Nearly a decade after Seedlip’s launch kickstarted the transformation of “non-alcoholic spirits” from a contradiction in terms to a legitimate beverage category, the case for thoughtful, well-executed non-alcoholic beverage programs has been resoundingly made. Walking into a bar or restaurant and seeing a collection of non-alcoholic drinks in various formats — beers, wines, mixed drinks — used to be a rare and pleasant surprise to those among us searching for zero-proof options that look and feel like traditional alcoholic drinks. But now, it’s a baseline expectation.
Beyond accessibility simply being a core tenet of hospitality, non-alcoholic drinks are big business. While spirits sales have been trending downward due to a cluster of factors including GLP-1s, inflation, and greater conversations surrounding alcohol’s health risks, the non-alcoholic drinks sector has been growing steadily in recent years. And my own experience validates this trend as well.
I was the bar director for New York’s Momofuku until 2018 and when we added non-alcoholic drinks to our beverage programs we saw beverage sales increase overall. It wasn’t that people were ordering non-alcoholic drinks instead of our other offerings; we were essentially capturing revenue from people who would otherwise be drinking tap water. A few years later, I received a substantial investment from a big liquor conglomerate to launch my own line of non-alcoholic drinks. Our launch was derailed by the onset of Covid, but I was able to keep the company running for years off of revenue alone when everyone involved in the project thought we’d
