Nearly every beverage brand faces some challenges when reaching out to consumers. For many, educating consumers can be essential to success, especially as craft trends continue to rise. Recently, Tequila Herradura took on the challenge and embarked on its Casa Herradura tour, which brought the Tequila Herradura hacienda to several cities across the country.

Whether it's relaxing at home, dining out at a restaurant or celebrating with friends and family, American consumers are enjoying wine in a wider variety of occasions. A recent report titled “The 2015 Gallo Consumer Wine Trends Survey,” commissioned by Modesto-Calif.-based E. & J. Gallo Winery, found that 85 percent of frequent wine drinkers now consider wine as an appropriate beverage for casual and formal settings alike. One-thousand frequent wine drinkers between the ages of 21 and 64 were surveyed as a follow-up to the 2014 survey of the same name, which aims to capture the current state of American wine-drinking attitudes and behaviors, the company says. 

Many of America's largest food and beverage (F&B) companies are in trouble, Rabobank, New York, says in its new report, "Dude, where's my consumer?" Iconic brands are increasingly out of favor with U.S. consumers, whose preferences and priorities have evolved, Rabobank says. Rabobank analysts predict that unless large F&B brands take bold action, they run the risk of following baby boomers (once their core consumer) into retirement.

With gas prices down 31 percent since June 2014 and oil prices were around $85 a barrel, American Consumer Confidence has improved, going up 12 percentage points year over year, New York-based Nielsen reports.

Consumer confidence hit a high in the third quarter of 2014 after zigzagging in previous quarters this year, according to the latest Information Resources Inc. (IRI) MarketPulse survey.