In the US, 'better-for-you' soda has gone from a wellness niche to a multi-billion-dollar supermarket fixture. Olipop and its sister brand Poppi created the category almost from nothing, and legacy giants are still racing to catch up. Now that same pitch – a soda with a health story built in – is landing on UK shelves, led by homegrown challenger Aapa.
The obvious assumption: the brand that built the category from scratch must have cracked the pack design problem long ago, and the new UK entrant has to play catch-up. We ran both brands' latest packs – Olipop's new Pomegranate Sparkle flavour and Aapa's Tropical can – through Dragonfly AI's Attention testing to see whether that holds up.
It doesn't, quite. Both packs have real strengths. Both also have a specific, fixable problem – and for a category built entirely on a health claim, one of those problems matters more than the other.
On Clarity – how focused or scattered attention is across the pack – both brands beat the packaging benchmark (76.87%). Aapa actually edges ahead, scoring 87% against Olipop's 82%, putting the UK newcomer in the top quartile of all packaging Dragonfly AI has tested.
But the higher score doesn't tell the whole story. Aapa's 'TROPICAL' flavour callout registers as a secondary hotspot in its own right, at 72% – close enough to compete with the brand name itself for the first glance. Two smaller hotspots at the base of the can, likely triggered by the metallic rim and water-droplet texture, add further peripheral noise.
Olipop's clarity score is lower, but its hotspot structure is tidier. A single dominant hotspot, scoring 100%, successfully fuses the brand name and the yeti character illustration into one combined focal point – exactly the kind of consolidation Byron Sharp's work on distinctive brand assets recommends. The only competing elements are minor: a tagline (9%) and a decorative sparkle flourish (7%).
In other words: Aapa wins on the headline number, but Olipop wins on discipline. A flavour word fighting the brand mark for attention is a bigger long-term risk to distinctiveness than a faint tagline nobody was going to read anyway.
Digestibility – whether attention is actually reaching the information that matters – is where the two packs diverge sharply. Aapa scores a perfect 100%, comfortably topping the packaging benchmark (77.35%). Olipop sits just below it, at 74%.
On the surface, that looks like a clear win for Aapa. The region-level breakdown says otherwise.
Aapa's logo processes almost perfectly, at 100%. Everything else on the can trails a long way behind: the 'Tropical' variant name at 62%, the 'Tastes Naughty. Isn't' brand narrative at 47%, and – most significantly – the health claim strip at just 32%. For a drink whose entire reason for existing is its functional, better-for-you positioning, that claim is the worst-performing element on the entire pack.
Olipop's problem is different but related. Its yeti mascot absorbs almost all of the available attention, scoring 100%, while even the logo (72%) and the 'Pomegranate Sparkle' variant name (64%) underperform. Brand narrative (9%), the promotional callout (14%) and the size marque (7%) are all unlikely to register at all during a typical shelf glance.
Two lessons sit underneath both results.
The first is that a single headline score is only the starting point. A 100% digestibility score sounds like a pack has nothing left to fix. Aapa's region-level data shows that isn't true – it has simply concentrated all of its strength in one place, the logo, while the claim that justifies the entire product is barely being processed.
The second is specific to categories built on a functional promise. When the whole pitch of a product is a health or gut-health claim, that claim can't be left to ride on the coattails of a strong brand mark or a distinctive character. It needs to be tested and protected as its own area of interest, the same way a logo or a mascot would be.
Olipop proved a category could be built around a distinctive character and a confident brand name. Aapa's UK debut proves that lesson has landed. What neither pack has yet solved is making sure shoppers actually absorb the one piece of information that explains why the drink is on the shelf in the first place.
This is exactly the kind of risk that's invisible from a design file and obvious from Attention data – which area of a pack is winning the glance, and which is losing it, before a single can goes to print. As more brands chase the next big shelf trend, that distinction is becoming the difference between a launch that gets noticed and one that just adds to the noise.