Why is carbonated water double the price of soda?!
Why is carbonated water double the price of soda?
So if corn syrup soda is at the top of the unhealthy list of beverages (not including alcohol), and diet soda is only a little less worse...
...what about carbonated water?
No sugar, no corn syrup, no chemical sweeteners... but then people claim that the CO2 alone in soda does horrible things to your teeth and esophagus. Why wouldn't the CO2 in carbonated water have the same negative effect?
And why is it that carbonated water costs 82 cents a bottle, while soda costs 41 cents a bottle? Isn't soda carbonated water, PLUS all the gooey ingredients that give it color, flavor, blah blah blah? Shouldn't that make plain carbonated water cheaper?
Do soda companies artificially add CO2 to regular water or something? Or do the soda compaines simply sell so much product that they can afford to charge less?
Answers:
Insane isn't it?!
The simple answer is volume.
They simply do not sell anywhere near as much club soda or sparkling water as coke or Pepsi or sprite.
The actual value of the ingredients in many of the food items we buy is pennies on the dollar. This is true of both Carbonated water and Colas both. The vast majority of the price goes for packaging, transportation, labor, inventory, overhead, etc... etc...
On the plus side for Carbonated water is that is has fewer and cheaper ingredients: Water and CO2. It also has low or no advertising cost.
On the negative side is that it is almost never on sale. I don't think there is more than a few weeks a year that Coke or Pepsi is not on sale somewhere - often for as much as 50% off the "regular" price. Cola type sodas are subject to huge price wars and are routinely used as "loss leaders" - ie. intentional money losers by markets that use them to draw customers away from their competition.
Carbonated water also has poorer turnover on the shelf thereby necessitating the retailer to demand a higher per unit return. It also gets distributed and stocked in smaller batches resulting in way higher per unit labor cost.
Furthermore plain carbonated water being such a generic product makes it difficult to establish branding.
i love soda.
simply put, supply and demand. there is more demand for soda so they can have a lower price and get better profits