Two policy stories landed at once, and together they capture a strange moment for the category. In the UK, the advocacy group Club Soda criticized the latest Budget for retaining full VAT on alcohol-free drinks even as it delivered duty relief and new access measures to pubs selling alcohol. Meanwhile in New Zealand, supermarkets have begun requiring ID for 0 percent beer under voluntary retailer policies, despite there being no legal age restriction on a drink with no alcohol in it.
The common thread is that alcohol-free drinks keep inheriting the rules written for alcohol. One is taxed at the full rate while the thing it replaces gets relief; the other is carded like a vice while containing none of the substance that makes carding make sense. In both cases the product is being treated as if it were alcohol, right up until the moment anyone checks what is actually in the glass.
The Cr(af)ted Take
This is the awkward adolescence of a category that has grown faster than the systems around it. Tax codes and retail policies are blunt instruments built for a world where a drink either was or was not alcohol, and alcohol-free sits in a seam those rules never anticipated. The result is friction that makes the better choice slightly more expensive or slightly more annoying than it should be, which is exactly backwards from what policy should want.
It also marks a kind of progress, oddly enough. Nobody writes rules about a category too small to notice, and the fact that budgets and supermarket chains now have to take a position on alcohol-free means it has arrived. The work ahead is getting the rules to catch up to the glass: tax a drink with no alcohol like the soft drink it is, and let an adult buy a zero-proof beer without proving their age for the privilege of drinking nothing.
Original reporting: Club Soda →