Why Beer Is Becoming Less And Less Popular
Beer is not as popular as it once way. Canned cocktails like White Claw are now taking center stage.
This article is more than 2 years old
For many, drinking a cold beer is synonymous with summer. Opening up a cooler to reveal lovely, chilled beers is a feeling Americans long for during those arduous winter months. But like all trends, different products start to gain traction while others fall by the wayside. Canned cocktails and hard seltzers have been getting more popular throughout the last couple of years, slowing down the beer industry’s overall sales.
Different beverage brands are exploring canned cocktail options, seeing as more consumers are opting for gluten-free alcoholic drinks. New flavors of hard seltzers are being stocked on shelves this summer, increasing their accessibility and general intrigue amongst new consumers. Hard seltzers like Whte Claw have come a long way from distributing standard flavors like lime or grapefruit.
Vice president of innovation for Molson Coors, Jamie Wideman, expects canned cocktail sales to explode due to the mask mandate removals. “Last year, people had one foot outside and one foot inside,” noting the precariousness of the CDC protocols and the looming threat of the Delta variant in 2021. With mandates dropped and quarantine periods shortened, many expect that 2022 will be a summer relatively similar to a pre-pandemic era. This will likely lead to more alcoholic beverage sales, and many companies are anticipating this by introducing new flavors of hard ciders and seltzers.
Molson Coors and Coca-Cola are collaborating to release a lemonade-inspired canned cocktail drink. Taking inspiration from Simply fruit juices, the two companies are coming together to distribute Simply’s Spiked Lemonade, a refreshing alcoholic lemonade perfect for summer. The drink will come in four different flavors: strawberry lemonade, watermelon lemonade, blueberry lemonade, and traditional. Coors noticed that people were already using Simply juices as a mixer or chaser, so taking the next step and adding both juice and alcohol elements into one bottle was a no-brainer.
Other beverage companies have been launching similar products to Coors’s lemonade concoction. Recently, Boston Beer Company partnered with PepsiCo to transform Mountain Dew into its own canned cocktail. The Mountain Dew alcoholic cocktail has all the quintessential flavors of the soda but without the caffeine. Coors also had a canned cocktail released before its new Simply beverage: a spiked version of the Topo Chico seltzer.
Beer brands aren’t the only alcoholic companies diving into the canned cocktail territory. Spirit and liquor companies are also attempting new spiked drinks to draw in consumers. Cazadores Tequila recently released a line of canned margaritas, while Jack Daniels experimented with flavored whiskey drinks. Many brands noticed the spiked cocktail craze in America, switching their focus to flavored, gluten-free products for higher revenue.
Beverage companies cashing in on the canned cocktail trend are moving in the right direction. Spiked drinks and hard seltzers grew 53% in general sales last year, which is expected to grow continuously. The canned cocktail category will increase by 29% over the next three years. Spiked seltzers grew by 4% over the last year, despite gaining a reputation that its market value will be dropping. Though spiked seltzers are falling behind canned cocktails’ general popularity, these categories are doing financially well amongst other adult beverages.
