Bryan Roth Talks Beverage Trends For a Confusing Time
And some of them are unexpected
Bryan Roth, co-founder of Sightlines, says one of the top trends of the moment is ‘confusion’.
Bryan, who’s a brilliant analyst, came on Drinks Insider at the start of 2025 to talk about market trends in the USA, and it seems a good time to reprise that conversation.
Given that nobody knows what’s going on with tariffs and trade wars, what are we right now if not confused?
Bryan Roth, Sightlines
The big beverage trends:
1. Confusion
Bryan says people spent 2024 asking him which drinks would be popular in 2025. But everything was changing so fast, the data wasn’t keeping up. He began to think that the correct way to understand the market was through behaviours, not beverages.
“For me, a key trend was one of confusion,” he says.
In other words, if you’re confused about what’s going on, don’t worry about it — you’re in the same boat as everybody else. Including consumers.
2. Little treat culture
Americans made more shopping trips in 2024 than they did in 2019 — but they’re buying the same number of products overall.
“There is an emotional attachment to the idea of shopping now, perhaps more so than before,” says Bryan, calling it ‘little treat culture’.
Some of the extra shopping trips might represent people going to multiple places to get better deals, but people are also making more impulse purchases of small items.
Bryan believes one of the biggest things driving this behaviour is the rise of convenience stores.
“The behaviour that we’ve created by shopping at a convenience store is spilling over into the way that we think about and interact with our shopping behaviours elsewhere,” he says. “We go in, we buy a handful of items that we need for that day, and then maybe two or three days later we make an additional shopping trip to fill up whatever we need again.”
This makes single-serve options more important than ever before.
“We've always had a shelf of single serve options, but never have we had the vast sea of brands and flavour experiences,” that’s available now,” he says.
The competition is now so fierce, that the more trialling options available, the better.
3. Falling brand loyalty
Recent reports suggest that brand loyalty is fading, with more than a third of American consumers now preferring to buy based on the best deal. As McKinsey reports, this trend is international.
Bryan says the fact that legacy brands are losing share is “just a mathematical game” because of the sheer number of new entrants to the market.
Not only that, but people are searching for new flavours, or looking for something extra from the foods and beverages they buy.
The retail media calls this new breed of shoppers ‘zero consumers’, characterised by “zero patience, zero boundaries and, crucially, zero loyalty”.
4. The barrier of choice
Too much choice means old categories like the ‘wine drinker’ or the ‘beer drinker’ are collapsing.
“Wine used to think it competes with wine, beer, and spirits, or just wine,” says Bryan. “Today in the US, two thirds of drinkers consume across beer, wine, and spirits. So they're thinking across all these things.”
That means that beer is now competing with tequila buzzballs, or a wine hybrid.
But so much choice leads to the paradox of choice, or what Bryan calls the “invisible barrier of choice”. It’s paralysing. “And so to minimise the friction for consumers is really, really important,” he says.
Bryan says an example of how to overcome this can be found on TheZeroProof website, “where if you go to the website they have a section, a pulldown tab called Occasions, and it's all vibes”.
Another one he mentions is a “great small upstart wine brand based in New England here in the US called Pizza Wine. They focused on on-premise opportunities with pizzerias. If I walk into a pizzeria and I'm scanning a beverage menu and I see pizza, wine, that's it, right? It's removing this invisible barrier of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to look through all these different options to figure something out’.”
5. Carbonation
The strangest things can catch fire and, according to Bryan, carbonation is killing it.
“American drinkers have more choices than ever before, and one of the things that they are increasingly becoming aware of is the texture of the drinks that they consume,” he says.
It's a trend that started around 2016-2017 with the rise of the hard seltzer and flavoured sparkling water brands and has taken off from there.
In a world of infinite choice, elements like texture are a way to differentiate.
6. More sleep
“Americans are sleeping more now than they have at any point in the last 25 years,” says Bryan.
The US government coordinates a survey called the American Time Use Survey and has clocked the fact that people are spending more time with their eyes shut.
“This started showing up in the early opening days post-Covid, where people were turning that five o'clock happy hour into a three o'clock late lunch with a drink,” he says.
Cocktail sales have increased during the day. “Anything before 10:00 PM has grown in share, while after 10:00 PM has declined.”
7. Multi-generational households
Europeans have long been accustomed to living in multi-generational households, and now it’s happening in the US as well.
Bryan says this became obvious in 2024. “I believe it was 17% of homes sold were specifically purchased for multi-generational households. It's the highest level ever.”
He says it’s not just because younger people lack the money to rent or buy their own property.
“For some people it is because you have a parent who needs some amount of caregiving and maybe you have a child along the way too. I don't want to pigeonhole it purely as a budgetary restriction,” he says, as some people are doing it just because they like it.
“It's just nice. They feel close with their family in ways that this is just advantageous,” he says.
But it changes the way people drink. As you can imagine, drinking around parents might be uncomfortable for many younger people. Bryan says there’s an upside, however.
“Now with multiple people in the house, the idea of having a bottle of wine with a meal becomes a shared experience in the way it's meant to be,” he says.
This is only a fraction of what Bryan talked about, from the impact (or not) of cannabis on the alcohol market, to the addition of flavours to products. You can find the whole thing here.
Alcohol and Health
I know that a whole bunch of you subscribe to this newsletter to get insights into the alcohol and health issue, and there are some posts coming shortly. (Honestly!)
In the meantime, you might be interested in some interviews I’ve done recently:
This one is from last week, when I appeared on KOIN 06 in Portland. I still haven’t had the courage to look at it:
This is a very short discussion on the Bottled in China podcast.
And here’s a longer and more in-depth discussion on Tim Atkin MW’s Cork Talk.
Some More News!
The Drinks Insider podcast is now fortnightly, because Lulie Halstead and I have launched a podcast together! Called A Question of Drinks, it’s like the Freakonomics of drinks. Each episode we take a question about drinks and explore it from every angle, looking at why some drinks become popular, some fade away, and some keep on keeping on.
We’ve already examined questions like why people are drinking less; how the gin and tonic became a tool of conquest; and whether award-winning wines taste better or not. Next week — Guinness!
You can find it on Amazon, Spotify or Apple.
