The debate over whether adaptogenic beverages would stick around is over. The question facing ingredient buyers now is whether the supply chain behind them can hold up.
A Circana analysis found that beverage categories built on prebiotic fiber, botanical blends, adaptogens, added vitamins and low-sugar formulations have been outpacing traditional diet soda by double-digit annual growth, according to FoodNavigator. Millennials and Gen Z are doing most of the swapping, trading sweetened cola for cans that promise gut health or a calmer nervous system. Circana’s own research on the category, titled “Modern Soda’s Moment,” describes these drinks carving out new occasions around gut-health routines and low-calorie indulgence, pulling shoppers toward kombucha, sparkling water and plant-based alternatives, according to Circana.
The Beverage Aisle Bet
The scale of capital moving into this space is no longer subtle. PepsiCo completed its $1.95 billion acquisition of Poppi in May 2025 to buy its way into functional share, according to FoodNavigator. Coca-Cola answered in February 2025 with Simply Pop, a prebiotic soda line under its Simply juice brand carrying 6 grams of prebiotic fiber and added vitamins. Olipop, still independent, was valued at $1.85 billion in a $50 million funding round that same February. Poppi, meanwhile, settled a class action over its prebiotic health claims for $8.9 million that May, a reminder that claims substantiation is following the money into this category just as fast as the money itself.
Circana expects more of the same: acquisitions and strategic partnerships rather than organic build-out, as multinationals decide it is faster to buy functional credibility than manufacture it. That has direct consequences for ingredient suppliers, because it means demand growth is arriving in large, contractually locked-in volumes rather than gradual upticks a supply chain can plan around.
The Ashwagandha Math
Ashwagandha is the bellwether botanical for this shift, and the numbers explain why. The global market approached $815 million in 2025 and is projected to more than double to roughly $1.79 billion by 2035, an 8.2% compound annual growth rate, according to Forward Fooding. Dietary supplements remain the largest segment, but food and beverage use is growing at an estimated 15.6% CAGR, nearly double the category’s overall pace and by far its fastest-expanding format. The sourcing side of that curve, including India’s April 2026 root-only mandate, is covered in a separate Superfood Times report.
Ready-to-drink beverages and social tonics have become the dominant delivery mechanism for adaptogens broadly. Forward Fooding puts RTD formats at roughly 43% of adaptogen-containing products, with ashwagandha alone carrying about a 35% share within that segment. Two brand case studies make the trend concrete: TRIP reached $100 million in revenue in 2025 and turned profitable while scaling to global distribution, and Grüns, which paired daily greens with adaptogen gummies, hit $300 million in annual recurring revenue in under two years before Unilever acquired it for $1.2 billion in April 2026.
Other adaptogens are riding the same current, if at smaller scale. Reishi, lion’s mane, rhodiola and ginseng are all showing up in the same RTD formats that made ashwagandha ubiquitous, benefiting from a beverage aisle that now expects a functional claim on the can.
A Sourcing Base Under Strain
Here is the part beverage marketers rarely mention on the label. Ashwagandha cultivation remains heavily concentrated in a handful of Indian growing regions, chiefly Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, which means the category’s entire supply is exposed to one geography’s weather, export policy and harvest quality in any given year. Forward Fooding’s reporting notes that as demand has outpaced high-quality supply, reports of adulteration and inconsistent extract quality have increased, while traceability systems downstream remain thin.
The scale of that dependency is not small. India exported roughly $689 million worth of ayurvedic and herbal products in its 2024-25 fiscal year, with the United States, Germany and Italy as the leading buyers, according to trade-data coverage from ExportImportData. A single-origin supply chain of that size, feeding a demand curve growing at double-digit rates in food and beverage alone, is precisely the setup that produces shortages, price spikes and quality shortcuts when a harvest goes wrong.
Europe’s Regulatory Patchwork
Regulation is compounding that pressure, and it is landing unevenly enough to complicate sourcing strategy for any brand selling on both sides of the Atlantic. Denmark has banned ashwagandha in food supplements since April 2023, the first EU member state to do so, and France added the herb to its list of plants banned in supplements in 2025, according to a regulatory overview from RegASK. The Netherlands proposed its own ban through an amendment to its commodities law, citing liver-damage and abortifacient concerns, with a public consultation that closed in March 2025, according to Food Safety Magazine. A final decision remained pending as of Forward Fooding’s April reporting.
Poland took a different approach, capping products at 3 grams per day of root powder and 10 milligrams of withanolides daily rather than banning the ingredient outright. The European Food Safety Authority has its own review pending as well, one that could eventually apply across all 27 member states, according to Forward Fooding.
The United States, by contrast, still permits ashwagandha freely as a dietary supplement ingredient under DSHEA, with no federal restriction on the books. That gap means U.S. beverage brands are operating under a materially lighter compliance bar than their European counterparts, even when both are sourcing from the same Indian suppliers and the same growing regions.
Certification as the New Differentiator
Against that backdrop, certification has become one of the few reliable signals buyers have for managing quality risk. KSM-66, the ashwagandha extract from Ixoreal Biomed, is now used by more than 4,500 brands globally, according to Forward Fooding’s estimate. Trade press coverage from SupplySide Supplement Journal has described it as the first USDA Organic-certified ashwagandha ingredient, produced through a “green chemistry” extraction process, and it has already been formulated into beverages, chocolate, granola and orange juice.
That positions organic certification and standardized extract documentation less as a marketing add-on and more as table stakes for any supplier trying to sell into the RTD channel at scale. Brands under pressure from class-action risk over health claims, as Poppi discovered last year, have every incentive to demand the same documentation from their ashwagandha suppliers that they already demand from their fiber and prebiotic vendors.
The Bottom Line for Buyers
Adaptogen demand in beverages is not a trend sourcing teams can wait out. It reflects a structural relocation of botanical volume from capsules to cans, and the brands and suppliers that win the next cycle will be the ones who can document standardized withanolide levels, root-only sourcing, organic or third-party certification, and traceability back to specific growing regions in Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan.
Buyers who cannot answer those questions today are the ones most exposed to the next European restriction, or the next adulteration scandal out of a growing region the entire category still depends on for the bulk of its raw material. Adaptogens beyond ashwagandha, from reishi to rhodiola, will face the same reckoning as their own beverage volumes scale. The category has proven it can grow. The open question is whether it can grow clean.