Coca-Cola Dives into Prebiotic Soda With Cohesive Designs For Their Three Flagship Flavors

Prebiotic sodas have been tremendously popular over the last few years. It seems like every new soda brand is of the gut-friendly variety, save for the recently launched protein-packed Proda, and Ben Stiller’s eponymous beverage brand.

So it was only a matter of time before Big Soda sat up and took notice. Sure enough, PepsiCo recently acquired one of the category’s early hits, Poppi, for $1.9 billion, and released a prebiotic version of its own cola. Unsurprisingly, Coca-Cola has now also entered the gut-friendly pop arena. Instead of buying an existing prebiotic pop darling, Coke opted to make prebiotic versions of three flagship flavors: Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Fresca.

Coke enlisted Analogue Creative to design the visual identity for these new prebiotic soda versions, with the brief to communicate familiarity with new benefits. 

“The product concept and formula were already established, with a clear takeaway: the taste you love, with the fiber you want,” says Mike Johns, creative director at Analogue Creative. “Our challenge was to communicate the new benefits while making the product feel fresh and exciting, without suggesting the familiar taste had changed.”

Their approach to fitting Coca-Cola into the popular prebiotic space combined elements of the category’s established visual language, with the brand’s highly recognizable look. The studio created a series of geometric illustrations, clear icons, and playful paths.

The Coca-Cola flavor can features an illustration of a tilted, curved glass with a striped straw. Meanwhile, the Sprite design showcases lime and lemon slices, and the Fresca can similarly centers a grapefruit illustration. “Prebiotic” is stamped front and center across the waist of each can, as the “taste you love” tagline hugs the edge of each graphic, with a 6g fiber callout sitting diagonally across it. Starbursts subtly dot the label as well, further distinguishing the prebiotic sodas from their regular counterparts.

“We introduced a clean, contemporary typeface to give the prebiotic sub-brand its own identity while complementing the master brands,” Jones says. “The real focus was developing a distinctive and playful illustration style that could work across Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fresca, retaining each brand’s personality while creating a cohesive new range.”

Brett Kellett, design director at Analogue Creative, adds that the biggest challenge of the project was creating a design architecture and illustration style that worked across the three distinct brands. 

The illustration style was key to overcoming that, and the brand world was built around it. This was Kellett’s favorite part of his team’s execution. “The clean, refreshing illustrations bring familiar flavors to life in a contemporary way, while benefit-led icons communicate the product’s functional side,” he says. “We then used a simple blue palette across the key art to bring everything together in an airy, uplifting world that felt fresh and ownable.”

The geometric illustrations certainly echo other brands in the prebiotic space, most notably rival PepsiCo’s Poppi. However, the hierarchy balances Coca-Cola’s brand language enough to signal that the sodas are probiotic, while still feeling distinctly Coke, Sprite, and Fresca.

Coca-Cola’s prebiotic play comes as the Poppi acquisition has underperformed, PepsiCo recently revealed to investors. PepsiCo estimated performance-based Poppi payments at around $12 million in a securities filing earlier this month, a significant drop from the $117 million reported in June and the $278 million it forecasted in December. Does this indicate an overall slump in the North American soda business? A bursting of the prebiotic soda bubble?  

Only time will tell, but as long as Poppi’s dipping sales are isolated, Coca-Cola’s entry into the category might just be a winning strategy.