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If your company is like most others, you may be feeling a lot of peer pressure lately to hop on the green bandwagon. After all, green is the new black. On a surface level for consumers, it has become a type of status symbol, and for manufacturers it is occasionally just a half-hearted public relations attempt.

After years of focusing on energy and performance, “recovery” may be the new buzzword in the sports and energy segment.  New products are focusing on what happens after exercise rather than during the activity itself. A number of recent sports and energy products have addressed post-activity recovery: Gatorade G Series Pro 03 Recover platform includes a dairy-based Protein Recovery Shake and a Protein Recovery Drink that also has electrolytes and carbohydrates. The company suggests consuming the shake 20 to 50 minutes after activity and then an additional serving 2 hours later.

In the tea category, some of the most unique new innovations are not just offering consumers new flavors, but creating entirely new drinking occasions for tea as well. “Breakfast tea” has been a common tea variety for years, but some tea companies are creating new drinking occasions with products targeted at other specific times of day. Tea Forté Herbal Retreat Teas, for example, are going after the cocktail hour, while the Republic of Tea’s Cuppa Chocolate Teas are designed as dessert drinks.

In recent years the United States soft drink market has seen beverages sweetened with a single sweetener supplanted by those using a multi-sweetener blend. Contrary to most other markets worldwide, the United States has historically been a single sweetener market — products have either been 100 percent sweetened with sugar or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or 100 percent sweetened with a single high potency sweetener, such as aspartame.