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Although more than half of consumers have purchased milk, juice and/or carbonated soft drinks in the past 30 days, sales were stagnant during 2014-2015 with top categories struggling to grab consumer attention, according to Chicago-based Mintel’s June 2016 “Beverage Packaging Trends” report.

There’s an idiom that talks about listening to one’s gut as a way to ward off something that doesn’t feel right. After the brain, the gastrointestinal tract, or gut, is the nervous system’s second-biggest network of closely interconnected neurons that greatly impacts overall health and well-being, experts say.

Despite an atmosphere in which many carbonated soft drinks have struggled to maintain sales, Cheerwine, a brand of Salisbury, N.C.-based Carolina Beverage Corp., has experienced continual growth, both in sales and distribution.

In celebration of their good fortune, the milkman Tevye and the butcher Lazar Wolf famously sing “To life, to life, l’chaim” while drinking shots of schnapps to their “good health and happiness” in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Carbonated soft drinks (CSDs) have long been the top seller in the U.S. beverage market based on volume. Last month, however, New York-based Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC) announced that U.S. volume sales of bottled water eclipsed CSDs in 2016, making it the No. 1 consumed packaged beverage. This shift followed more than a decade’s worth of single-digit volume declines for soft drinks.

Regardless of whether consumers are drinking beer, wine or spirits when dining out, suggested food pairings and recommendations from influencers, like bartenders and wait staff, can motivate consumers to try something new or trade up to a more premium product.

In the mid-1990s, when the craft beer movement still was in relative infancy, Stone Brewing co-founders Greg Koch and his homebrewing partner Steve Wagner were busy experimenting with beer recipes and bemoaning the “industrial fizzy yellow stuff.”

Although it has been available in the U.S. beverage market for about 15 years, kombucha has gained broad consumer appeal within the past several years, according to New York-based Beverage Marketing Corporation’s (BMC) September 2016 report titled “U.S. Ready-To-Drink Tea through 2020.” As health and wellness has progressed from a niche interest to mass consumer appeal, this beverage segment has reaped the benefits.

When Austin Allan traveled to Madrid to study abroad in 2001, he did not know that the upbeat people, culture and lively, rich flavors of Spain that he “fell in love with” would result in a new livelihood: Tio Gazpacho.