Get more exercise. Learn Spanish. Start budgeting. Depending on the source, our custom of making New Year’s resolutions is somewhere between 300 and 3,000 years old. Which means the habit of not sticking with them is likely just as old. But an increasingly popular one is skipping alcohol for a month – or longer. And the global drinks industry is serving up options.
Dry January isn’t exactly new. Some Brits claim they invented it in 2013, but it’s not hard to find folks who’ve been at it longer (this writer, for one). What’s more recent is the growing consumer demand, year-round, for non-alcoholic or low alcohol drinks. Global market research firm Nielsen IQ (NIQ) defines non-alcoholic beverages as “all products that mimic traditional beer, wine, and spirits production processes and flavour profiles”.
Canadians (and plenty of others) are buying
For the one-year period ending June 15, 2024, non-alcoholic, off premise beverage sales (so not in a bar or restaurant) in Canada rose 24%, up from a 17% bump posted 12 months before.1 At the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), Canada’s biggest booze retailer, non-alcoholic sales jumped 73% in the 12 months ending November 2024, and the category has rung up growth of 189% since 2022. 2
Nationally, beer is by far the biggest non-alcoholic seller (76%), followed by wine and then spirits. But the hottest product last year was ready-to-drink (RTD) mocktails. Sales of them popped 168% for the 12 months to June 30, 2024. 3 Right on trend, Vancouver’s Mocktails, which bills itself as the city’s “premier alcohol free liquor store” opened in March, 2024. There’s no lack of choice. Its web site lists 96 RTD products, 90 wines and 69 beers.
Beer is also the biggest seller globally, with the global non-alcoholic beer market estimated at USD$20.2 billion in 2023. 4 Name any iconic brand and there’s probably a non-alcoholic option: Guiness, Budweiser, Molson (Coors), Heineken, Corona, Labatt, Stella, Carlsberg, Peroni, Becks, Modelo – to name a few – and the growth trends are compelling. Industry heavyweight Heineken reported that sales of its zero alcohol beer grew 14% in the first half of 2024 while the brewer’s overall sales inched up 2.1%. 5
Younger consumers are driving the trend
According to Alcohol Change UK, a charity that seeks to reduce alcohol harm, 15.5 million people in the UK are participating in Dry January this year, up from 4,000 in 2013. 6 Pub operators report more customers are alternating between alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages in one sitting. And an adjacent category, low-alcohol beer (3.5% or less), got a significant boost when the British government overhauled its alcohol taxation policies a few years ago. Brewers now pay a government levy on low-alcohol products less than half the rate for beer that’s above 3.5%. As a result, brewers have expanded their low or non-alcohol product offerings and reformulated some existing ones to below 3.5%. Consumers put their money down, doubling the sales volume of low-alcohol beer in the UK from 2022 to 2023. The biggest buyers of low and no alcohol beverages in the UK are aged 18-24, according to industry research, with 44% of that demographic surveyed in 2023 saying they were either occasional or regular drinkers of alcohol alternatives, compared to 31% in 2022. 7
In the US, sales volumes of non-alcoholic beverages increased 29% in 2023 from 2022, with beer ringing up 81% of the total. Non-alcoholic wine volumes rose 18%, with the smaller spirits and RTD segments jumping 32% and 36% respectively.8 Rising demand in the US is being driven by younger people, similar to Canada and the UK, with American millennials representing 45% of no-alcohol buyers in 2023. This was down from 51% in 2022 largely due to more Gen Z consumers, which rose from 11% in 2022 to 17% in 2023. Gen Z in the US, UK, Canada and Australia are also more active in a growing segment the beverage industry calls “substituters”, those “cross purchasing” or swapping out alcoholic for non-alcoholic drinks on certain occasions or alternating in one sitting.
Shifting attitudes on alcohol
What’s behind these trends? Health. In Canada, NIQ reports that 33% of consumers who report drinking less alcohol than a year ago say they’re doing so “to be healthier”. Global research giant Gallup has surveyed US consumer attitudes towards alcohol ten times since 2001. In July 2024, 45% of Americans said drinking 1-2 alcoholic drinks per day “is bad for one’s health”, the highest level yet and up from 26% in 2016. But it’s the 18-34 age group (again) really driving that: in 2016, 31% of them said it was bad for one’s health but by 2024, 65% said so.9 And recent announcements by government health officials in the US and Canada agree, stating that there are correlations between alcohol consumption and higher risks for developing certain cancers. A sobering thought, but we have a lot more options now to choose from.
Sources: