Alcohol-delivery company Drizly reports that since the pandemic began, Tequila sales have been booming with their customer base.
Drizly CEO Corey Rellas said in an interview of the Covid-19 era trends which have not abated, “Tequila is the big winner here and the type of alcohol people are drinking at home.”
Rellas said the home cocktail market expanded rapidly during the pandemic, “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.”
Acquired by Uber (UBER) for $1.1 billion in 2021, Drizly has seen sales to the at-home cocktail market slow a little since the economy reopened and bars once again opened for business, but Rellas noted that even as that category slowed, the ready to drink cocktail category has been growing.
So far this year, ready-to-drink canned cocktails have made up 2.6% of Drizly’s total sales. That has already beaten the entire year of 2021, when the category made up 1.9% of sales, which itself was nearly double the 1.1% of 2020, which itself was over double the 0.4% the category comprised in 2019.
Grandview Research has noted the ready-to-drink cocktail category was worth $782.8 million in 2021, and was expected to grow at an annual compounded growth rate of 13.4% between 2022 and 2030.
Rellas noted such shifts are not uncommon in the alcoholic beverage industry. In the summer of 2019, there was a surge in popularity of hard seltzers, a trend which rapidly gave way to at-home cocktails once the pandemic locked everyone at home, and led to them trying to recreate the drinks they used to go out for.
Rellas said, “Canned cocktails were not a thing four or five years ago. 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.”
But Rellas says in the alcohol business, where one category slows down, another picks up.
“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.”
