How Chewable Beverages Could Make a Comeback ... and Be the Future

The 90s were a decade for grunge music and inventive beverages. The Orbitz was a soft drink described rather unappetizingly as "a lava lamp you could drink" and featured floating sugary chunks of tapioca in a more disgusting precursor to the Boba tea craze. While this concept of floating chunks of something in a drink is still dated, there is some precedent for experimentation in this area.

One Indian chef a few years ago, for example, went viral with her recipe for Masala Coke -- a  drink that balanced the sweetness of Coke "enhanced with cumin, sulfurous black salt, lime juice, and fresh cilantro and mint." Smoothies or Sangria are both drink styles that are often served to be chewed while drunk as well. Along the way, there have also been questionable entrepreneurial efforts in the space, like Chuice, which was a bottled drink that "combines juice, salad, and granola into a single shot of drinkable-yet-chewable sustenance." Trust me when I tell you that a photo of this product is not a pretty sight.

A futuristic effort in the chewable drinks category was a startup called Oohowater that made an edible water bubble using brown seaweed extract and calcium chloride to produce edible water pods that could reduce plastic bottle use. Sadly, that idea didn't quite work, so they pivoted to making disappearing packaging and rebranded to become Notpla. So, it seems the promise of chewable beverages is still out there waiting for someone to own the category and it has potential. It's pretty clear that anyone who can create an edible version of Masala Coke would be pretty popular.