And on top of that, they’d have to comply with a complicated legal landscape in the United States where laws for selling alcoholic beverages vary by state. There was also a “perception that a non-alcoholic brand becoming associated with alcohol would damage or harm the brand in some way,” said Caleb Bryant, associate director of food and drink reports at Mintel, a market research firm. “So, bringing that into the ready-to-drink space was a no-brainer,” she added.īut it took some time for brands like Simply, which is owned by Coca-Cola, to reach that realization.įor decades, it was “generally frowned upon” for non-alcoholic beverage brands to enter the alcoholic beverage market, Stanford said. “Consumers are already using the non-alcoholic Simply brand as part of their mixology regimen,” Jamie Wideman, vice president of innovation at Molson Coors, told CNN ahead of the company’s Simply Spiked Lemonade launch last year. But until recently if you wanted, for instance, a vodka and cranberry you’d have to purchase a bottle of vodka and some cranberry juice separately to mix it yourself.īrands recognized that this was happening with their non-alcoholic beverages all the time, said Stanford. Spiked beverages have been around for a while.

We’re really at the very beginning,” said Duane Stanford, editor of Beverage Digest, an industry trade publication. Casey Brooke Lawson/AP Images for HARD MTN DEW Nowadays, just about every non-alcoholic drink has an alcohol-infused twin.

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