After a decade of social media hype, beautiful packaging and expensive publicity, is it time to call last orders on no-low?

Pick up a trade magazine, open your emails or attend an industry trade show and you will be guaranteed an article on the phenomenon known as no-low, a combined category of low and no alcohol beverages that has taken the drinks world by storm.

Except that it hasn’t — not even close. No-low is the wine equivalent of small boat crossings: an industry hot topic that generates polarised opinions, stokes anger and acts as a convenient scapegoat for much larger and more complex issues.

Low quality information is rife. Comprehensive data can be hard to come by, as most companies only release flattering and selective figures. The growth narrative is freely distributed by the people selling the products, while falling sales or disappointing news — such as Diageo-backed Seedlip’s delisting in Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose — doesn’t get communicated.

Big Publicity, Small Beer

According to Worldpanel consumer data, in the 52 weeks to December 2025, no-alcohol (defined as <1% ABV) and low-alcohol (1-5% ABV) still wine combined accounted for 1.5% of still wine spend in the UK off-trade — down from 1.7% four years earlier. Standard wine (above 9% ABV) held 95.5%, with the remaining approximately 3% accounted for by wines of intermediate strength (5–9% ABV).

No-alcohol wine grew within the no-low category, but largely by cannibalising low-alcohol wine’s sales, which have collapsed, rather than by winning drinkers from full-strength wine. Combined, no-and-low still wine was worth £102.9m in 2022 and £89.4m in 2025 — a 13.1% overall decline, even if no-alcohol grew within it.

Sparkling is the better story for no-low advocates, with combined no-low sparkling growing from £35.6m to £53.1m and spend share moving from 3.5% to 5.0%. But across still and sparkling combined, no-low wine totals approximately £142m against a £6.76bn off-trade market.

In both categories the pattern is the same: it is the low and middle tiers that have collapsed, partly driven by UK duty reforms, with no-alcohol being a major beneficiary.

The loyalty data is where things get interesting. In every no/low wine subcategory, more than two thirds of buyers purchase it only once a year. These are not Champagne or Prosecco drinkers building a new behaviour but people picking something up in week one of January or getting something for the drivers at Christmas. Compare this to standard wine, where around three quarters of buyers purchase more than once a year.[1]

The on-trade numbers are also sobering. A 2025 peer-reviewed Sheffield/UCL study, using CGA by NielsenIQ data across 499 weeks, estimated all no-low products combined — beer, wine, spirits, the lot — at 1.0% of on-trade alcohol sales volume. And, even though 87% of pubs list at least one no-low beer — typically a few bottles at the back of a fridge — only 6.8% of pubs offer any draught no-low product, which hardly represents a major vote of confidence in the category.

The counter-argument will come that wine is the worst performing no-low drink and not representative of the success of the category. It’s true that no-alcohol beer is the standard bearer, backed by Heineken, AB InBev and Diageo with major R&D investment over a decade. Yet in 2026, partly thanks to an advantageous reform to duty rates, it accounts for a mere 2% of the total UK alcohol market.[2]

Meanwhile Madrí, an alcoholic lager launched in 2020 and brewed in the UK by Molson Coors, has passed £1bn in annual UK sales with off-trade revenues of £140m and growth of 12% year on year.[3]

Mintel puts the total UK market value of all no- and low-alcohol drinks — every beer, wine, spirit and RTD — at £413m.[4] New boy Madrí does more than twice that on its own, and is itself a minor player in the approximately £20bn beer market in the UK.

The Kids Are Alright

So what’s going wrong for no-low? For a start, the idea that people are switching from alcohol to no alcohol, which underpins the entire public health rationale for the category, barely registers. Only 1.8% of households are simultaneously increasing no-low purchasing and decreasing their alcohol consumption.[5] It seems the rest are adding, not swapping — perhaps having a no-alcohol beer with their lunch where they’d have had a glass of water, but still having wine with dinner.

One counter-argument runs that this doesn’t matter because Gen Z — health-obsessed, looksmaxxing and self-optimising — are going to drive future growth. Yet there’s no evidence for that, either — and plenty to the contrary.

In June 2025, IWSR published a press release headlined “Gen Z NOT the generation of moderation.“ Across 15  markets, the proportion of Gen Z legal-drinking-age adults consuming alcohol in the past six months rose from 66% in March 2023 to 73% in March 2025. In the UK the increase was 10% in two years, from 66% to 76%.

That’s simply massive. By comparison, adult smoking rates in England fell from around 20% in 2011 to 13% in 2021 — a decline that took a decade of sustained public health intervention, plain packaging legislation, the rise of vaping alternatives, duty escalation and mass media campaigns — all to achieve a drop of seven points. Gen Z drinking participation moved ten points in two years with no comparable intervention driving it. If anything, it moved against the prevailing cultural and policy wind.

This reflects the gradual correction of a data set that was skewed for several years by a cohort that came of drinking age during Covid restrictions. These early representatives of the generation showed abnormally low social participation rates. As newer cohorts reach legal drinking age under normal social conditions, they are filling out the numbers and pulling the averages back toward historical norms.

As Richard Halstead, IWSR’s COO of Consumer Insights, stated plainly: “The idea that [legal drinking age] Gen Z drinkers are somehow fundamentally different from other age groups isn’t supported by the evidence.“[6]

Decaf or Disaster

So where is the no-low category heading? Two comparisons might help illuminate the way forward.

The British Coffee Association reports that 20% of UK coffee consumers regularly choose decaf[7] — approximately 10% of the overall coffee market by value — a mature minority that is a small and stable part of the customer base rather than the future of it.

Decaf coffee didn’t help people quit coffee, nor did it undermine it — it reinforced it, helping drinkers maintain the habit on occasions when caffeine would otherwise have been problematic. No-low may be doing the same thing, which would make concerns about it replacing alcohol profoundly misconceived.

Plant-based meat took the other path: venture capital-fuelled, aggressively marketed and carefully branded. UK sales fell by £38.4m and 4.2% in volume in 2023 alone, one of the worst-performing grocery categories of the year, according to NIQ data reported in The Grocer.[8] Good Food Institute data puts the two-year decline at more than 13%.[9] It seems vegans decided they’d rather eat lentils and no meat than pay a premium for meat substitutes that were nowhere close to the flavour of the real thing.

The parallels for the no-low category are instructive. IWSR’s own data shows meaningful numbers of people saying they want to drink less. But wanting to drink less does not automatically translate into buying no-low. People find other ways: they buy half bottles, they have one less glass, they choose a real wine but at 13% rather than 15%. They might even find out that a can of good tonic with a wedge of lime and lots of ice is almost as good as a G&T — no £23 Seedlip required.

No-low is faltering, not because the underlying moderation trend has disappeared but because most people, given something other than Hobson’s choice, prefer the real thing. More uncomfortably for its advocates, and surprisingly for its detractors, the latest data suggests it is barely reducing alcohol consumption at all.

No-low, a movement with its roots in old-fashioned Biblical temperance, may now be doing more to normalise drinking than to reduce it. Those of us who love real wine, real beer and real spirits might not want to call time on it just yet.

[1] Worldpanel by Numerator, Purchase Panel, 52 w/e 28 December 2025; proprietary data
[2] IWSR, UK No-Alcohol Market: Key Statistics and Trends, January 2025; https://www.theiwsr.com/insight/the-uk-no-alcohol-market-key-statistics-and-trends/
[3] Molson Coors press release, December 2025; https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Article/2025/12/08/madri-excepcional-hits-1bn-annual-sales-as-premium-lager-brand-marks-fifth-anniversary
[4] Mintel, UK Low- and No-Alcohol Drinks Consumer Report, May 2025; https://store.mintel.com/report/uk-attitudes-towards-low-and-no-alcohol-drinks-market-report
[5] Wilson LB et al., Addiction, 2025;120(8):1655–1665; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40116140/
[6] IWSR, June 2025; https://www.theiwsr.com/insight/press-release/gen-z-not-the-generation-of-moderation-survey-reveals/
[7] https://britishcoffeeassociation.org/, and personal conversation
[8] https://thegrocer.co.uk/top-products/meat-free-2023-plant-based-feels-brunt-of-tight-budgets/686245.article
[9] https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2024/08/13/How-plant-based-foods-can-regain-their-market-strength/

Photo by Marcus Woodbridge on Unsplash