How can Craft Beer brands thrive in a stagnant category?
The UK Craft beer category is treading water with a slim +1.9% volume growth YOY (NIQ EPOS data to 22nd Feb 2025) and only accounting for 4.7% of the total beer market.
The Beer category is dominated by Mainstream (63.9%) and World Beers (27.8%), and even Low/No Alcohol is gaining ground at 3.6% (a whopping +13.1% growth).
Added to that the residual effects of lockdown on the On Trade, and the cost-of-living crisis pushing prices up and squeezing margins, it’s no wonder that 100 craft beer breweries stopped trading last year.
With the major retailers rationalising their ranges and giving more shelf space to World Beers and No/Low, is there any good news for craft beer brands?
UK Beer Category
UK Craft Beer brand performance
Yes, there is. 8 of the top 20 brands showed YoY growth, with Northern Monk (+12%), 71 Brewing (+49.4%) and Jubel (+109.2%) leading the way. The growth of Jubel with its range of fruit beers is particularly telling.
Can craft beer brands grow in this category?
There’s plenty of evidence that growth can still be achieved...sectors within the category such as Fruit beer, Session abv and No/Low have all shown recent growth.
Brands can still find opportunities to grow, but it requires their teams to dig a lot deeper into data and insight than craft beer businesses have historically. Gone are the days of gut-feel NPD – Retail Buyers now expect a pitch to include commercial rational for a new listing, backed with evidence.
The first questions that a brand should be asking are:
1. Can they bring new shoppers into the brand?
2. And what Retail Buyers wants to know….can they bring new shoppers and incremental sales into the category?
The only way to answer those questions is to invest in category data…a blend of EPOS, Panel and bespoke insight.
However the good news is that it could be exactly that – an investment that delivers return, rather than looking at it as a cost.
Let’s tackle these one at a time and switch the focus onto your own business…can you bring new shoppers into your brand?
The only way to answer this is with a few more questions (sorry, more insight needed)...
1. Who currently buys you?
2. Who doesn’t buy you, and why not?
3. Where are you under-performing?
How many brands truly know who their consumers are and why they buy them?
And we don’t mean their Facebook page, mailing list or direct online shoppers. Those are unlikely to be representative of who buys them in the multiple retailers.
Do they have a younger or older demographic, male or female, affluent or not?
Even within these variables, brands shouldn’t look for a single answer...there is no 80/20 rule in this. In truth, every brand will have a blend of different shopper segments – the key is to recognise this, spot the groups you need to focus on and design your proposition accordingly.
Take Beavertown and William Brothers as two interesting examples below. Beavertown are the 2nd biggest brand in the UK, behind BrewDog, while William Brothers are 10th.
Their overall profile looks similar in terms of age and income (chart 1). However, when we split age into 10-year bands (chart 2) a very different picture emerges. Beavertown do well in each age band, over indexing with all but the 65+ shoppers. William Brothers do really well with 26–35-year-olds, a whopping 38% of their shoppers. They also do well with 65+…but they under-perform with the other key age groups.
Chart 1
Chart 2
Therefore, for William Bros the key to growth will be understanding why they’re doing well with those two very different groups and using those learnings with the other groups.
They can do this by diving deeper into the insight – what are the drinking preferences of those groups? What beer types do they prefer, do they prefer bottles or cans, what other brands do they buy, how often do they buy, and what are the most important factors when choosing their beer.
In summary, a lot of questions, but that’s the key to data and insight – asking the right questions and using the answers to build an evidence-based strategy for growth.
TRKR Ltd are a leading data and insights agency, and a connected partner of NIQ.
To receive a free copy of the reports discussed, and to discuss how data and insights can drive growth for your brand, email Director of Insights Mark Thomson at mark@trkr.co.uk.