor, formulation and packaging innovations, or attention-getting brand collabs such as Pepsi x Peeps. Their parent companies are each managing revenue through pricing and package architecture, and looking for sales growth around the globe.