And they’re national or regional brands – not global.
The world’s top 100 fastest-growing spirits brands, categorized by their respective case volume growth last year, collectively grew by 11%, compared to total global category growth of 0.8% in 2018. Those 100 leading brands, across all the major spirits categories, represent 690.5m nine-liter cases of the world’s total 3.17billion cases of spirits.
These figures – and more than 1.5m other points of data – are included in the just-released IWSR Drinks Market Analysis Global Database.
The top-selling brand in the world, which is also the product that added the most cases to its total volume last year, was Korea’s Jinro soju, growing 6.4% to a total of 80.9m cases. (Interestingly, Jinro sells 47m more cases than the next-largest brand in the world, Officer’s Choice whisky, which posted 33.8m cases last year, an increase of 5.6%.) The majority of brands that top the list of fastest-growing are national or regional products, including soju, baijiu, and Indian whisky.
“Though we saw a decline in beer and wine consumption last year, brands in the spirits category continue to enjoy great consumer loyalty,” says Mark Meek, IWSR’s CEO. “It’s particularly interesting to see the growth of gin brands, the category which experienced the largest gain in global beverage alcohol consumption in 2018.”