Roughly half of all beverage alcohol consumers do not associate alcoholic beverages with features of a wellness lifestyle. However, of those who do, two thirds perceive wine as an overall healthier choice compared to hard seltzer, spirits and beer.
That’s the conclusion of a just-released study by Nielsen for Wine Market Council that sought to better understand how wine is perceived as compared to other beverage alcohol categories such as beer, spirits, and hard seltzers.
Three categories of wellness were defined, based on what consumers considered important to a healthy lifestyle.
The first and largest group is activity focused, rating exercise, stress management, and time with family as most important for wellness.
The second is consumers whose primary focus is on diet and ingredients with an orientation to reducing sugar, calories, and carbs.
The third and smallest group includes those who are ‘alcohol-concerned,’ and focus on reducing the amount of alcohol consumed or seek lower alcohol products. These last two groups also value exercise and social activities but differ significantly on the important factors in food and beverages consumed.
“We’re tempted to ascribe consumer choices to the ‘trend du jour,’ be it reduced calories or cutting back alcohol. But in fact, the consumption trends we’re seeing now are a complicated mix of health perceptions, taste and social influences, magnified by the pandemic,” said Christian Miller, Wine Market Council Director of Research.
“Wellness factors that are important vary person to person and the products that are credible depend on the attribute being stressed. The good news for wine is that it isn’t particularly vulnerable on any one factor and so far, has kept its position as the alcoholic beverage most compatible with a wellness lifestyle in general. However, we are at the start of a very dynamic phase in this area, and consumers are going to be bombarded with a lot of new products and claims, so we need to keep an eye on this topic.”
Roughly half of all beverage alcohol consumers do not associate alcoholic beverages with features of a wellness lifestyle.
However, of those who do, two-thirds perceive wine as an overall healthier choice compared to hard seltzer, spirits and beer. Hard seltzer does better with diet/ingredient-focused consumers and is seen as hitting the mark for lower calories, carbs and sugar.
Those whose wellness concerns were focused on diet and ingredients were less likely to be cutting back on hard seltzer, while those whose concerns were alcohol-focused were more likely to be cutting back on spirits and less likely hard seltzer.
Core wine consumers ranked reducing calories and artificial ingredients, and eating more plant-based foods, as higher priorities than less frequent wine consumers, who were in turn higher than non-wine drinkers.
The study also looked at overall bev/al trends, which have been decreasing, and finds the No. 1 reason for the decline has been fewer social situations where consumers might drink, no doubt correlating with the pandemic.
Given that there have been fewer social occasions, the study found that taste is the leading reason for not or only occasionally drinking wine.
A general dissatisfaction with drinking was the second reason for decline in consumption, while third were factors related to dietary and eating habits.
Also of note: Most consumers drink and purchase alcoholic beverages across multiple categories, rather than focusing the majority of their consumption on a single category such as beer or wine.
Seltzer’s surge vs. wine appears partly related to health/wellness perceptions, but there are clearly other factors. Seltzer is seen by significantly more as low calorie, carb and sugar, but wine is perceived by more as a healthier
choice compared to other beverage alcohol.
While hard seltzer picked up share from those consumers reducing wine consumption, overall, more wine drinkers reported increasing wine and hard seltzer than those who said they were drinking less wine and more hard seltzer. The big loser in this equation appears to be beer, ceding purchases to both wine and hard seltzers.