The Ever-Expanding Product Line

I certainly understand that corporations need to broaden their appeal and diversify their products. The whole name of the game in corporate business is growth and expansion, and the fact that they can realistically expand only so far has nothing to do with their expectation that this quarter's bottom line should exceed last quarter's. So you get brand names expanding into products that don't initially make obvious sense. If you stumble over a new product from an old brand that does make sense, you wonder why no one had ever thought of it earlier.

As we approach the Christmas season, your grocer's dairy section has started to bring out its selection of egg nogs. I've got a long history of preparing homemade egg nog (a tradition started while spending Christmas as an exchange student in Japan where, for all their love of raw egg products, I couldn't find it for sale). My egg nog routinely gets the nod from self-proclaimed egg-nog haters, so I can be somewhat picky about store-bought nogs. But making egg nog is extremely time consuming and labor intensive, so I'm not entirely averse to picking up store-bought nogs if pressed.

Passing the dairy case the other day, I noticed a new Southern Comfort brand egg nog. But, of course! Why hasn't Southern Comfort jumped into the egg nog market sooner? Well, perhaps there's a reason. The new Southern Comfort egg nog is nonalcoholic. That's right, there's no Southern Comfort--or, in fact, any other kind of whiskey--in Southern Comfort egg nog. Someone please tell me what, exactly, is the point of that. Why would I ever want to buy a Southern Comfort product that didn't have whiskey in it? Maybe distilleries just aren't good at coming up with extended product lines. I know you can get nonalcoholic Jack Daniels barbecue sauce, and I've seen some distillery (I'm not sure which, but Jack Daniels, Southern Comfort, and Jim Beam are all possibilities) selling charcoal briquettes. What other non-whiskey products do these companies produce?