My BevNET NYC 2026 Recap
BevNET Live came back to the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York on June 10-11, and I spent two days walking the floor with a press badge, sampling products, and talking to founders. The biggest takeaway wasn’t about any one brand. It was a question the beverage industry seems to be answering differently than the plant-based food industry: does taste still matter most?
The functionality bet
Walk the floor at BevNET and you’ll see it immediately. Almost every brand is leading with what their product does, not how it tastes. Mood support. Cognitive enhancement. Gut health. Adaptogens, nootropics, lion’s mane, L-theanine, collagen, creatine. The functional beverage category is projected to grow at roughly 8.5% CAGR through 2033, according to Grand View Research, and this year’s BevNET floor reflected that trajectory. Brands are building products around specific, measurable outcomes: energy without the crash, focus for a four-hour work block, relaxation that replaces the evening glass of wine.
Taste Radio’s recap of the event confirmed what I was seeing in real time. The conversation at BevNET Live NYC 2026 kept circling back to protein, creatine, collagen, and ingestible beauty as core category drivers.
Here’s the thing, though. A lot of these drinks didn’t taste great. At least not to me.
I sampled a range of products over the two days, and the pattern was consistent: strong functional positioning, solid branding, mediocre flavor. Part of this is personal. I don’t consume stevia, monk fruit, or allulose, and those three sweeteners are now standard across the functional beverage category. They’re cheaper than sugar, they carry a “no sugar added” label, and they let brands market health claims without the caloric tradeoff. But they come with trade-offs of their own. Stevia still triggers a chemical aftertaste for a lot of people, and monk fruit needs to be blended with a bulking agent to taste anything like actual sweetness. These are known issues in the industry, yet brand after brand at BevNET is building on the same sweetener foundations.
The taste contradiction
This gets interesting when you compare it to what we hear constantly in the plant-based food space. For years, the drumbeat in plant-based meat has been that taste is the single most important factor for consumer adoption. A 2026 focus group study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems explored how consumers assess plant-based meat innovation, noting that the products’ ability to mimic the taste and texture of conventional meat remains central to how consumers evaluate them—even as concerns about processing and price also weigh heavily. A December 2025 Food Navigator article quoted Louis Bedwell, industry and engagement director at the Future Food Movement, saying the market was likely to stay flat into 2026 given a clear price gap and uneven eating quality, unless products improved on value and taste.
So plant-based food founders are told that nothing else matters until the product tastes right. And then you walk a beverage trade show and see an entire industry betting that function will carry the sale even when flavor falls short. Both can’t be right. Or maybe they can, but it means something different is happening in beverages.
What might explain the gap
A few things. First, consumption frequency. A functional drink is often a one-and-done daily ritual. You take your morning focus drink the way you’d take a supplement. The bar for “enjoyable enough to finish” is lower than “enjoyable enough to choose over a steak.” Second, the alternative sweetener issue may be masking the real problem. It’s possible that many of these products would taste significantly better with sugar, and that the industry has made a collective bet that consumers care more about the “no sugar” claim than the actual taste experience. Third, beverages allow for easier format innovation. Shots, effervescent tabs, powder mixes. When the format is small or fast, taste matters less because you’re not savoring it.
But I think the biggest explanation is that the beverage industry right now believes functionality is the purchase trigger, and taste is a nice-to-have. That’s the inverse of plant-based meat’s operating assumption.
The animal ingredient creep
One more thing worth noting. While most beverages at BevNET were plant-based by default, there’s a growing number of companies adding animal-derived functional ingredients. Collagen and whey are showing up in products that would otherwise be entirely plant-based. This tracks with broader industry data: the collagen market hit roughly $5.5 billion in 2026, according to Future Market Insights, and collagen was cited as the standout functional ingredient of the year by Bakery & Snacks, with nearly 20% of surveyed registered dietitian nutritionists naming it their top trending ingredient for 2026.
For founders building plant-based beverage companies, this is worth watching. The functional ingredient arms race is pulling some brands toward animal-derived inputs because collagen and whey have built-in consumer recognition and established efficacy narratives. Plant-based alternatives to collagen exist but haven’t achieved the same mainstream adoption or brand recognition.
The lunch, though
On a lighter note, BevNET Live was one of the few trade conferences I’ve attended with genuinely good vegan options at lunch. For anyone who’s suffered through trade show catering where the plant-based option is a sad side salad, this was a welcome surprise. More conferences should take note.
What I’m taking from this
The beverage industry is running a live experiment on whether functionality can override taste as the primary purchase driver. As someone who spends most of my time in the plant-based business world, where taste parity is treated as existential, that’s a fascinating divergence to watch. The answer probably isn’t that one industry is right and the other is wrong. It’s more likely that the categories have different consumer relationships, and what drives repeat purchase in a $4 daily ritual drink is not the same as what drives it for a $7 pack of plant-based burgers.
For founders in the VEGPRENEUR community who are building beverage brands or considering it, the BevNET floor made a few things clear: functionality is table stakes, alternative sweeteners are the industry default (for better or worse), and animal-derived functional ingredients are gaining ground even in categories that were plant-based by default. Plan accordingly.
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