Do Bars Actually Sell Non-Alcoholic Drinks?

Sales of non-alcoholic drinks in American bars and restaurants grew 44 percent in the year to June. The number is NIQ’s, it ran on Wednesday, and you can already write the stories it will turn into. The sober curious generation. The bar is changing. A movement.

It is none of those things, and you do not need a study to see why. You need a bar and a calculator.

Say a bar sold five non-alcoholic beers on a Friday night last year and sells ten this year. The story about that bar writes itself: non-alcoholic beer up 100 percent. True. Now count the rest of the night. That bar pours a thousand drinks on a Friday. Ten of them is one percent. Nothing has changed at that bar, except that it is now in a headline.

Those are made-up numbers. The real ones are smaller. In Britain, where the University of Sheffield reads it off the tills, no and low alcohol drinks were 0.6 percent of what pubs, bars and restaurants took for alcoholic drinks in 2023. Six pence in every ten pounds. And that is with three quarters of those places stocking a non-alcoholic beer. Five percent had one on tap.

Nearly every bar has it. Nearly nobody buys it. The American share is not published. You can guess why. A 44 percent jump on a base that size is bars that had nothing putting a few cans in a fridge. A growth rate tells you how fast something small got a little bigger. The share tells you whether anyone should care, and the share is the number that never runs.

The strange part is that the guest in the headline exists. In Britain, more than a third of pub and bar visits now involve no alcohol at all. A third of the visits, six pence in every ten pounds. Those people are at the bar, and they are ordering something.

NIQ asked Americans doing Dry January what they order in a bar instead. Fifty seven percent said a soft drink. Fifteen percent said a mocktail. The non-drinker walked in, read what the bar had for them, and ordered a Coke.

That is not a movement. That is a person who could not find anything on the list worth ordering, and on most lists they are right. The boom in the headline is mostly cans: three quarters of what sells as non-alcoholic spirits in American stores is ready to drink, and that is where nearly all the growth is. A bar that believes in a category makes you something, and a bar that does not opens you something. The Bottle Size Never Lies made that argument from the back bar. A can at the back of the fridge gets ordered like one.

We run a completely non-alcoholic space. Cocktails first, with beer and wine as well. Even here, it is not unusual for someone who does not drink, or does not want to tonight, to sit down and order a Coke, an iced tea, an iced coffee. There is no alcohol on our list to avoid. They are still not ordering the non-alcoholic beer.

The industry has two numbers and reads them as one. People are drinking less. Non-alcoholic sales are up. So the one must be flowing into the other. It is not, and the data says so: nine in ten people who buy non-alcoholic drinks also buy alcohol. The non-alcoholic beer is a drinker’s product, bought by people who drink, for the taste and for the nights they are not drinking. The person who does not drink was never its customer. Expecting the drinking less number to show up as a drinking more non-alcoholic number is the mistake under every one of these headlines.

The one time anyone tested it, fourteen English pubs put an alcohol-free beer on tap in place of one regular line, on and off over eight weeks. Alcoholic draught fell about 4 percent and revenue did not move. A second study this month tried cans, then posters, then a tap, in three pubs. The tap sold the most, and guests took the poured pint over the can. Put a real drink on a real tap and it sells like a drink. Put a can in the fridge and it sells like a can.

Nobody knows the number that makes it worth a tap, a line on the list, a bartender’s time, and the headline is not trying to find out. Growth like this year’s does not hold anyway. In American stores it has slowed two years running.

So the questions are the ones the headline skips. A percentage of what? What did the guest who is not drinking actually order? And are the people drinking less even the people this product is for? Offering is not selling, and a growth rate is not a movement. The next time the number runs, ask what it is a percentage of before you call it one.