John Beaudette | Beaudette Beverage Group | Founder, BEValuator.com

There is little question that ready-to-drink products have been one of the biggest growth stories in beverage alcohol. Consumers like the convenience, retailers have devoted more space to the category, and both established companies and entrepreneurs have invested heavily in it.

But after more than four decades in the beverage alcohol business, I think there is an important distinction that can sometimes get lost in all the excitement:

Category growth and brand value are not the same thing.

A rapidly growing category can create tremendous opportunities. It can also make it easier to overlook some of the fundamentals that ultimately determine whether an individual brand is building meaningful long-term value.

If two RTD brands each sell 100,000 cases, they can still be dramatically different businesses, and potentially worth dramatically different amounts.

One may have strong consumer pull, excellent velocities, healthy margins and a growing base of repeat purchasers. The other may have reached the same volume through aggressive expansion, promotional spending and continually adding new distribution.

The case volume may look similar. The underlying value may not be.

Distribution Is Important. But What Happens After You Get It?

Throughout my career, I have seen emerging brands put enormous emphasis on gaining distribution. That is understandable. Without distribution, it is very difficult to build a beverage alcohol brand.

But getting into an account is only the beginning. The more important questions are what happens afterward.

Does the product sell through? Does the retailer reorder it? Does velocity improve as awareness builds? Can the brand maintain its shelf position without excessive discounting or promotional spending?

I would much rather see an emerging brand performing exceptionally well in a smaller number of accounts than one that has accumulated thousands of placements that are not producing meaningful movement.

Door count can tell you how widely a brand has been placed. It does not necessarily tell you how healthy the brand is.

That distinction is particularly important in RTDs because the category has attracted so many new products.

Is the Consumer Buying the Brand or the Format?

I think this may ultimately become one of the more interesting questions in valuing RTD brands.

Consumers clearly like the RTD format. But convenience alone does not necessarily create brand equity.

If a consumer buys a canned margarita, vodka soda or tequila-based cocktail, what brings that consumer back the second or third time? Is it the brand, the taste, the price, the package or the alcohol base? Or simply the fact that the consumer wanted a convenient cocktail and this one happened to be available?

For founders and investors, the distinction matters. The most valuable RTD brands will be those that develop an identity and consumer following that goes beyond simply participating in a growing category.

That becomes even more important as shelves get crowded and retailers inevitably begin deciding which brands deserve to stay.

A Brand I Watched Early: The Finnish Long Drink

The Finnish Long Drink is a particularly good example of the difference between participating in a growing category and building a brand with real enterprise value.

I had an opportunity to see the brand relatively early in its U.S. development because it was a client of MHW, the company I founded and ran for decades. At the time, the founders were introducing most American consumers not only to a new brand, but also to a drink with which they had little familiarity—Finland’s traditional long drink.

The subsequent growth was extraordinary. Industry reports show the brand moving from a little over 200,000 9-liter cases in 2020 to approximately 3.2 million cases in 2025. In April 2026, Mark Anthony Group, the company behind White Claw and one of the most accomplished operators in the RTD business, announced its acquisition of the brand.

But the most useful part of the story is not simply the size of the case sales or the fact that the company was acquired. It is why Long Drink was able to create that value.

The product had a distinctive taste and an authentic Finnish story connected to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. It was not another minor variation of a familiar canned cocktail. Sampling was important because consumers could quickly understand the difference once they tried it, and the product gave them a reason to buy it again.

The brand also benefited from prominent investors and partners, including Miles Teller. But celebrity involvement did not have to substitute for the product. Teller reportedly discovered Long Drink at a tasting, liked it and later became an investor and co-owner. That is very different from trying to manufacture a beverage around a celebrity name and hoping the association creates consumer loyalty.

Most importantly, consumer acceptance continued as distribution expanded. Strong movement justified more distribution; broader distribution created more trial; and the product continued to perform as the footprint grew.

By the time Mark Anthony acquired the company, it was not buying a story about what the brand might someday become. It was acquiring a differentiated brand that had already demonstrated substantial consumer demand, scale and a clear point of difference.

The distribution followed the consumer. The consumer did not have to be manufactured to justify the distribution.

There Is More Than One Path to Success

The Finnish Long Drink is not the only model. High Noon, for example, succeeded with a proposition consumers could understand immediately: vodka and real juice, strong branding, a clear drinking occasion, and exceptional distribution and execution behind it.

The two brands followed different paths. Long Drink introduced many Americans to a distinctive Finnish product and story. High Noon made a familiar proposition unusually clear and executed it at enormous scale.

What they share is more important than what separates them. Both gave consumers a reason to choose the brand, not merely the RTD format, and both converted distribution into sustained movement.

There is no single formula for creating a valuable RTD brand. But there must be evidence that the brand itself is becoming valuable.

Growth Can Be Expensive

Another lesson I have learned over the years is that growth by itself does not tell you enough about the health of a beverage business. You have to understand what it costs to produce that growth.

RTDs can involve complicated economics: packaging, co-packing, freight, distributor and retailer margins, promotional allowances, sampling, marketing, and the working capital necessary to support inventory across an expanding distribution network.

A brand can be growing quickly while requiring substantial amounts of new capital to support that growth. That does not mean it is not a good business. Many successful beverage brands required significant investment before reaching profitability.

But there is an enormous difference between investing behind a business whose underlying economics improve with scale and continually funding growth that never produces attractive economics.

Velocity Still Matters

One of the simplest measurements in the beverage business remains one of the most important: how much product is actually moving through the accounts where it has been placed?

This is why I continue to put so much emphasis on depletion information when evaluating emerging brands. Total case sales matter. Distribution matters. Revenue matters. But I also want to know what is happening underneath those numbers.

Which markets are working? Which accounts are reordering? Where are velocities strongest? Are existing accounts growing, or is virtually all of the company’s growth coming from opening new accounts and new markets?

Those questions can tell a very different story than total case volume alone.

The Distribution Environment Has Also Changed

This is particularly relevant today.

I have written recently about how difficult the U.S. environment has become for emerging wine and spirits brands. Distributor consolidation, retailer consolidation, tighter working capital, increased competition for attention and the recent disruption within the wholesale tier have all made building a national brand more challenging.

RTDs are not immune from those pressures simply because the category is growing. In fact, the large number of new entrants makes execution even more important.

A brand that demonstrates strong velocities and repeatable consumer demand has something valuable when it approaches a distributor or retailer. A brand that primarily demonstrates that it has raised capital and secured placements has a much harder story to sustain.

So What Creates Value?

When I look at emerging beverage brands, including through the valuation work we do with BEValuator, I do not believe there is any single number that determines value.

Growth certainly matters. But so do the quality and sustainability of that growth.

I want to understand distribution, depletion trends, velocity, gross margins, pricing, competitive position, management, capital requirements and the amount of investment that may still be necessary to reach the next stage.

I also want to understand something that is harder to put into a spreadsheet:

Is this becoming a brand that somebody else is eventually going to want to own?

The Finnish Long Drink ultimately answered that question. For an RTD founder, it is a question worth asking long before anyone is actually considering a sale.

The Opportunity Is Real

None of this is intended to diminish the opportunity in RTDs. Quite the opposite.

The consumer shift toward convenience and prepared cocktails has created an important part of the beverage alcohol business, and I believe there will be significant winners.

But as the category matures, I suspect we will see an increasingly wide separation between brands that participated in the RTD growth story and brands that actually created substantial enterprise value from it.

The brands that ultimately become valuable will not necessarily be the ones that expanded the fastest. They will be the ones that can demonstrate that consumers want the product, retailers want to keep it, distributors have a reason to support it, and the economics justify continued investment.

John Beaudette
Beaudette Beverage Group
Founder, BEValuator.com