Snooper
Hard seltzer is finding its home In mid-2020 hard seltzer as a new category was suffering from homelessness on the shelf and in the fridge, but over summer this situation has changed dramatically, writes Laurie Wespes, CEO of Snooper.
Laurie Wespes CEO Snooper
Nearly six months ago we wrote about how our shopper Snoopers, as part of our monthly RTD data tracking series, had discovered a degree of instore category homelessness for the then-new hard seltzer category. At that time, despite a growing number of brands and investment in some POS materials such as wobblers and fridge decals, hard seltzers were spread across fridges. There were six or seven commonly observed brands last August, and White Claw, which according to Lion made $4m in sales in its first week after launch in October, was yet to come. Fast forward to February 2020 and the picture looks rather different, and rosier, for hard seltzers, although potentially at the expense of cider and some other RTDs. We sent our Snoopers back into some of the same stores we monitored in August and November 2020 to see what had changed across six months. Below is what we found.
Brand proliferation continues Then (August 2020): Most stores our shoppers visited ranged at least one hard seltzer brand and up to 10 SKUs. We had observed an average fivefold increase in the number of brands between June and August, albeit Quincy, Actual and Good Times were the most distributed brands. Now (February 2021): In 70 per cent of the stores we visited, the number of brands had increased dramatically over the past quarter. More than 40 different brands were found across independent and national chains, with both large manufacturers such as Lion and Diageo and smaller brands pushing hard, as there were up to 13 brands observed in a single store. The average number of brands per store increased from 1.6 in August to 3.8 in February.
A home on the shelf (and elsewhere) Then: The biggest issue was a lack of layout consistency, with hard seltzer ‘broken up’ as a category rather than blocked together, with some brands sitting adjacent some categories and other brands adjacent other categories. And where seltzers were ranged together, the adjacencies varied tremendously; from 26 | National Liquor News