When the Gallup poll on American attitudes to alcohol came out last month, it lobbed a grenade into the US industry.
“For the first time in Gallup’s trend, a majority of Americans, 53%, say drinking in moderation, or ‘one or two drinks a day’, is bad for one’s health,” said the report.
Mitch Louch wasn’t convinced.
Polls measure mood, not behaviour
Mitch was most recently principal strategist at Numerator, advising clients from Moët Hennessy to MillerCoors, after earlier stints at Anheuser-Busch and Beam Suntory
Polls, he argues, capture noise not behaviour — they track whatever society happens to be talking about the most at the time.
“Generally speaking, the industry is going through a transformation, and it’s not new. I’ve been watching it happen for a decade,” he tells Drinks Insider.
In his opinion, there are three things going on. The first was the pandemic.
Stimulus cash drove drinkers upmarket. “You had a $100 bottle of Don Julio 1942 flying off the shelf. I think that was a time we’re still benchmarking against, but the reality is that’s not the situation.”
While spending patterns have now normalised, inflation and premiumisation are changing how people spend, leading to lower volumes.
A third, smaller factor is substitution at the margins (THC and some non-alcoholic options), which he sees as incremental rather than category-killing.
But the biggest issue facing the market is the immovable one: demographics.
Fewer drinkers, not less drinking
The issue isn’t how people drink, it’s how many drinkers there are.
”I think there’s been too much concern on a per person basis,” says Mitch, noting that per-person consumption hasn’t materially declined.
What has fallen is the number of drinkers. The Baby Boomers are tapering off their drinking — but there are not enough Gen Xers to replace them.
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