How cocktails in a can became Britain’s secret vice
Diane Abbott swigged one on a train. Britons glug £440m of them a year. And Asda alone sells 60 varieties...
LIVING in these vexed times, our ruling class has rarely seemed so distant from the people. So let’s raise a brimming glass to Diane Abbott for chancing upon a way to connect with the Great British public.
The Shadow Home Secretary made headlines at the weekend after a picture emerged of her swigging from a can of Marks & Spencer mojito while taking a London Overground train across her constituency at around 1pm last Saturday.
Yet, while she issued a contrite apology, our bank holidaying nation appeared profoundly unbothered. If anything, voters appeared to be delighted, rather than concerned, that a woman with designs on running our justice system was illegally drinking alcohol on public transport (Transport for London banned booze on its network more than a decade ago).
The fact Ms Abbott was apparently doing so alone, at lunchtime, barely seemed to register.
‘I have never felt so represented’ was one typically gleeful response to the controversy on Twitter. ‘We’ve all done it!’ declared another backer.
Meanwhile, Labour activists flooded social media with images of themselves supportively quaffing turquoise cans of the drink on trains and buses, under the hashtag #mojitogate, while more than 5,000 people have pledged on Facebook to ‘sip a cheeky mojito’ on the capital’s Underground train system in solidarity.
In sweltering Central London, reports soon emerged that M&S branches had begun to sell out of the £2.25 product, which contains two measures of rum, is 8 per cent alcohol by volume and, according to a drinks critic employed by modish website Vice, ‘tastes like old mint tea and is super-sweet . . . my teeth hurt after one sip’.
Images of empty in-store refrigerators went viral, prompting calls for the British retailer to build its next advertising campaign around the thirsty Corbynista and MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Abbott had, in other words, struck a chord.
But, in truth, we shouldn’t be surprised. For, while some prefer to make their aperitifs themselves, it turns out Abbott’s tipple of choice — budget, ready-mixed cocktails, usually sold in tin cans — have, in recent years, spawned quite the trend.
KNOWN in the trade by the acronym ‘ RTD’, meaning ‘ ready to drink’, the UK market for these often sickly- sweet products is currently worth £440 million a year, according to analysis by the Wine and Spirit Trade Association.
That’s more than ten times the market’s £40 million value a decade ago and equates to around £15 for each of Britain’s adult drinkers.
Cheap, refreshing and designed to appeal to the masses (especially younger drinkers with a sweet tooth), one might even argue that they’ve quietly replaced alcopops as our secret vice.
Indeed, in the U.S., where overall alcohol sales are falling by just under 1 per cent a year, industry tracker IWSR reckons millennials are helping the RTD market to expand by 6 per cent each year. On any trip to a major supermarket, one can see the effect writ large.
Ocado sells 53 ready- mixed cocktails, from Kahlua Espresso Style Martini to Malibu Pineapple Caribbean Rum with Coconut. Asda stocks 60, including a Baileys Iced Coffee Latte (nearly 20g of sugar per can) and a Southern Comfort Lemonade & Lime that channels ‘the spirit of New Orleans’.
Waitrose, meanwhile, knocks out tinnies of gin mixed with middleclass staples such as elderflower and Sicilian lemon, and Pink Dry Gin, which consumers are exhorted to ‘garnish with fresh strawberries’.
‘In the past few years, these canned drinks have really evolved from being full of fairly rubbish stuff into being quite smart,’ says Helen McGinn, doyenne of the Daily Mail’s Knackered Mothers’ Wine Club. ‘ They have been “premiumised” and become, dare I say it, rather respectable.’
Nowhere is that trend more evident than at Marks & Spencer, supplier of choice to the nation’s picnickers and historic arbiter of Middle England’s changing tastes.
Its Foodhalls located in major stations (RTDs are, as Abbott has demonstrated, particularly popular with rail travellers) now have refrigerators devoted to canned cocktails.
These are filled with colourful tins of such exotic- sounding concoctions as Blackberry Gin Bramble and Woo Woo (vodka with cranberry juice and peach flavouring), along with classic cocktails such as the Harvey Wallbanger, Cosmo, Bloody Mary and whisky with ginger ale.
There’s also a range of gin and tonics (regular and slimline) sold at three price-points: a ‘budget’ offering, a mid-market selection and a premium array of ‘smallbatch’ gin and tonics, with highfalutin themes such as ‘ spice’ and ‘zest’.
The more adventurous can also purchase a £2 Porn Star Martini in a can. Its launch before Christmas was overshadowed by controversy as aficionados of the drink — a mixture including vodka and passion fruit juice popularised by fly- onthe-wall TV shows Geordie Shore and The Only Way Is Essex — say it should properly be served with a shot glass of prosecco on the side.
Analysts, for their part, sum up the reasons behind this trend in a single word: convenience.
Put simply, modern consumers are less likely to want to bother mixing their own drinks, filling ice trays, slicing lemons and washing up glassware, when they can merely crack open a can.
And if they’re drinking on the hoof (as more and more seem to) convenience is more important still. Punters attending a music festival or filling a picnic hamper, for example, find it far easier to bring along a few cans than to pack wine bottles, corkscrews and plastic tumblers. And, while a ready-made Pimm’s may not match a properly assembled version of the classic summer drink, complete with sliced lemon, strawberries and mint, it makes for a passable alternative.
Advances in packaging technology have also helped, because modern cans are far less likely to lend a metallic ‘taint’ to drinks (which also explains why so many trendy craft ales are now sold in cans, rather than bottles).
What’s more, environmentalists prefer them to plastic and glass alternatives because cans are more easily recycled.
Intriguingly, RTDs have been around for more than 30 years. In 1984, James Burrough, the firm that owned Beefeater gin, announced it would launch a canned gin and tonic, retailing for a princely 99p.
And the following year, Britvic released a range of ready-mixed cocktails with a relatively low alcohol content.
It wasn’t until the mid-Nineties that the trend really took off, however, thanks to sugary lemonade products called Hooch and Two Dogs, which created an entirely new drinks sector, known as alcopops. BY THE early 2000s, the market for these drinks was worth a whopping £1.3 billion, but brands also found themselves on borrowed time, being widely pilloried for appealing to children by producing products with bright packaging, a high sugar content and low prices.
In 2004, with regulators circling, demand dropped off a cliff.
Smirnoff Ice lost 12 per cent of its market share almost overnight. Diageo, until recently the world’s largest distiller, was forced to scrap several RTDs, including Captain Morgan Gold, a budget rum-based product, and Gordon’s Edge, a take on gin and lemon, losing tens of millions of pounds in the process.
The comeback started a few years later, when the drinks industry began to experiment with RTDs — previously cheap, mass-market products — for more sophisticated consumers.
Initially, the trend was met with stiff resistance.
A famous 2009 episode of TV’s Dragon’s Den saw a Surrey entrepreneur called James Nash unveil Le Froglet, a range of French wines sold in single-serve plastic glasses with a tear-off lid.
He offered the investors a 25 per cent share in his business for £ 250,000, but got short shrift. Dragon Duncan Bannatyne was particularly dismissive, saying: ‘People don’t want to buy wine in plastic glasses like that with a seal on top. For that reason, I’m out.’
It was, however, a costly mistake: Le Froglet quickly started selling out in M& S and remains on its shelves.
Meanwhile, in a curious example of things coming full circle, traditional drinks are seeking to exploit the success of RTDs.
Premium beer brand Peroni is soon to launch its product in thin metal cans (modelled on the M&S cocktail range), while Waitrose will this summer begin to sell an upmarket rosé wine — Mirabeau en Provence — in what the producer calls ‘canettes’.
‘ It’s a lifestyle thing,’ is how Mirabeau’s founder, Stephen Cronk, puts it. ‘ Since more of us live alone, it’s also good to make it in a format that means you can just open a glass of wine, rather than a whole bottle.
‘People want their drinks to be portable, too, so they can bring them to concerts, festivals, picnics and other special occasions.’
Or, indeed, on a lunchtime train journey across North London.