In the world of convenience-store dispensed beverages, entice customers to break the rules.
This advice comes from consultant Rachel Toner, owner of Chalfont, Pennsylvania-based Taste Strategy, at CSP’s 2025 Dispensed Beverages Forum in Lombard, Illinois. In the talk Making Sense of Dispensed: Delivering Multi-Sensory Engagement with Dispensed Beverages, Toner discussed beverage customization and the dirty soda trend, which involves mixing a carbonated beverage with creamers, syrups and more.
“We’re seeing so much innovation in this space, and the combination of carbonated soft drinks with other things to create unique products,” Toner said. “We’re talking about adding protein to dispensed beverages and other things. This is the height of fitness and things that are trending. People are literally going into convenience stores and QSRs (quick-service restaurants), getting a product and adding a protein shake to it.”
She added, “There’s this element of curiosity, of experience, of rule breaking that is just so liberating and deeply human. People are seeking this out because it’s fun and they’re breaking the rules.”
One element to this trend Toner said she finds so interesting is that food and beverage brands are “leaning into this and driving innovation by finding out what invisible rules we collectively have made.”
Wide Variety
Dirty sodas run the gamut, including a viral jalapeno pickle Diet Coke beverage.
“Who would have thought that somebody would actually do that?” Toner asked. “It’s amazing, and people are sharing these experiences. We're sort of backing away from when consumers would really rely on, like, what we call celebrity chefs or people of influence to tell us what we can and can’t do with dispensed beverage.”
Elsewhere, Coffeemate has a single-serve creamer, Dirty Soda Coconut Lime, for consumers to use in creating their own dirty soda.
“What a cool opportunity, especially for a smaller retailer,” she added.
Chick-fil-A, meanwhile sells ice cream beverages using their soft serve and combining it with a carbonated beverage, Toner said. “What’s the difference between a dirty soda and something like a float? It’s very similar, right? It’s just that that the dairy is frozen.”
Some are combining soda and tea. “Did anybody follow this trend? Adding tea bags to a package beverage and just letting it steep,” Toner said. “This is cool, right?”
Fresh Juice
One QSR is making a beverage with fresh juice.
“They’re posting it on social media for people to see,” Toner said. “Maybe somebody could make this at home, but they’re probably not going to.”
The QSR is putting together trending flavors to create new beverages that highlight the freshness and these flavors. What’s even more interesting, she said, “is that it’s made in-house. So, the QSR is signaling ‘fresh’.”
Even though it might be challenging to do something like this in a convenience format, there are other ways a c-store could get around that work with their suppliers. “There’s new technology you can use to deliver a high-quality fresh product,” she said.
At tea-based brand HTeaO, Fort Worth, Texas, they’re offering fresh fruit inclusions to their freshly brewed tea.
“From a sensory perspective, you can eat the fruit, which is really cool,” Toner said. Some of this fresh fruit is free with a purchase, while some is an extra charge, she said.
‘They’re going across all categories, buying products and mixing them together to create new things.’
“This could be a really interesting opportunity, especially if many of you offer fresh produce or fresh-cut fruit in your cold case or your grab-and-go,” she said.
Ultimately, Toner said, “Consumers don’t care about how we define categories, and they also don’t understand the way that we’ve classified them.”
“What they want is to make what they want,” she continued. “We talked about this individuality, this wanting to customize and create. They want to go to the cold space and they want to get a protein shake, and then they want to go to made-to-order and get an espresso and then they would go to dispensed to get a Diet Coke and add that all together. People are literally doing this. They’re going across all categories, buying products and mixing them together to create new things.”
Regarding this behavior, Toner asked if retailers are setting up their stores and consumers for success “the way we’ve built them and the way we’re thinking about them to drive innovation and to allow them to explore in the way they want to explore?”
Want to learn more about foodservice? Register for CSP’s Foodservice Forum in June here.
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