Most retail coverage of alcohol alternatives focuses on the brand’s perspective: how to pitch, how to price, and how to win the shelf slot. This week we’re exploring the retailer’s perspective, because the primary constraint on the category right now comes down to how that shelf space is built.
We keep hearing the same story from founders. A chain reaches out, samples get shipped, and the brand lands in the carbonated soft drink aisle. Sitting there makes the velocity comparison unwinnable, and the shoppers open to the product never even walk down that aisle.
Turning down the “easy” slot
One founder we recently spoke with, Andrea Wightwick, did something almost no emerging brand does. With over 20 years in CPG, including 10 years handling The Coca-Cola Company as a NielsenIQ client, she’s now the founder of non-alc cocktail brand Hapsy. When a well-loved regional grocer reached out asking for samples, she said yes, then asked the chain about its specific plan for the set. “Can you help us understand what you’re doing to get the shopper to understand that this shelf set is in your store?” she asked the buyer. “Because if they don’t build it, the people will not come.”
The aisle where many grocers would slot an RTD like Hapsy is run by Coke, Pepsi, and Keurig Dr Pepper and is typically shopped on autopilot. “If they’re going to put us in between the red and blue, we’re going to get lost in the shuffle,” she says. “We might get placement, but we’re not going to get reorders.”
Wightwick notes the retailer was receptive. “They didn’t view it as pushback,” Wightwick says, adding that conversations about an endcap, a wine-adjacent placement, or a defined set are ongoing. “They saw it as an intellectual conversation to make sure we’re doing right by the shopper at the end of the day.”
The velocity and invisibility traps
An alcohol alternative in the soft drink aisle is scored like soda—a habit-driven category that generates a velocity occasion-driven products can’t match in the same location.
Here, Wightwick is slowing her own retail expansion because she’s seen what happens next during the velocity review, where an occasion-driven purchase gets measured against products bought on autopilot. The new brand loses and gets discontinued. In the end, the retailer blames the category for a failure that stems from poor placement.
Discoverability poses yet another challenge. Wightwick saw this at NielsenIQ with refrigerated pet food, a product that asked shoppers to browse a cooler in an aisle they walked on autopilot. Fixing the issue required a complete shift in strategy. “You start with the consumer. You create the demand, and then you bring that demand to the retailer,” she explains. “That took about five years of long-term strategy.”
Alcohol alternatives scattered into a soft drink set face the same invisibility. The retailers getting this right are building a destination. They create a defined, signed, and shoppable set to capture shoppers actively looking for these items, not passively browsing a general beverage aisle.
Protecting the entire basket
Wightwick sizes the stakes from her research career, noting the average in-store food and beverage trip runs about $40, with affordability pressure driving smaller, more frequent trips roughly every four days. A weekly stock-up trip runs closer to $175. “Every time a shopper is walking in, if the shelf set is not correct or if it’s incomplete, you’re risking about a $40 basket,” she says. “If it’s a stock-up trip, that’s around $175 right now. The shopper will switch over to the store that’s going to make them run fewer trips overall.”
Retailers have lived this math once with gluten-free. Chains that carried gluten-free bread but skipped the beer learned the gluten-free household doesn’t split the trip. If the store can’t serve the whole basket, the shopper takes their entire recurring grocery run to a competitor.
The ceiling runs higher still. Back to refrigerated pet food: once the right assortment existed, that shopper bought more than just premium dog chow. “They’re buying expensive cheese. They’re buying expensive orange juice. That higher-ticket item is no longer the average $175—it’s closer to a $325 ticket when you can provide the right assortment.”
Internal silos block the vision
The beer buyer, the wine buyer, and the non-alc buyer at most chains sit in separate silos with different shelf sets, promotion schedules, and seasonality. Since the alcohol alternatives category lives across all three, there’s often no internal owner making the cross-store case. “You need somebody who’s going to cross-pollinate across the aisles,” Wightwick says. If all three buyers run holiday promotions without comparing notes, for example, they crowd each other out and miss the chance to serve different occasions in the same trip.
Some emerging brands end up doing this integration work for free. They pitch their product along with a broader theory of where the category should live. But most understandably take the placement they can get, leaving the velocity problem for another day.
What doing it right looks like
The retailers winning the alcohol alternatives shopper share a few key behaviors, Wightwick explains.
First, they create a defined, signed set, establishing a true destination the shopper can be trained to find. Second, they group products where the drinking decision happens. RTD formats belong next to RTD, while hosting formats sit with hosting formats. Third, they evaluate performance against the broader alcohol alternatives category to get more accurate results, knowing that measuring an occasion-driven product against habit-driven staples throws off the data. Finally, they commit to the full set before expanding. Recognizing that beer and wine analogues alone miss a large portion of the shopper base, they include spirit alternatives and newer formats.
The retailers who build this will find what the early movers in other emerging categories found: the shopper shows up, concentrates the trip, and stays. Those who don’t will keep running the same flawed experiment with the wrong aisle and inappropriate benchmarks. Ultimately, they will conclude the category failed a test it never really took.
