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The year in beverages: A look at standout drinks at restaurant chains in 2023

Featuring items from Black Tap, Blank Street Coffee, Blue Bottle Coffee, Chick-fil-A, Clean Juice, Gong Cha, Gregory’s Coffee, Ippudo, Jack in the Box, Krispy Kreme, McAlister’s Deli, McDonald’s, Mellow Mushroom, North Italia, Original ChopShop, PJ’s Coffee, Rock & Brews, Rock N Roll Sushi, Sajj Mediterranean, Salad Station, Shake Shack, Smokey Bones, Starbucks, Taco Bell, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Tim Hortons, and Ziggi’s Coffee

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

December 22, 2023

26 Slides
North Italia

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This past year has seen a great deal of innovation in beverages for a variety of reasons. Getting customers to upgrade from tap water can be a challenging task, but if you succeed it’s an incremental and highly profitable sale.

Also, drinks are, for whatever reason, very popular on social media.

Among young people, what they drink and how they customize it is often a surprisingly important part of their identity, or at least that’s how they present themselves via Instagram, TikTok and other platforms.

There has also been a great deal of beverage activity in the ready-to-drink segment, with more RTD cocktails, energy drinks, new-age sodas often supplemented with vitamins or caffeine and other stimulants, coffee, and tea.

It stands to reason that restaurants would respond to that with upgraded coffee, in-house energy drinks, lemonade with added fruit flavor (or caffeine), tea with increasingly popular boba or other textural elements such as gummy cubes, and cold foam, the aerated and sweetened dairy (or sometimes non-dairy substitutes), that can now be scooped on top of drinks at most major coffeehouse chains.

Read on to see some of the highlights of beverage innovation in the past year, presented in the order they were introduced.

Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@informa.com 

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality.

Hi is responsible for spotting and reporting on F&B trends across the country for both publications. 

He is the co-host of a podcast, Menu Talk with Pat and Bret, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities, and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: bret.thorn@informa.com

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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