Reach vs. Habit: Why PepsiCo Is Beating Coca-Cola With Gen Z

Product & Brand Performance For years, the U.S. beverage story has had a clear pecking order: Coca-Cola out front, PepsiCo a step behind, roughly 20% to 16% of the market. Nearly every industry report tells the same version. But inside ECGO's Gen Z panel, that order flips — and how it flips is the interesting part. It's not really about reach. PepsiCo edges Coca-Cola on distinct users, 20 to 15, which isn't much of a gap. The separation shows up in how often those users come back. PepsiCo users log around nine tracked events each; Coca-Cola's log about three and a half. So this isn't a case of more people trying PepsiCo once. It's the same people reaching for it again and again — and that repeat behavior is what turns a slim reach edge into a big lead in actual volume. You can see it in the mix, too: one sub-category in PepsiCo's lineup just spiked hard enough in a single month to account for most of its entire three-month volume. That's what it looks like when a product stops being an occasional grab and becomes part of someone's routine. Here's why that matters. A headline market-share number can't see any of this. Winning Gen Z's attention and winning their habit are two different games, and right now PepsiCo is winning the harder one. Whether it holds — or whether it's riding one fast-moving sub-category — is exactly the kind of thing you only catch by watching month to month. The full Portfolio Performance table breaks down every tracked brand on both reach and frequency, sub-category by sub-category. That's where the rest of this picture lives.