RTD Canned Cocktails

Spirits giant Sazerac announced today plans to acquire Southern Champion’s ready-to-drink (RTD) portfolio, including BuzzBallz, the spherical wine-, spirit- and malt-based cocktail brand.

Blake’s Beverage Co. is looking to be a leader in not just hard cider, but all “fruit-forward fourth category innovation,” founder and CEO Andrew Blake told Brewbound.

In the latest installment of Brewbound’s A Round With – a weekly Insider-exclusive Q&A series with industry leaders – Katie Beal Brown chats about the rollercoaster ride of turning a cherished family cocktail recipe into a nationally distributed, ready-to-drink product … and kicking off right before the pandemic turned the bev-alc world upside down.

In this latest round of distribution news, we check in with new coconut vodka water, Mother’s Milk and another fruit-infused vodka cocktail named after the same parent, Mom Water, as well as craft distillers Heritage Distilling and Frey Ranch, plus news from rum Coconut Cartel.

Two brands are positioning themselves as the “first” Black-owned hard seltzer brands hyper-focused on carving out a niche among the Black community.

San Diego-based hard kombucha and canned cocktail (RTD) maker JuneShine will acquire beyond beer brand Flying Embers in an all-stock transaction, the company announced today.

The population of Flavortown just increased by three. Stratford, Connecticut-based Two Roads Brewing has added three new iterations of the Flavortown Spiked flavored malt beverage (FMB) line it brews in collaboration with celebrity chef Guy Fieri.

California canned cocktail and hard kombucha maker JuneShine has received a seven-figure investment from private equity firm InvestBev.

After a category-wide downturn this year, one global spirits company is championing its portfolio of ready-to-drink cocktails as the silver lining of 2023.

Red Tree Beverages, Coca-Cola’s “firewalled, wholly owned” subsidiary to explore beverage-alcohol, has no intention of getting into the distribution business, Red Tree president Jenny Dowdy said yesterday during Beer Marketer’s Insights fall seminar.

Boston Beer Company has the No. 1 share of the hard tea segment with Twisted Tea, the more than 20-year-old flavored malt beverage brand that continues to record exponential growth in scans.

Ready-to-drink (RTD) bev-alc continues to be a hot segment for beer, wine and spirits producers. However, the RTD landscape has become so extensive that its definitions have become blurry and sometimes confusing.

Incremental innovation and clear brand identity were running themes throughout Boston Beer’s presentation to wholesalers in Los Angeles last week. Boston Beer shared an edited recording of the meeting with Brewbound this week.

Volume improved slightly on a sequential basis across wine, spirits and flavored malt beverage categories, while decelerating across hard seltzer in the two-week period ending September 9, according to an analysis of NielsenIQ data by Goldman Sachs Equity Research.