Built out of somebody's posts

Listen to this episode of The Daily Trend Report, then use the piece below.

Coca-Cola is putting fiber in Fresca. Six grams of prebiotic fiber, in Coke Zero Sugar, Sprite Zero Sugar and Fresca, in a pilot that starts at the end of October in parts of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Food Dive broke it on Wednesday. The company's North America marketing president, Shakir Monin, gave the quote you'd expect: "For us, innovation starts with the consumer."

I read it differently. The independents spent five years teaching shoppers what a prebiotic is, and the biggest soda company on earth waited until the class was over, then stirred a powder into three cans it already had.

That's fine. That's what giants do. The useful part for a small beverage brand is somewhere else, and it showed up in a different story the same day.

Both giants are in now

Coca-Cola already had a toe in this with Simply Pop, under its juice brand, early last year. PepsiCo bought Poppi for nearly $2 billion and put out a prebiotic version of Pepsi last summer. So the category that started as a couple of founders with a fiber thesis now has both soda companies standing in it.

On Thursday Food Dive ran a sit-down with Olipop's new CEO, Christian Patiño Webb, who ran Electrolit for four years and took over in August. He told them roughly one new better-for-you soda competitor enters the market every week. He wants the category to go from about 5 percent of soda sales to 10, 15, maybe 20. And he pointed at the number on the can: Olipop carries up to 9 grams of prebiotic fiber, Poppi carries 2.

Line those up. Olipop up to 9. Coke's pilot at 6. Poppi at 2. The independent has the better number. The giants have trucks, cold boxes, trade spend and every gas station between Dallas and El Paso.

A better number only works if somebody hears about it, and nobody reads the back of a can standing at the cooler. They read it at home, later, after they've already asked somebody which one is worth buying.

Who they're asking

More and more, they're asking a machine. SE Ranking ran 100,000 keywords through Google and ChatGPT and counted where the answers came from. Social Media Today carried the study on October 7. Social platform links showed up in 67.66 percent of Google's AI Overviews, 32.39 percent of AI Mode answers and 8.4 percent of ChatGPT answers. YouTube was the most commonly cited source in AI Overviews. Reddit and LinkedIn led for ChatGPT.

One more number from that study, and it's the one I'd tape to the monitor. In AI Mode, social sources showed up in 48.58 percent of answers to non-branded questions and 39.34 percent of answers to branded ones. The category question pulls more social than the brand question does. "Which prebiotic soda has the most fiber" is a category question.

So when somebody types that at eleven at night, the answer gets assembled out of somebody's posts. For most small beverage brands right now, those posts belong to somebody else.

Coke can buy the cooler door. It can't buy the sentence the machine writes when your customer asks a plain question. And look at what a giant posts: somebody on a dock holding a can at golden hour, nobody talking. There's nothing in that for a machine to quote. A forty-second video of a founder answering one plain question, with the number said out loud, is exactly what those answers are built from.

Say your number, never theirs

The reflex when a giant walks in is the side-by-side: your can next to theirs, the grams in big type. Don't. Comparisons draw lawyers, and they keep the whole conversation on the other company's can. Say what's in yours and let the shopper do the math. Shoppers are good at math when nobody's yelling at them.

The work is boring, which is why it's open. Write down the questions people ask about your category (not your brand, the category). What does prebiotic even mean. How much fiber should a soda have. Why does this one taste like root beer. Is the fiber in a diet soda the same as the fiber in mine. Each one becomes one short video. The question is the title, word for word, the way a tired person types it. The answer starts in the first sentence. Your number gets said out loud and typed in the caption, because the machine reads text; it can't read your lighting.

Put them on YouTube first, since that's the social source Google quoted most in the study. Cut the same file down for wherever else you post. And keep the title ugly if the search is ugly.

The timing is on your side for once. The pilot covers three states. When it rolls wider, a lot of people will wonder out loud whether the fiber in their Fresca counts, and every answer you've posted before then is already sitting there when they go looking.

What to ship today

One, the post. Paste it, swap the brackets, run it on LinkedIn and Instagram with the video below:

People keep asking us how much fiber a soda should have. Ours has [X] grams of prebiotic fiber per can, and here's why we landed on that number: [ONE SENTENCE ON THE RECIPE DECISION]. We didn't add it this year. It's been in the can since [YEAR]. Got a question about what's in it? Ask in the comments and we'll answer the good ones on camera.

Two, the still. One can, label turned so the nutrition panel faces the lens, on the actual bench or desk where you make decisions, in daylight from a window. Leave the clutter. Shoot it straight on at eye level with a phone so the fiber line is sharp enough to read. No props from a stock shoot, no competitor anywhere in frame, and the number goes in the caption too, typed out.

Three, the video, twenty-five seconds, vertical, five shots. Shot one, three seconds: you to camera, saying the question exactly as a customer types it, "How much fiber should a soda have?" Shot two, six seconds: you answer with your number in the first sentence, can in hand. Shot three, six seconds: close on the panel, finger on the fiber line, room noise left in. Shot four, six seconds: the ingredient or the batch, whatever puts the fiber there, in your hands. Shot five, four seconds: back to you, "Ask us the next one." Upload it to YouTube with the question as the title, caption the number, and post it the day you shoot it.

Before the pilot spreads

Tonight, type your category's most common question into Google and look at whose posts the AI answer is quoting. That's the competition worth worrying about this quarter, more than the cooler door. Then film the first answer tomorrow, and the next one the week after. If you built this category, you're better at plain sentences than the company that just showed up; go put yours where the machine can find them.

This piece extends this morning's show, where Chloe Dawn, Rachel Donovan and I went through it alongside Threads handing out Gems and a tequila brand paying for your ride home. The show is the briefing, the article is the build, and the post is what you ship. Subscribe to The Daily Trend Report on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and it's waiting before you open the laptop.

I build answer libraries like this for food and beverage brands: the question list, the short videos, the stills, the posting rhythm that keeps it going. If a giant just walked into your aisle, message me on LinkedIn.