Diet Mountain Dew, Brisk tea, Starbucks beverages cross billion dollar sales marks

By Leon Stafford

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The PepsiCo family has added three drinks to its billion dollar sales club.

The beverage and food giant said Thursday that Diet Mountain Dew, Brisk tea and the Starbucks ready-to-drink beverages it distributes now have annual sales of more than $1 billion annually. The milestone brings the number of billion-dollar brands at PepsiCo, which includes food products such as Cheetos and Lay's potato chips, to 22.

The Purchase, N.Y., company -- the main rival to Atlanta-based Coca-Cola -- said it has has doubled the size of its billion-dollar brand portfolio since 2000, adding five new billion-dollar brands over the past five years.

“Our ability to accelerate the growth of our billion-dollar brand portfolio with Diet Mountain Dew, Brisk and Starbucks reflects the success of our product marketing and innovation initiatives, the strength of our joint venture partnerships and the power of our distribution systems," the company's Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer Indra K. Nooyi said in a release announcing the numbers.

Diet Mountain Dew, which the company introduced in 1988, is the eighth carbonated soft drink in its line up to reach annual billion-dollar sales status.

Brisk, which the company sells under a partnership with Unilever's Lipton Tea, has seen volume growth of about 30 percent over the past three years in the United States.

Drinks in the PepsiCo and Starbucks billion-dollar category include Doubleshot Energy+Coffee and bottled Frappuccino. The two companies partnered in the ready-to-drink coffee business in 1994. Starbucks dominates ready-to-drink coffees with about 90 percent of sales.