Canned Cocktails Are Starting to Eat the Spirits Business
RTD / Analysis
Canned Cocktails Are Starting to Eat the Spirits Business
The ready-to-drink category is posting double and triple-digit gains while overall alcohol consumption falls. That is not two separate trends. Increasingly the can is not finding new drinkers, it is taking them from the bottle on the shelf behind it, and the biggest spirits companies now have to decide whether to build a canned business or buy one.
By Vim, Editor of 12×75
In brief
- RTDs passed one billion nine-litre cases globally in 2025 and were the only major alcohol category to grow, up 3%, while total beverage alcohol fell 2%.
- The growth is concentrated in spirits-based cans. US spirits RTDs grew while malt-based hard seltzer declined, and RTD cocktails grew 14% globally.
- High Noon alone did about 24 million cases in 2025, which makes it bigger than most spirits brands its owner also sells.
- The cannibalisation question: when a drinker buys a canned vodka soda instead of a bottle of vodka and a mixer, the spirits company may keep the customer but loses margin, volume and the bottle on the back bar.
- The strategic response has split. Diageo is rebuilding around cans it already owns. Sazerac is buying brands outright. Both are admissions that the bottle business alone will not grow.
There is a comfortable version of the RTD story that the industry told itself for five years: cans are incremental. They bring new drinkers, new occasions, new moments, and the good ones sit alongside the bottle business rather than replacing it. Everybody grows, nobody loses.
That version is becoming harder to sustain, and the category has grown too big for anyone to keep telling it. Total alcohol volumes have fallen three years running while the can passed a billion cases and kept growing, and arithmetic eventually catches up with optimism. If the total is shrinking and one part is expanding, the expansion is coming from somewhere, and the somewhere is the shelf directly behind it.
The arithmetic that makes cannibalisation hard to deny
Two trends that cannot both be additive
Total beverage alcohol volume, 2025Down 2%, about 500 million cases
RTD volume, 2025Up 3%, past one billion cases
RTD cocktails specificallyUp 14%
Spirits volume, 2025Down 3%
BeerDown 2%
WineDown 5%
High Noon, 2025 US volumeAbout 24 million cases
IWSR 2025 global data and Shanken/Impact Databank US brand volumes, as covered in our billion-cases analysis and vodka seltzer guide.
The clearest way to see it is at brand level. High Noon sold roughly 24 million cases in the United States last year. That is not a successful new product; that is one of the largest alcohol brands in the country, larger than most of the spirits brands it sits beside. Those cases did not materialise out of new drinking occasions invented in the last five years. A meaningful share of them are vodka sodas that somebody used to make from a bottle, or beers they used to buy, or wine they used to open.
If the total is shrinking and one category is growing, the growth is not incremental. It is transferred.
Why the can wins the occasion
Worth being precise about what the customer is actually choosing, because it is not flavour.
What a can beats a bottle on
1Portion control. One can is one drink, at a known strength. A bottle is a decision you keep making, which is the opposite of what a moderating drinker wants. The standard-drinks maths is printed on the side.
2No equipment. No mixer, no ice, no glass, no measuring, no washing up. The barrier to a cocktail at home used to be six items and ten minutes.
3Portability. Beach, golf, pool, festival, park. Glass is banned in half of those places and inconvenient in the rest.
4Known cost. A four-pack is a price. A bottle plus mixers is a project with a variable outcome.
5No waste. Nothing goes flat, nothing oxidises, nothing sits half-used in a cupboard for two years.
None of those is about the liquid, and that is the point. The spirits industry spent two decades competing on what was inside the bottle, and then lost a large slice of volume to a format argument it was not having. That is the same shift that has been pulling money out of the rest of the category for five years.
It is also why quality improved fast enough to close the loop. Early cans were sweet and synthetic; the current ones are not. When I blind-tasted 17 canned cocktails against freshly made versions, the best of them lost narrowly and one beat the bartender outright. A 100ml Old Fashioned at 37% is not a compromise product. Once the taste gap closed, the convenience argument was the only argument left, and convenience wins.
What cannibalisation costs a spirits company
Here is the uncomfortable part for the companies, and the reason this is a strategy story rather than a trend story.
When a customer switches from a bottle of vodka to a four-pack of vodka seltzer, the brand owner may keep the customer and still lose. A 750ml bottle of vodka contains roughly seventeen drinks. A four-pack contains four. The revenue per serve on a premium can is decent, but the margin structure is different: cans carry packaging, dilution, freight on water, and a shelf position competing with beer pricing rather than spirits pricing. You are shipping a lot of liquid that is not alcohol.
There is a brand cost too. A bottle on a back bar is an advertisement that works every night for months. A can is consumed and binned. The spirits business was built on the visibility and the ritual of the bottle, and neither survives the format change.
The same drinker, two formats
750ml bottle of vodkaAbout 17 drinks, one purchase
Four-pack of vodka seltzer4 drinks, one purchase
What the brand keepsThe customer
What the brand losesServings per purchase, margin per serve, and the bottle on the bar
Illustrative. Actual economics vary enormously by brand, market and channel, and a premium can can be more profitable per serve than a cheap bottle. The structural point is that the two formats are not interchangeable on a P&L.
That is why Brown-Forman’s results were read the way they were: tequila down 12% while RTDs grew 20% is not a company winning, it is a company watching its mix change underneath it.
Build or buy: the choice facing every major
Confronted with that, the big companies have split into two camps, and the last month has made the split unusually visible.
Build: Diageo
Diageo’s chief executive Sir Dave Lewis wrote something remarkable in the 2026 annual report: the company “created this space with Smirnoff Ice 25 years ago, but we lost focus.” Its RTD share has fallen from roughly 25% in 2008 to under 10%, and it is now redefining the market it competes in as total spirits including RTDs. That is the build strategy: use the brands you already own, stop treating cans as a side business, and accept that the RTD is part of the spirits business rather than adjacent to it.
Buy: Sazerac
The opposite approach, executed at speed. In 2026 alone Sazerac has bought Au Vodka, the RTD brand Dirty Shirley, a Kentucky distillery group, stakes in 818 Tequila and SipMargs, and signed a binding agreement for Germany’s Berentzen at a 68% premium. It also tried to buy Brown-Forman for around $15 billion and was refused. That is a company deciding it is faster to acquire brands that already have the drinker than to persuade its own drinkers to switch format.
Diageo is rebuilding around the cans it forgot it owned. Sazerac is buying the ones somebody else built. Both are conceding the same point.
The third option, which several companies are quietly taking, is to do neither and defend the bottle by going up. Premium, luxury, allocated, experiential. That works at the top and it is why the brands with a production argument are the ones still growing. It does not work in the middle, and the middle is most of the market.
Where this goes next
Three things worth watching over the next eighteen months.
Consolidation accelerates
If buying is faster than building, and the fastest-growing brands are independents, the independents get bought. High Noon’s owner, Gallo, is not selling, but the tier below is full of brands that are large enough to matter and small enough to buy. Expect more deals like the ones Sazerac has been doing, and expect the premiums to stay high.
The spirits companies start cannibalising deliberately
The logic of cannibalisation is that if it is going to happen anyway, better that you do it to yourself than let a competitor do it to you. That means more line extensions: canned versions of established spirits brands, sold next to the bottle, accepting the format shift rather than resisting it. Every major now has them; the question is how hard they push.
The category stops being one category
“RTD’’ already covers a 4.5% vodka seltzer, a 37% canned Old Fashioned and a plastic ball of premixed cocktail. Those are different products for different occasions with different economics, and the data will eventually split them, as it has already split spirits-based cans from malt seltzer. The winners are increasingly spirits-based, which is the whole reason this became a spirits-industry problem rather than a beer-industry one.
What it means for drinkers
Mostly good, with one caveat.
Competition of this intensity produces better products quickly, and it has. The current generation of canned cocktails is genuinely good, the real-juice and real-spirit formulations have pushed out the synthetic ones, and prices are keen because everybody is fighting for the same fridge. If you have not tried the category since 2021 you are judging it on obsolete evidence.
The caveat is strength. A can is one drink only if you read the side of it. A 4.5% seltzer and a 37% canned Old Fashioned look similar in a cooler and are not remotely the same thing, which is why the drinks-per-can question keeps coming up. Convenience cuts both ways: the format that makes moderation easy also makes it easy to lose count.
And if you want the best of what the category has become, that is what the canned cocktails guide and the vodka seltzer rankings are for.
The last word
For most of the last decade the drinks industry described RTDs as incremental, and for a while that was probably true. It is not true now. The can is growing while everything else contracts, which means it is taking share, and the companies affected have stopped pretending otherwise in their own annual reports.
What makes this more than a format story is where it leaves the bottle. The bottle is not going away; it is becoming a different product, aimed at a different occasion, sold on story and provenance rather than convenience. The everyday drink is moving into aluminium, and the companies that own the everyday drink are either rebuilding around that or writing cheques to people who already have.
The industry called the can incremental for five years. Its own accounts now call it the growth strategy.
Sources
- 12×75: RTDs pass one billion cases, using IWSR 2025 data
- Shanken News Daily: RTD brands among the spirits category’s largest players
- Food Dive: spirits RTD growth and cannibalisation analysis, September 2026
- 12×75: 17 canned cocktails blind-tasted against fresh versions
Volume figures are IWSR 2025 global data and Shanken/Impact Databank US brand estimates. The bottle-versus-can economics comparison is illustrative and varies widely by brand, market and channel. Correct as of September 25, 2026. Please drink responsibly.
