By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

One of the most consequential insights in the history of consumer marketing came from Roberto Goizueta, Coca-Cola's legendary CEO.

Instead of thinking about Coca-Cola's market as soft drinks, Goizueta encouraged the company to think about all the fluids people consumed. Coca-Cola's 1996 annual report calculated its market opportunity using an assumed daily fluid intake of 64 ounces per person. Suddenly, Coke wasn't competing primarily with Pepsi. It was competing with water, coffee, tea, juice and virtually everything else people drank.

That seemingly simple reframing helped change the beverage business. Over time, Coca-Cola and its competitors expanded far beyond traditional carbonated soft drinks into sports drinks, energy drinks, bottled water, coffee, tea, flavored and sparkling waters, mixers and other beverages. Dasani, a still water, for example, was launched in North America in 1999.

But something more significant has happened.

We are no longer simply putting different flavors into those 64 ounces. Increasingly, we are using beverages as delivery systems.

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Australian journalist Jamie Waters, "I Traded Coffee for Energy Drinks—and Nearly Lost My Mind," illustrates the phenomenon. Waters replaced his usual coffee with fashionable energy drinks such as Celsius and Alani Nu. A 12-ounce can of either contains 200 milligrams of caffeine. After drinking two Celsiuses within four hours, he described an almost euphoric energy surge.

For most healthy adults, the FDA cites 400 milligrams of caffeine per day as an amount not generally associated with negative effects, although sensitivity varies considerably among individuals. Too much caffeine can cause increased heart rate, palpitations, insomnia, anxiety, jitters, nausea and headaches.

The interesting question isn't whether caffeine is bad. Millions of people consume it safely every day.

The question is what happens when marketers make biologically active ingredients increasingly easy and appealing to consume.

That question extends well beyond energy drinks.

Consider the explosion of sophisticated nonalcoholic cocktails. Today's mocktail may contain distilled botanicals, concentrated herbal extracts, kombucha, vinegar-based shrubs, sweeteners, flavorings and texturizing agents designed to reproduce the complexity of an alcoholic cocktail.

Individually, many of these ingredients may pose little risk for most people. But "natural" does not mean biologically inactive. Some botanicals can interact with prescription medicines. The National Institutes of Health, for example, identifies documented or potential interactions involving St. John's wort, green tea extract, goldenseal, ginkgo and several other herbs. For many herbs, scientists simply don't have enough evidence to characterize all possible interactions.

Cannabis-containing beverages add another layer of uncertainty. Edible and drinkable THC products behave differently from inhaled cannabis: their effects are delayed, can last longer than expected, and can be easier to overconsume because the consumer may take more before the initial dose takes effect.

Regulation also becomes complicated.

Packaged beverages sold in interstate commerce generally fall under FDA food laws, and substances intentionally added to conventional beverages must satisfy applicable food-additive or generally-recognized-as-safe requirements. Restaurants and bars, however, are primarily overseen by state and local authorities, operating within a regulatory framework in which the FDA Food Code serves largely as a model. Cannabis-derived ingredients create still more regulatory complexity; FDA continues to caution that significant safety questions remain about many cannabis-derived products.

And whatever we combine ourselves at home is, practically speaking, our own experiment.

The larger issue is therefore not carbonation, caffeine, botanicals, artificial sweeteners or THC considered individually. It is the complexity of design.

A cup of black coffee is relatively easy to understand. So is a glass of water. But a brightly packaged "wellness" beverage containing caffeine, multiple botanical extracts, sweeteners, vitamins and other functional ingredients requires considerably more knowledge to evaluate.

We should welcome innovation in beverages. Many of these products may be enjoyable, useful and perfectly safe for most consumers. But beverage innovation has advanced much faster than consumer understanding.

Goizueta taught the beverage industry to see an enormous opportunity in those 64 ounces we consume every day.

Consumers now need to become equally sophisticated about understanding what is being put into them.