Welcome to The Next Case.
Beverage has no shortage of headlines about what's declining, disrupted or downright difficult.
We're going to spend a little more time looking in the other direction.
Every two weeks, we'll follow the consumer—and the dollars—across water, energy, wine, spirits, THC, non-alc and beer to find what's working, what's genuinely innovative and who's thinking differently.
We'll bring the data. Question conventional wisdom. And probably poke a little fun at a few sacred cows along the way.
Because despite everything you've heard:
The consumer is still thirsty.
The Case
THE CONSUMER DIDN'T GET THE MEMO
The beverage industry is organized neatly into beer, wine, spirits, water, energy, non-alc and now THC.
The consumer is being remarkably uncooperative.
A cocktail tonight. NA beer tomorrow. Energy at 3 p.m. Champagne on Saturday. A spritz at brunch. Water that promises to hydrate, focus, recover—or apparently solve several other problems we didn't know water was responsible for.
They're not abandoning beverage.
They're getting more demanding about what earns the next drink.
Consumers are still spending when beverage gives them a compelling reason to celebrate, energize, moderate, indulge, simplify, socialize—or simply feel something different.
And increasingly, some of the most interesting growth is showing up where the industry's tidy category lines start to blur.
The consumer doesn't give a hoot which category gets credit for the sale.
Maybe we should stop obsessing over which category is winning because the lines are blurring.
The next big opportunity may be hiding in the space between categories.
The Gain
THE RED NUMBERS ARE REAL. SO ARE THE GREEN ONES.
There are plenty of red numbers in beverage right now. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
But staring at the declines makes it remarkably easy to miss where consumers are still enthusiastically opening their wallets.
And there are some very green numbers hiding among the red ones.
🍾 CONSUMERS ARE STILL CELEBRATING
Champagne +14.7% | Prosecco +10.2%¹
Champagne tells us consumers are still celebrating.
Prosecco may be telling us something even more interesting.
The Aperol Spritz and Hugo Spritz have helped sparkling wine stretch beyond the traditional wine moment. Prosecco can be the bottle at the table, the base of the cocktail, the brunch order or the aperitivo.
That's not just sparkling-wine growth.
That's one product finding more jobs to do.
⚡ CONSUMERS WANT THEIR BEVERAGE TO WORK HARDER
Zero-sugar energy: +$640M²
The U.S. zero-sugar energy segment added approximately $640 million in retail sales growth in Q2, according to Circana data cited by Celsius Holdings. Alani Nu retail sales jumped 55.7% in the 13 weeks ending June 28.²
Energy isn't simply selling caffeine anymore.
It's selling function + flavor + identity + lifestyle.
Alani Nu is particularly interesting because it doesn't look much like yesterday's definition of an energy brand.
Its growth suggests yesterday's definition of the energy consumer may not be terribly useful either. Health & wellness overlapping with energy is a new concept. This consumers demand is multi-faceted.
🍸 CONSUMERS STILL LOVE A COCKTAIL. JUST MAYBE NOT THE WORK.
Spirits RTDs: +14% | Cutwater: +125% YTD³
Spirits-based RTDs are up 14% in dollars and 15% in volume, even as the broader beverage-alcohol market has been under pressure. Once again, these are alcoholic beverages and they’re growing!
Cutwater?
Its off-premise volume is up roughly 125% year-to-date through July 18.³
The insight isn't “RTDs are growing.”
We've all sat through that 2021 presentation on repeat.
It's that consumers increasingly want the experience without all the work traditionally required to create it.
Margarita? Yes.
Shaker, lime, triple sec, tequila, ice and sticky dishes?
Negotiable.
Cocktail RTD success is about more than simply the can.
🚫🍺 MODERATION ≠ ABSTINENCE
NA beer, wine & spirits: $1B+⁴
Non-alcoholic beer, wine and spirits surpassed $1 billion in U.S. off-premise sales in 2025.⁴
But here's the more interesting number:
95% of NA buyers also purchased alcohol-containing products.⁴
Read that again.
The growth of non-alc isn't simply evidence that consumers are walking away from alcohol.
It's evidence that they're adding choices.
Maybe the old segmentation of “drinkers” and “non-drinkers” deserves to join the fax machine. Beer has earned an early lead on capturing a portion of the same consumer for their zero alchohol and full alchohol offerings. Is this an ignored insight by other categories or simply a beer anomoly?
🌿 THE OTHER BUZZ IS GROWING
THC: THE NUMBERS JUST GOT MORE INTERESTING
There have been plenty of big projections about THC beverages.
These aren't projections. They're wholesale depletions—product actually moving from distributors to retailers.
A new Hemp Beverage Alliance report using anonymized data collected and processed by VIP analyzed more than 2.3 million case equivalents across 26 participating brands in 2024 and 2025.⁵
And importantly, the dataset doesn't include DTC sales, direct-to-retailer shipments or brands outside the VIP network.
Within the dataset:
Volume +133%. Distribution +129%. Retail accounts +72%.⁵
But the number that really got our attention?
VELOCITY +12%
Average monthly velocity rose from 7.40 to 8.29 while the retail account base expanded from roughly 25,000 to 43,500 accounts.⁵
That's important.
Getting a young category into thousands of additional stores can produce a spectacular growth chart.
Getting more product to move through those stores at the same time is considerably harder to dismiss.
There's more. The data shows familiar adult-beverage seasonality, with summer peaks and year-end strength. And in 2025, 6–10mg products overtook the above-10mg segment among participating brands.⁵ The loose assumption: these are consumers looking for a functional beverage, not stoners!
None of that proves where THC beverages ultimately land.
But it does suggest something more interesting than novelty may be developing:
Repeatable consumer behavior.
Curiosity may have sold the first case.
It doesn't explain the next one.
The statement every category begs for: These beverages expanded into thousands of additional retail accounts, average monthly velocity still increased 12%.
That's when curiosity starts looking like something more.
Bold & New
New products. Bold moves. No participation trophies.
There are plenty of new beverages.
Being new isn't particularly difficult.
Being new for a reason is.
These four made us look twice.
BOBA POPS
THE COCKTAIL GETS A POP
Boba Pops takes one of the most recognizable drink experiences of the last decade—popping boba—and gives it an adult twist:
The pearls contain alcohol.⁶
Designed to be added to cocktails, seltzers and lemonades, Boba Pops introduces something beverage innovation frequently overlooks:
Play.
The innovation isn't another liquid fighting for shelf space. It's changing the experience of the drink already in your hand.
And in an industry obsessed with functional benefits, premiumization and the next whitespace analysis, maybe FUN deserves a little more respect.
WHY IT'S BOLD:
It doesn't ask consumers to learn a new behavior. It puts an adult twist on one they already love.
SVEDKA - VODKA WATER
THE CAN DISAPPEARS
In a sea of increasingly loud packaging, transparency is a pretty loud choice.
SVEDKA's new Vodka Water comes in a completely transparent can.
But the package is only half the story.
It's real vodka + natural spring water, still instead of sparkling, with 90 calories, zero sugar, zero carbs and zero bubbles in Strawberry, Peach, Lime and Pineapple.⁷
The bigger bet is what SVEDKA is borrowing from water:
clarity, simplicity and refreshment.
Vodka Water doesn't fit neatly into the old visual language of vodka—or the increasingly crowded language of RTD noise.
Water, spirits…..consumers are loving the blurred lines.
WHY IT'S BOLD:
Vodka spent decades trying to stand out. SVEDKA is betting the next opportunity might be blending right in.
BOGLE - ELEMENT[AL]
WINE TRADES GLASS FOR ALUMINUM
Bogle took one of wine's most recognizable objects—the 750mL glass bottle—and changed what it's made of.
Element[AL]'s aluminum bottle is 80% lighter than glass, shatterproof and infinitely recyclable, according to Bogle.⁸
But here's why we care:
It changes the material without abandoning the ritual.
It still looks like wine. Pours like wine. Sits on the table like wine.
For a category that talks endlessly about sustainability while shipping heavy glass around the world, that's more than a packaging exercise.
It's a challenge to one of wine's favorite arguments:
“That's just traditionally how it's done.”
WHY IT'S BOLD:
Wine loves conformity. Bogle is betting its consumers don't require it.
MATUA - BAGNUM
THE 1.5L MAGNUM LOSES THE BOTTLE
Wine in a bag isn't new.
Putting Matua Sauvignon Blanc into a 1.5L one is considerably more interesting.⁹
It's portable, chillable and shareable—two bottles' worth of Sauvignon Blanc without the bottles.
Beach. Boat. Golf. Pool. Picnic. Party.
That's the idea.
Instead of asking consumers to adapt their plans to wine, Matua adapted the package to the plans.
Wine tradition survived the screwcap.
We're guessing it'll survive this too.
WHY IT'S BOLD:
It takes a very familiar wine and removes the limits of where people can enjoy it.
AI Sips
SIMPLE TIPS AND TRICKS TO REALLY UPSET YOUR “ANTI-AI” ADULT KIDS BUT IMPROVE YOUR NEXT LAUNCH.
Ask AI to kill your next launch before the consumer does.
Most people use AI to make an idea sound better, subconsciously loving the reinforcement along the way.
Try asking it to make the idea fail.
Before your next innovation survives another enthusiastic PowerPoint, give your preferred AI tool the product concept, target consumer, occasion, price, package, channel, competitive set and distribution assumptions.
Then paste this:
Act as a skeptical beverage innovation strategist. Identify the five most likely reasons this product will fail. For each, identify the assumption we're making about the consumer, what evidence would prove or disprove it, and one inexpensive way to test it before launch. Be specific. Do not validate the idea simply because I proposed it.
Then ask one more question:
Which assumption would you refuse to invest behind until it was proven?
That's usually where it gets interesting.
AI SIP: Stop asking AI to agree with you. It's considerably more useful when you ask it to be the loudest contrarian in the room.
So What?
Walt Disney once said, “We're not trying to entertain the critics … I'll take my chances with the public.”
Maybe beverage could use a little of that thinking right now.
Consumers haven't stopped celebrating. They haven't stopped socializing. And they certainly haven't forgotten how to enjoy a great glass of wine, a cold beer or a cocktail.
They're not oblivious. They're choosing.
More deliberately. Across more categories. With more options competing for their attention and their wallets.
That's not the death of beverage alcohol.
That's new competition.
And competition has a funny way of making industries better.
The numbers in this first issue don't erase the declines. They're not supposed to.
They show something more useful:
Where consumers are saying yes.
Yes to Champagne. Yes to cocktails without the work. Yes to zero-sugar energy. Yes to drinking without alcohol, sometimes. Yes to an entirely new kind of buzz.
The winners won't be the companies that spend the next decade arguing that consumers should drink the way they used to.
They'll be the ones paying close enough attention to understand why they're drinking differently now.
That's what The Next Case is here to find.
The growth. The gaps. The bold bets. The ideas that work—and the ones that deserve to be challenged.
Because beverage isn't dead.
It's changing.
And somewhere in that change is the next case.
Here's to celebrating The Next Case.
Cheers,
Sarah
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Sources & Notes
¹ SipSource/WSWA, July 2026 depletion data: Champagne revenue +14.7% and Prosecco +10.2% over the latest three months.
² Celsius Holdings Q2 2026; Circana Total U.S. MULO+ w/C, 13 weeks ending June 28, 2026.
³ NIQ/Shanken News Daily, 2026 RTD and Cutwater off-premise performance data.
⁴ NielsenIQ, 2025 Beverage Alcohol Year in Review, 52 weeks ending Jan. 3, 2026; buyer overlap from NIQ Omnishopper panel.
⁵ Hemp Beverage Alliance, The Future of Drinking: The Hemp Beverage Marketplace 2024–2025; anonymized wholesale depletion data collected and processed by VIP from 26 participating brands. Dataset excludes DTC, direct-to-retailer shipments and brands outside the VIP network.
⁶ Boba POPS product information; original bottled Boba POPS is 12.5% ABV and uses grain-neutral spirit.
⁷ SVEDKA product information.
⁸ Bogle Family Vineyards, Element[AL] product information.
⁹ Matua Bagnum retail/product information; 1.5L Sauvignon Blanc format.