Consumers read sugar content on labels now in a way they never used to bother with, and even the biggest cola makers have responded by pushing zero sugar and low sugar variants harder than before.
For most of the last few decades, a cold drink in India meant one of two names, both foreign, both fizzy, both selling refreshment through the same glossy campaigns. That was simply what a cold drink was. Ask a shopkeeper in a small town what he stocked, and the answer barely changes from one state to the next. That uniformity is cracking now, for reasons that have less to do with fizz and considerably more to do with identity.
Start with the obvious part, the one every beverage company can already see in its own sales numbers. Consumers read sugar content on labels now in a way they never used to bother with, and even the biggest cola makers have responded by pushing zero sugar and low sugar variants harder than before. That alone says something important: sugar, carbonation, and a familiar logo no longer hold a shopper’s loyalty on their own. Health consciousness did not kill the fizzy drink. It just raised the bar for what earns a place in someone’s fridge.
The more interesting change, though, is cultural rather than nutritional. Flavours that used to live entirely at a roadside cart, or in someone’s grandmother’s kitchen, jeera, shikanji, nimbu pani, kachcha aam, imli, are turning up bottled and branded on the very shelf that global names once had entirely to themselves. These are not new flavours invented to chase a trend. They are old, familiar tastes finally getting the packaging and distribution that used to be reserved for imported brands. The flavour did not change. What changed is that it is now allowed to be the main product, not a regional footnote.
This shift shows up hardest exactly where you would expect, the smaller towns and growing cities where a global cola was once the aspirational choice almost by default, the drink that signalled you had arrived somewhere modern. That instinct has not gone away. It has widened. A bottled version of a drink your family already made at home now carries its own kind of pride, not despite being local, but because it is. Choosing something distinctly Indian has stopped feeling like settling and started feeling like a statement.
Retail and distribution have caught up enough to make this possible at real scale, and that matters more than it sounds. A regional flavour used to stay regional mostly because getting it onto a shelf outside its home state needed infrastructure only a handful of large companies had spent decades building. Modern retail chains and quick commerce have shortened that distance a great deal, letting a genuinely local flavour reach a national audience without anything close to the scale a legacy multinational once needed just to compete.
Marketing has moved alongside all of this too. Campaigns built around nostalgia, regional language, and family memory are now regularly outperforming the generic, aspirational, celebrity led advertising that used to define this category for so long. People do not just want a drink that tastes familiar. They want to feel like the brand actually understands where that familiarity comes from, instead of borrowing it for a season and moving on to the next campaign.
Even the biggest, most established players in the space have started responding in kind, leaning into retro branding, regional positioning, and homegrown identity instead of treating global scale as the only asset worth marketing. That is a fairly clear signal of where the market has decided to go. When the largest incumbents start copying the smaller, culturally rooted challengers rather than the other way round, the shift has stopped being a passing trend. It has become the new baseline.
None of this means the global cola is disappearing from India’s fridges anytime soon. It just means it no longer stands there by itself. What used to sit quietly at home, in a steel glass, made from memory rather than a recipe card, has finally made its way onto the same shelf, and, more and more, into the same shopping basket too.
The article is co-founder and chief operating officer of Lahori Zeera
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First Published onJuly 20, 2026, 09:08:19 IST
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