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If beer, cider, wine, spirits and RTDs were competing in an 800m race based purely on growth, one of them would be lapping the other four at this point.
We called RTDs a “growth engine” in a previous blog. That wasn’t hyperbole – value rate of sale was up 21%, and value share had climbed from 5.6% to 6.82% in the first half of 2025.
Fast forward to Q1 2026 and that bold “growth engine” claim turns out to have been a massive understatement. RTDs grew 31% year on year. Beer was slightly down. Wine was slightly down. Cider barely moved. Spirit managed about 3%.
A category that still accounts for just 7.5% of total alcohol value is now contributing more to overall alcohol growth than every other category put together. Average store RTD sales have climbed from roughly £550 a month in early 2024 to around £850 by March 2026.
Those are the topline numbers. Look a little closer and you uncover a spicy tale of brand shake-ups, a product type being overtaken, and some very big companies arriving with the kind of distribution muscle that reshapes a category. If you’re an alcohol brand wanting to surf the trend wave in independent convenience, keep reading!
This is the one that made us do a double take.
Twelve months ago, Dragon Soop was the biggest RTD brand in UK independent convenience. BuzzBallz was sitting in eighth place.
In our last piece, they’d just broken into the top five and the momentum was obvious. We didn’t expect them to take the number one spot within a year.
Today the top five looks like this:
1. BuzzBallz (was 8th)
2. Dragon Soop (was 1st)
3. Au Vodka (was 2nd)
4. Smirnoff (was 3rd)
5. Jack Daniel’s & Coca-Cola (was 6th)
Three of the five best-selling individual RTD products are now all BuzzBallz. The entire top five reshuffled in a single year – and the brand that came out on top wasn’t even in the top three twelve months ago.
Further down the table, Suntory’s -196 brand has climbed 17 places, from 39th to 22nd, on the strength of just two products. They’ve recently launched a new Passionfruit Lemon flavour, so don’t be surprised if they keep climbing.
Here’s a shift that tells you something important about where this category is heading.
Spirit-based cocktails have overtaken spirit-based caffeinated RTDs to become the second biggest product type, behind premixes – your Jack Daniel’s & Coca-Cola, Smirnoff Ice, Au Vodka Pink Lemonade – which still account for 45% of all RTD value.
The RTD fixture in convenience used to lean heavily toward energy-drink-style serves – strong, caffeinated, functional. That’s changing. It’s becoming a cocktail fixture.
BuzzBallz’s rise from eighth to first is the most visible sign of that shift, and the data confirms it across the board. A year ago, caffeinated RTDs were the bigger product type. Spirit-based cocktails have now overtaken them.
Au Vodka isn’t taking third place lying down.
They've been spreading their range across multiple product types – cocktail cans (Strawberry Daiquiri and Blue Hawaiian) launched in 2024 as a direct format challenge to BuzzBallz, and their Ultra caffeinated range arrived in May 2025, pushing them into yet another product type.
Their limited edition Miami Mango vodka (10,000 bottles, 35.2% ABV) looks like a clever bit of forward planning: test a new flavour with a limited bottle run, build the demand, then roll it into the canned RTD range later.
And speaking of flavour trends – tropical is having a moment. Au Vodka’s Miami Mango, Suntory’s -196 Passionfruit Lemon, CCEP’s new Absolut Vodka & Sprite Pineapple, and Vogo’s Party Pouch range (which includes Tropical Deluxe among its launch flavours) all point in the same direction.
Four brands, four separate launches, one clear trend – crack out the paper tropical cocktail umbrellas...
This is the bit that should make everyone in the category sit up.
The established RTD brands are expanding fast. Dragon Soop has launched Dragon Soop X – a high-strength, caffeine-free range – and Dragon Soop Vodka Ice, a vodka-based RTD line that only went on sale on 1st May, so it's too early to see convenience sales data. Four Loko has a new high ABV remix RTD. The brands already in this category are not standing still.
But the bigger story is who's arriving from outside.
CCEP – Coca-Cola Europacific Partners – is pushing Absolut & Sprite through soft drinks distribution infrastructure. The Watermelon variant, launched a year ago, is already in around 3,000 convenience stores. The new Pineapple variant appeared across our estate in April and is starting to build. Monster Energy has entered alcohol entirely with Beast Unleashed.
These are companies with distribution reach and marketing budgets that most independent RTD brands simply don’t have. The category is getting crowded – and the new arrivals are not small.
RTDs are doing the heavy lifting for alcohol growth in independent convenience. A category with just 7.5% of total alcohol value is contributing more to overall growth than Beer, Spirit, and Wine combined. That’s remarkable on its own. But what makes it properly interesting is how unstable the inside of the category is. The number one brand changed in a year. The product type mix shifted underneath everyone. And the competitive set is about to get a lot harder.
If you’re in this category, the growth is the easy bit to see. The harder part – and the part that actually determines whether you win or lose – is seeing what’s moving underneath it in time to act. Brand shifts, product type changes, distribution patterns. By the time those show up in quarterly category reviews, the shelf has already moved.
The data in this piece is drawn from Retail Spotlight’s transaction dataset, covering 13,000+ independent convenience stores across the UK. If you want to see what’s happening in your category – which brands are gaining, where distribution is shifting, and what the RTD fixture looks like in your target stores – hit the contact us button below to get in touch.
