I was at Spinneys yesterday and stopped in the middle of the beverages aisle because of this.
Nine different zero-proof beers, lined up like they belonged there. Not the Bavaria or Holsten malted beverage options of ten years ago that nobody actually drank.
Heineken 0
Corona Cero.
Bud Zero.
Estrella Galicia 0
Guinness 0
Actual beer brands, with their actual identities intact, making zero-proof products that look exactly like the real thing and get bought by people who very much do drink the real thing. Including me.
I haven't quit drinking. I've reduced it, for a few reasons I'll spare you (you're welcome), but I haven't given it up. What I have done is started enjoying nights out where I have one drink and then switch to a zero-proof Guinness for the rest of the evening, and I genuinely feel like I've got the best of both worlds. The social bit. The ritual of the glass. The actual taste I love. Just without waking up at 7am questioning every life decision I've ever made. And that’s the entire lesson.
Zero-proof alcohol is succeeding because it understood, deeply and correctly, who it was for. It was never for people who don't drink. Teetotalers already have water, mocktails, kombucha, lassi, and the moral high ground. They don't need a Heineken 0.0.
This category exists for people who do drink, who love the experience of drinking, and who, for whatever reason, want to do less of it without giving up the social architecture that comes with it.
This is brand positioning done properly.
Figuring out exactly who your audience is, what they actually want from your category, and then saying the right thing to them in a way that lands. It is not complicated work, but apparently it is rare work, because everyone says they do it and very few brands actually pull it off.
Which brings me, painfully, to fake meat. I have ranted about this before, and I will continue to rant about it, because Beyond, Impossible, and the rest of the imitation-meat industrial complex got this brief catastrophically wrong.
They built products designed to taste, bleed and behave exactly like real beef, and then aimed them at vegetarians and vegans. Which is genuinely baffling, because a vegetarian, by definition, is the one person on the planet who does not want to eat meat! Why would I, who actively chose not to eat beef, want to eat something engineered to mimic beef as closely as humanly possible? It's like selling sand at the beach.
The audience that would have made these products a category-defining business was meat eaters. People who like burgers but want to eat fewer of them. The exact mirror of what zero-proof alcohol has done for drinkers. Beyond and Impossible could have owned that conversation entirely. Instead, they put their products in the vegan aisle, marketed them to people who don't want what they're selling, and somehow seemed surprised when the maths didn't work.
The difference between these two categories isn't taste or technology or trend. It's audience clarity.
Zero-proof alcohol knows it isn't asking people to change who they are. It's giving them a way to keep being who they are with less of the cost. Fake meat asked the wrong people to become someone they already aren't.
That's the whole brief and point, really. Know exactly who your product is for, and then build for that person obsessively. Not the person you wish was buying. The person actually capable of buying.
Because if you're trying to sell a steak to a vegetarian, the problem isn't the steak, my friend.
M.
M’s Currents
A small thing I loved this week: no structure or theme, just sharing some favourites.
Food: Our hearts sing every time we eat a piping hot, crispy dosa at Vasanta Bhavan and the simple joy in this comfort food cannot ever be diminished. I’ve said what I’ve said.
xx
Manuja
Not for everyone. Never was.
