Slice has a new flavor on grocery store shelves, and it tastes like a tropical getaway. The revived soda brand just added Pineapple to its lineup. It’s a bright, crisp flavor crafted from a blend of prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics, with 35 calories and 5 grams of sugar. It arrives in a drinks aisle that looks nothing like it did a few years ago. Gut-health soda has gone from a niche bet to one of the most crowded corners of the cooler, and the new arrivals keep coming.
Better-for-you soda sells the same satisfying fizz as classic pop while promising a little help for digestion, and shoppers have bought in fast. The category has more than doubled to roughly $440 million, still a sliver of total soda sales but a corner growing far quicker than the rest of the aisle. Slice steps into that demand with a name many shoppers already know, pairing nostalgia with a functional formula. Its Pineapple can carries the brand’s signature carbonation, which the company calls the highest in the healthy-soda category, alongside the gut-friendly cultures now standard across the segment.
A throwback brand bets on gut health
Slice trades on a name plenty of shoppers recall from decades back, now reworked for buyers who read the label before they sip. The brand sits under wellness-drink maker Suja, and its cans pair familiar flavors like Cherry Cola, Grape and Orange with the prebiotic, probiotic and postbiotic cultures meant to support gut health. Each can holds 40 calories or less and 5 grams of sugar or less, with no high-fructose corn syrup. Pineapple, the newest, plays up a tropical note while keeping that better-for-you build, and the line is billed as non-GMO Project Verified, gluten-free and vegan.
The startups that built the category
Poppi did as much as anyone to move gut-health soda from a health-store novelty to a mainstream grab, leaning on apple cider vinegar, prebiotics and just 5 grams of sugar per can. The brand spread to 14 flavors and leaned hard into splashy marketing, including back-to-back Super Bowl ads that pushed it in front of record audiences and helped lift sales past $500 million. That growth caught the eye of a giant: PepsiCo agreed to buy the brand for close to $2 billion, a deal that showed how seriously the soda establishment now takes the segment.
Olipop arrived with a different pitch, packing in more prebiotic fiber per can than most rivals and lacing its sodas with botanicals chosen for the gut. It built a steady run of triple-digit growth and a devoted following, and a recent funding round valued it near $2 billion. Its founder has cast the arrival of the big players as proof the modern-soda idea has gone fully mainstream, not as a threat to the brands that opened the category in the first place.
Big soda muscles in
Coca-Cola answered with Simply Pop, a fruit-forward line built on real juice, 6 grams of prebiotic fiber and no added sugar, rolling out in flavors like strawberry and pineapple mango. Backed by the world’s biggest soda machine, the launch handed the category instant mass-market reach and signaled that the largest names read the demand as lasting rather than a passing craze. With both PepsiCo and Coca-Cola now committed, the gut-health aisle has the muscle to keep widening well beyond its early niche.
Where the fizz goes next
The momentum is hard to miss. Soda carrying digestive-health claims has posted dollar growth of about 300% in a single year, the kind of jump that pulls in both scrappy upstarts and century-old soda houses at once. For shoppers, that translates to more options on the shelf and more room given over to cans that promise function next to flavor, a stretch of cooler that barely existed a short time ago.
What started as a wellness-store experiment now anchors a fast-filling category, and the next wave is already forming around sodas that promise more than digestion. As legacy brands like Slice line up beside the startups and the giants, the question is less whether gut-health soda lasts and more how far the functional-drink idea spreads across the rest of the cooler.
Jennifer Allen is a retired professional chef and long-time writer. Her work appears in dozens of publications, including MSN, Yahoo, The Washington Post and The Seattle Times. These days, she’s busy in the kitchen developing recipes and traveling the world, and you can find all her best creations at Cook What You Love.