'Tequila is the big winner' as more people embrace at-home cocktails, Drizly CEO says
More people are toasting with tequila, according to alcohol-delivery company Drizly's customer base.
"Tequila is the big winner here and the type of alcohol people are drinking at home," Drizly CEO Corey Rellas told Yahoo Finance (video above) about COVID-19 era trends that have stuck around.
At-home cocktail making "reset" with COVID, Rellas said, "as more and more people started to embrace cocktail culture, wanting to try new things at home when [they] didn't have access to the bar."
The Boston-based company, which Uber (UBER) acquired in 2021 for $1.1 billion, saw the at-home cocktail category slow down a "little bit" amid reopenings, but Rellas says the trend has now extended into the ready-to-drink cocktails category.
Year-to-date, ready-to-drink canned cocktails account for 2.6% of total sales for Drizly. That's already higher than the entire year of 2021, where the category accounted for 1.9%, nearly doubling from 1.1% in 2020 and 0.4% in 2019.
According to Grandview Research, the overall ready-to-drink cocktail category was valued at $782.8 million in 2021 with expectations to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 13.4% from 2022 to 2030.
From this heightened interest, spirit brands like Cutwater Spirits, which makes canned margaritas and is owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD), are gaining attention as customers differentiate them from hard seltzers.
"Canned cocktails were not a thing four or five years ago," Rellas said. "There is a little bit of a shift, more from the hard seltzer to the ready-to-drink cocktails as consumers appreciate the difference between the two."
Hard seltzers, which are typically malt-beverages, quickly became the "it" drink in the summer of 2019 but have fizzled in popularity recently.
"This is a little bit of a tough story not because the deceleration [of hard seltzers] has happened most recently...It's just slowed down in the last 18 months, so I think it's created a new category."
Brooke DiPalma is a producer and reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @BrookeDiPalma or email her at bdipalma@yahoofinance.com.
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