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By Mike Kostyo of Datassential
The fastest-growing cocktails on menus this year are a mix of old and new favorites featuring a wide range of flavors and spirits. From “the best pizza joint in every state” to “the top 10 types of nuts” and “92.5 things you are doing wrong on your menu” — let’s face it, a lot of lists are nonsense. They’re opinions masquerading as facts, or “listicles” based on a quick Google search, all designed to get readers to click on a link and start arguing in the comments … “how dare you say cashews are better than pistachios!” So how do you come up with a list of the top 10 cocktails of the year that actually means something? For this list, we dove into the data in Datassential’s MenuTrends database, which has over 100,000 menus that are updated every year, all from a restaurant base that is balanced against the census to make certain it’s an accurate depiction of the U.S. dining landscape. It’s a wide range of concepts, including both chains and independent restaurants in every segment, from fast food to fine dining. From this database, we looked at only those restaurants that serve alcohol, and ran the numbers on which cocktails have grown the fastest on those menus in just the past year, to see what has truly been trending on the American drink menu. These aren’t necessarily the most prevalent or common cocktails on menus. In fact, some of the cocktails on this list are only one or two percent of menus today, but their rapid and substantial recent growth means they could become the next big thing on menus and retail
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shelves in the years ahead. A few of these trending cocktails will almost certainly follow the path of drinks like the Negroni, which was on less than one percent of menus a decade ago and can be found on seven percent of them today — huge growth for a cocktail. In fact, Negronis will almost certainly hit one out of every 10 cocktail menus in the next few years according to Haiku, our machine learning prediction engine. While the Negroni has been on the list of the top 10 fastest-growing cocktails in past years, it was edged out this year by other options, including a variation on the drink. In fact, this year’s list of the fastest-growing cocktails represents a wide range of flavors, spirits and influences. For many years the list was dominated by Whiskey, but this year Gin and Tequila show up numerous times (though, interestingly, Vodka isn’t featured in any of the drinks on this list). The “everything old is new again” trend also continues to make its mark on drink menus, with a number of cocktails on this list gaining new life on menus as bartenders play with craft spirits and unique flavors. You may already have a few of these on your menu, while others may inspire your menu in the year ahead and beyond. So here’s a look at the fastest-growing cocktails on menus in 2019 — what’s driving them, how operators are adapting them, and recipes for every single cocktail to make it easy to keep your menu relevant in today’s fast-moving trend cycle.