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The Ready-to-Drink Cocktail Revolution
While consumers have been trying their hand at making their own cocktails at home during the Covid-19 pandemic (read The New At-Home Drinking Occasion), pre-mixed, ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails have ballooned in lockdown, with brands getting increasingly creative with flavour and format.
- Complex Flavour Profiles: Julia Gorman, digital marketing specialist at global flavour producer Symrise, says: “When creating a ready-to-drink beverage, you should really think about including flavour profiles that are harder to replicate at home, or include ingredients that may be harder to find in-store.”
Several recent launches speak to this thinking, including UK producer Niche Cocktail’s new Manuka Honey Whisky Sour and Blood Orange Old Fashioned drinks, and US canned cocktail producer LiveWire’s bartender-created Heartbreaker drink, a blend of vodka, oroblanco grapefruit, kumquat, jasmine, and ginger.
For more on consumers’ growing interest in complex flavour profiles, read The New Kitchen Warriors and our upcoming report, Taste’s New Normal.
- Low/No Sips: Canned cocktails are also appealing to consumers continuing to reduce their alcohol intake for health reasons (see Selling to the Sober Curious Consumer). Non-alcoholic spirits brand Seedlip’s range of canned RTD 0% cocktails contain its aromatic Spice 94, herbaceous Garden 108 and citrusy Grove 42 spirits mixed with tonic. Meanwhile, US bitters brand Hella Cocktail Co has launched a new range of canned Bitters & Soda drinks, which can be enjoyed alone or mixed with a spirit.
Offering the best of both worlds, UK drinks brand Punchy has both an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic version available of each of its three different punch flavours in a canned format.
Read Alcohol Packaging for the Sober Era and Alcohol Trends 2019: Imbibe Live for more on the shift towards low-to-no alcohol.
