Oli Dodd (00:03) I’m going to be looking a little bit into how I’m approaching this subject matter, but from my perspective as a journalist rather than a brand owner or an analyst. I tend to look at things in a slightly more trend-based way. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how consumers are driven, how micro and macro trends form, and how that is shaping where we are now. To start off, I’d just like to look at a couple of graphs.

Oli Dodd (00:33) These are very broad. This is IWSR data, and it shows global volumes of alcohol intake—this is volume, by the way, not value—from 2015 to 2025, the most recent data we have. I want to split this into three separate phases. First, we have this pre-pandemic slight decline; then, a big event here in the middle; and finally, a small recovery followed by some subsequent declines.

Oli Dodd (01:04) It is really interesting to think about this from our 2026 mindset. If we were to very lazily place a straight trend line across all of these data points, it would pretty nicely match up. But we know something very big happened in the middle, and everything on the right side of the graph is completely influenced by that disruption.

Oli Dodd (01:33) The pandemic was a huge accelerator of trends. We had social trends accelerating; people became much more focused on health after being suddenly confronted with the vulnerability of their well-being. We also experienced financial and supply-chain disruptions that we are still not fully over.

On top of that, we faced market-by-market issues that weren’t pandemic-related but remain highly relevant: Brexit, regional wars, and a wave of new tariffs all over the globe. All of these factors shade this part of the graph to look the way it does. Yet, the fact that we can still draw a loosely fitting trend line across the whole timeline indicates that there is a longer-term macroeconomic force at play.

Oli Dodd (02:31) If we look specifically at the UK data, it shows those shifts even more clearly. From 2015 to 2019, we see a more severe decline, followed by a sharper pandemic drop. However, we also see a greater recovery and a less severe subsequent decline on the other side of it. This shows that while the UK is largely operating in tandem with global trends, it perfectly fits the model of picking up right where it left off in terms of how moderation is influencing consumer choice. I just want you to bear that baseline context in mind as we look at how those macro events continue to shape the industry landscape.

Oli Dodd (03:00) You can read the text on this next slide if you like, but the one thing I really want to draw your attention to is this specific figure. For the longest time, when we were writing about the industry to try and describe what was driving those early, pre-pandemic declines and the beginning of the post-pandemic recovery, we used a phrase I’m sure you’re all familiar with: “less but better.” This wave of premiumization was coloring absolutely everything. People were consuming less volume, but the financial value of the market remained steady or increased.

Oli Dodd (03:30) If we are to believe this latest set of results, that dynamic might be changing now. Anecdotally, we can kind of feel that shift happening in the trade. It looks like the “less” part of the equation is hanging around, but the “better” bit is starting to struggle.

Oli Dodd (04:00) With that in mind, I’d like to show you one more graph. I’m sorry for all of this statistical data, but this is a particularly horrible chart because it visually makes it look like the no-and-low alcohol sector is three times larger than spirits! That is not what it’s actually showing. What we are mapping here is year-on-year growth rates for these different categories.

As you can see, spirits, beer, and wine—which, for all intents and purposes, constitute beverage alcohol—follow a very similar growth trajectory to what we saw in the previous UK volume graph. However, two specific subcategories show a completely different pattern of growth. In 2020, when traditional beverage alcohol categories took a sharp decline, both of these jumped. (And by the way, when looking at no-and-low alcohol volumes here, we are primarily talking about no-and-low beer; we aren’t really talking about anything else yet.)

Oli Dodd (04:55) Both of these categories took a massive leap forward, which tells us a lot about how to navigate this market. As a case study, ready-to-drink (RTD) products are a great example of this friction: the exact same market pressures that caused traditional categories to decline are what RTDs were able to exploit to achieve explosive growth.

Let’s look at a brief summary of the last few years in the RTD sector. We aren’t talking about old-school alcopops here; that belongs to a previous generation of this category. What we are talking about is everything that emerged around 2019 and 2020, and the story of that era is hard seltzers.

Oli Dodd (05:52) The attributes that hard seltzers offered mapped perfectly onto the consumer friction points brought about by the pandemic. People were suddenly more health-conscious, and here was a category that purported to be better for you—low carb and lower calorie. A lot of people were suddenly less financially flush, and these products were highly affordable. They were also portable at a time when people weren’t drinking in bars; they were convenient, and you could buy them at the local corner shop. All of these macro factors dramatically benefited them as a category.

Oli Dodd (06:22) But the one thing we can’t claim hard seltzers to be—and I’m sorry to everyone in the room who disagrees—is premium. Generally speaking, they don’t even name the specific alcohol that is in them. They are bought from a corner shop right next to a can of Coke. They possess inherent category limitations that they can’t easily fix.

Because of that, as the RTD category matured, premium canned cocktails stepped into the space. Brands like White Box and Moth solved the exact problems hard seltzers couldn’t. They are genuinely premium, they use named spirits, and while they are a little bit more expensive, they remain accessible. They delivered what hard seltzers couldn’t, and what other traditional categories weren’t providing.

Oli Dodd (06:51) This next statistic is really interesting: IWSR data shows that 43% of UK Gen Z respondents said they had consumed an RTD can within the previous six months. That is significantly higher than the UK population at large, where penetration is only about a quarter of consumers.

For a very long time, the industry narrative was that Gen Z simply didn’t drink. While there is still some truth to their overall moderation, they are now coming back online in comparison with other demographic cohorts. What this data tells us is that for a generation that came of age during the pandemic, they felt those lifestyle friction points much more acutely.

Oli Dodd (07:51) The moment a category emerged that was able to appeal to them and solve for those specific friction points, it reached them in a way that traditional spirits categories couldn’t. We are seeing that play out now with the wild success of brands like BuzzBalls—which is somewhat head-scratching to older generations but makes total sense to a younger consumer.

Naturally, this shift hasn’t gone unnoticed by major players like Diageo. If I were an independent RTD brand right now, I think I would feel two ways about their entry into the space. On one hand, there is certainly some fear; it’s like you’re a League Two football team and suddenly Arsenal joins your division. That’s frightening. They have unmatched commercial reach and unmatched scale. On the other hand, their entry validates the category and proves there is an immense amount of long-term commercial potential here.

Oli Dodd (08:20) This begs the question: where exactly is that growth potential? For RTDs, convenience is their native language, so they make total sense as an off-trade retail item. But I’ve been hearing it for a long time now: it is the on-trade where Diageo has its sights set. They want to insert these premium canned cocktails into bars and restaurants as standard serves.

To evaluate that, we have to think about what people actually want when they enter a hospitality venue. Consumers and bar guests generally want a few core things: they want to feel looked after, they want to drink something tasty, and they want to feel like they are experiencing good value—whatever that word means to them.

Oli Dodd (09:17) Premium canned RTDs solve the first two requirements quite easily. As long as you serve a brand the consumer trusts, they are consistent and tasty. From an operational standpoint, the speed of service is unmatched. It’s similar to the Blank Street Coffee model: you don’t necessarily need a highly trained bartender who knows how to manually build every complex drink from scratch. You can just open a premium can, allowing the staff to spend the rest of their time hosting and looking after their guests.

However, that third point—value perception—is where the real challenge lies. There is something about watching a cocktail manually crafted right in front of you that feels inherently more premium and valuable than watching someone pour liquid out of a can.

Oli Dodd (10:10) Just this past Friday, I was having a drink with someone who used to own an RTD brand but exited the business. The primary reason they gave was that they simply couldn’t get the liquid format to work financially in the on-trade. So, this is clearly a major sticking point for the category.

On the flip side, you have iconic bars like Tayer + Elementary in Old Street, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with. They have been absolutely evangelical about the use of pre-batched and RTD serves. They use them continuously, and they are regularly ranked among the very best bars in the world.

So, the on-trade is not a monolith. If you can design a bar program where the speed of service and the liquid consistency outweigh the theater of a bespoke build, it can absolutely work in a high-end environment.

Oli Dodd (10:38) I am running out of time, so I will wrap things up. Am I saying that we should all rush out and launch RTD brands? No, of course I’m not. But what I am saying is that if you view the market through this lens—as a complex patchwork of micro-trends and distinct consumer cohorts—and you can pinpoint exactly where your target audience’s friction points are and design a product to solve them, there is still plenty of room for commercial growth, even in a downturned market.

Thanks a lot, everyone. That is my time.

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