The Bull Case for Non-Alcoholic Beverages

Welcome back to Social Experiment, a newsletter about sobriety from a cultural lens brought to you by Edge Health.

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We’ve just hopped off our Group Coaching Call tonight with our August course where I interviewed our special guest, Elizabeth Gascoigne from Absence of Proof.

Fired up to address one of the most frequently asked questions — What’s the business behind the non-alcoholic beverage space and why should I care?

We’re going to give a high-level overview on what’s happening with this market opportunity expected to reach $30B by 2025.

Comparatively, the alcohol market is $250B in the US alone.

• 1 in 5 US adults plan to participate in Dry January

• 52% of US adults report they’re trying to drink less

• 30% of US adults don’t drink at all

• 58% of consumers who drink No-and-Low ABV options switch off between them and alcoholic drinks at the same time

According to this report by Listen Ventures, the low ABV/non-alcoholic (NA) market is projected to grow 10x faster than the alcohol industry. The non-alcoholic industry is projected to grow 31% over the next 2 years.

We’ve seen a massive shift with industry leaders supporting the non-alcoholic movement, from Gary Vaynerchuk to Marc Andreessen.

One way to contextualize what’s happening with sobriety losing its stigma is how we’ve opened up the conversation around depression/mental health over the past decade. We’re hitting an inflection point — it’s become mainstream.

Big Alcohol is taking note. AB InBev announced it wants its portfolio to be 20% non-alcoholic by 2025. There will be continued interest in M&A in this space over the next decade.

For an interesting perspective check out this article from Digital Native by Rex Woodbury, Partner at Index Ventures.

Woodbury discusses the Seven Heavenly Virtues that make great consumer investments, and categorizes NA beverages/solutions solving for sobriety under Temperance.

Here’s another useful article from Joe Vennare of Fitt Insider who leads Fitt Capital.

Decision makers close to the CPG/beverage space, like Julia Bainbridge, have been anticipating this shift over the past decade.

From Drizly’s consumer insights report to Nielsen’s analysis, you can’t ignore consumer demand in this category. It’s become too big to ignore. 

To continue diving deeper, I highly recommend reading this issue and this issue of SnaxShot. Andrea Hernandez has built a reputation around accurately predicting trends in the CPG space, and it’s no surprise her first newsletter issue was about NA spirits.

Also, I highly recommend subscribing to High Spirits by Dry Atlas (brought to you by the stellar founding team behind Spirited Away).

According to Ruby Warrington, who coined the term Sober Curious — “[sobriety] is the next logical step in the wellness revolution.”

We couldn’t agree more.

See you next week