Southern Glazer's, the largest US wine and spirits distributor, published the first edition of Raise the Bar, a twice-yearly report, and named moderation one of five growth opportunities it is telling accounts to build against. The figures: non-alcoholic spirits hold 0.3 percent of total spirits dollars but 8 percent of non-alcoholic bev-alc, and gained more share than any other part of that segment, up 2.6 points against 2024 on a 54 percent three-year compound growth rate. Non-alcoholic spirits, wine, and beer together cleared one billion dollars, approaching 1 percent of bev-alc dollars. Notably, Southern Glazer's own account data puts a mocktail section on just 9 percent of the accounts that already run a spirits cocktail menu.
That last number is the opportunity hiding inside a sales document. A distributor report is a sales tool before it is a research paper, and Southern Glazer's reps carry it into retail and on-premise reviews. There is a related signal from the other end of the market: at the Barclays consumer conference, Molson Coors said it is not chasing fifteen non-alcoholic brands because it cannot outspend the specialists everywhere, and will instead pick a few segments of scale. A major conceding most of the category is room for native brands to be the scaled player.
The Cr(af)ted Take
The quiet milestone here is who is doing the talking. For years, an alcohol-free brand had to walk into every buyer meeting and argue the category from zero, armed with its own velocity deck and a lot of conviction. Now the largest distributor in the country walks in first, with its own numbers, and tells the account that moderation is one of five things worth building against. The shelf conversation this fall runs better on Southern Glazer's figures than on anything a single brand could bring.
And the 9 percent is the tell. If only nine of every hundred accounts with a cocktail menu run a mocktail section, the near-term growth is not some distant behavior change; it is the ninety-one accounts that already have the bar, the staff, and the demand and simply have not built the menu yet. That is a distribution and menu-design gap, not a demand gap, which is the most fixable kind. For anyone making or serving alcohol-free drinks, this is the most encouraging shape a market can take.
Original reporting: BevNET →