Non-Alcoholic Beer is Booming & Two Craft Brands Have Cornered the Market on Amazon

I drank my first beer this summer.

Let me clarify — I drank my first non-alcoholic beer this summer. 

While I do enjoy sipping on a nice lager as the weather heats up, I’ve recently encountered a few scenarios where drinking a cold one sounded delicious, but the effects of the alcohol didn’t:

• A barbecue before a long drive home
• A 10 a.m. haircut on a busy Saturday
• A mid-golf refreshment (the jury’s still out on whether it would have mattered or not for my golf swing)

But this isn’t only about making sensible choices. I wouldn’t have snagged a non-alcoholic beer if it wasn’t an option. 

The availability and — perhaps most importantly — quality of non-alcoholic beer has skyrocketed in recent years, leading to a surge in demand and an increasingly crowded market (especially on Amazon).

In this article, we’ll unpack the growing interest in non-alcoholic beers and explore which brands have brewed up the biggest revenue, sales, and market share on Amazon.

The ‘sober curious’ movement

Studies show that young adults are consuming less alcohol than those in previous generations. Given the wider cultural focus on physical and mental health (and alcohol’s well-documented negative impact on both), an emphasis on living sober has emerged. 

It’s also worth examining alcohol consumption through a post-pandemic lens. A surge in lockdown-influenced drinking led to a 34% rise in alcohol sales early in the pandemic. Balancing out that “pandemic hangover” by cutting back on booze feels like a natural reaction.  

I’ve seen it firsthand. 

In my network, this past January felt like the “driest” to date, with more and more folks ringing in the new year on a sober note.

Data from Google Trends confirms it. The search volume for “dry January” climbed significantly over the past five years.

That interest has translated to Amazon, too. 

We’ll cover beer more specifically in the next sections, but look at this data from Jungle Scout Keyword Scout. It shows searches on Amazon for “non alcoholic drinks” over the past two years.

Notable spikes occur during time periods associated with heavier drinking — mid-summer and, of course, the holidays — but it’s clear that interest is rising.

Brewing better-tasting non-alcoholic beer

Demand is one thing, but brands can’t meet it without a compelling product.

Non-alcoholic beer isn’t brand new. O’Doul’s has been on liquor store shelves for decades. 

In 2017, Heineken launched its own “0.0” beer, which is now one of the best-selling non-alcoholic beers on the market (overall, not exclusively on Amazon). As part of the company’s marketing plan to give away free samples during the pandemic, I ended up receiving two cases of Heineken 0.0 at a drive-in movie.

I wasn’t impressed. It tasted watered down and wasn’t nearly compelling enough to be considered a worthy alternative to other alcoholic beverages.

Luckily, manufacturers have substantially improved their brewing process — the details of which understandably remain a relative industry secret — and better-tasting non-alcoholic beer has come at the perfect time.

Non-alcoholic beer on Amazon: The top brands

We already examined the steady rise in searches for “non alcoholic drinks” on Amazon. But searches for “non alcoholic beer” are even higher, and perhaps a bit less prone to the same seasonal volatility we saw in the previous graph. 

Let’s take a look at which brands have capitalized on the surge.

We built a segment in Jungle Scout Cobalt by filtering for Amazon listings with “non-alcoholic beer” in the title.

The graph below shows the top brands by market share based on unit sales over the past year.

Among the top 10 brands in this segment, Athletic Brewing Company (which we’ll discuss in detail later) absolutely crushes with a 45% market share, followed by Go Brewing at 31%.

It’s also notable that Heineken — which dominates overall (off-Amazon) sales for non-alcoholic beer (it posted $83.6 million in sales in 2022) — ranks so far behind craft NA beer brands.

This applies to the revenue data as well.

My theory? Massive, billion-dollar corporations like Coors, Budweiser, and Heineken simply don’t prioritize Amazon as a platform. Their success off Amazon, in liquor and grocery stores worldwide, is all they need, and their foray into the non-alcoholic market represents only a sliver of their overall portfolio (about 7%, in Heineken’s case).

As a result, they’ve forfeited a huge chunk of market share to brands specializing in non-alcoholic beer and investing in their Amazon business.

The rise (and recent fall) of Athletic Brewing Company

Bill Shufelt was working on Wall Street in 2014 when he had an idea. 

He wanted a beer that tasted great, could keep up with his busy, healthy lifestyle, and wouldn’t leave him obliterated after a night of drinking. He recruited John Walker, who’d already carved out a successful career brewing beer, and together, they spent years testing and iterating hundreds of batches of non-alcoholic beers, officially launching Athletic Brewing Company in 2017.

Look at the top-selling products in the non-alcoholic beer market. Over one-third of them belong to Athletic Brewing, and the estimated revenue numbers are massive!

Like a lot of brands who dominate their markets on Amazon (many of which we cover here at Jungle Scout), Athletic Brewing Company (which recently closed a $50 million funding round) has succeeded by:

1. Building a great brand identity
2. Partnering with big influencers
3. Investing in its Amazon presence

1. Savvy branding and alignment with its customers

Athletic Brewing concocted a great-tasting non-alcoholic beer. However, its marketing strategy and positioning have really made the brand stick.

Its tagline—“Fit for All Times”—emphasizes the idea that non-alcoholic beer can be consumed anywhere: after the gym, at the office, or on the trail. True to its name, Athletic Brewing’s savviest brand awareness move was sponsoring athletic events, such as 5Ks, marathons, and Ironmans.

“That first summer on the market, I signed up to sponsor 70 athletic events,” Sufelt told This is Working host Daniel Roth. “Most of it was just emailing race directors asking if I could show up for free with a cooler and hand out hundreds of beers at the finish line of their race.”

Further aligning with its adventure- and outdoors-minded target audience, the company is a certified B-Corp that gives back up to $2 million yearly to restore local trails. 

Its new Paceline Pedal IPA honors Closer to Free Ride, an annual cycling based in Connecticut (where Athletic was founded) that benefits cancer research. Athletic Brewing plans to donate $25,000 of the beer’s proceeds to Smillow Cancer Hospital and Yale Cancer Center.

Athletic Brewing took a great-tasting non-alcoholic beer, marketed it to the perfect target audience, and established a charitable, altruistic identity. It also offers a handful of “Lite” low-calorie options — perfect for its health-conscious athlete consumers.

2. Well-chosen partnerships and strong social media marketing

Athletic Brewing doubled down on its target audience by recruiting some notable celebrity athletes, including Arsenal Football Club, fitness instructor Kendall Toole, tennis player Cameron Norrie, and WNBA star Jewell Loyd.

The brand also spotlights amateur athletes as part of its Ambassador program and recently launched a merchandise line with athleisure brand Rhone.

And one at the company’s Instagram page — full of surfers, runners, hikers, cyclists, and snowboarders (basically a whole bunch of active people drinking non-alcoholic beer) — gives you an instant summation of its brand. 

3. An investment in Amazon

Athletic Brewing recognizes Amazon’s power. As a result, it has invested in optimizing its product listings, A+ content, posts, and Amazon storefront.

Jungle Scout Cobalt data also shows us the average number of Amazon reviews by brand.

Unsurprisingly, Athletic Brewing dominates here, too.

Part of that is simply producing a good product.

But seeing thousands of 5-star Amazon reviews can really elevate your brand.

On the other hand, Heineken features generic A+ Content and a minimal product description. It appears that Heineken simply doesn’t have a storefront set up on Amazon, either.

As we mentioned earlier, a brand like Heineken likely isn’t concerned with its performance on Amazon because of its success inside brick-and-mortar stores. But it’s leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue on the table by surrendering market share to brands like Athletic Brewing that invest in their Amazon presence.

A new brand emerges

Despite Athletic Brewing’s overall dominance on Amazon, it has lost a lot of market share in the past 12 months. 

Go Brewing — is catching up.

A niche so popular would inevitably introduce new competitors. But a decline that steep is a testament to Go Brewing’s emergence as a major player in the non-alcoholic beer market.

Joe Chura, a former digital marketing executive, and his wife Heather founded Go Brewing in the aftermath of the pandemic. As the world reopened, they wanted to kick the drinking habits they developed during lockdown. They launched Go Brewing and its Illinois taproom in 2023, introducing the only significant challenger to Athletic Brewing Company on Amazon.

Go Brewing’s Not Just Another Story Double IPA won the gold medal at the 2024 Best of Craft Beer Awards in the NA Hop Forward Beers category (Athletic won bronze). In 2023, Go Brewing claimed both the gold and silver, with Athletic taking bronze again.

Go Brewing’s Amazon strategy

Looking at Amazon data, two of Go Brewing’s non-alcoholic beer packs rank in the top five products over the past year. What’s even more impressive is the growth. Both of those products saw increases in revenue of over 400% year over year. And one of them actually ranks second overall in revenue thanks to its pricing — Athletic charges $29.65 for one of its 12-packs vs. Go Brewing’s $36.97. 

Based on these Sponsored search results, it looks like Go Brewing is investing in an Amazon advertising strategy. Aside from the increased revenue opportunity, having that visibility at the top of Amazon’s search results page is also critical to Go Brewing’s brand awareness.

Go Brewing has some overlap with Athletic Brewing in terms of marketing — it’s sponsored some races and partially leans into the obvious marketing opportunity with health-conscious athletes.

But with its graffiti-inspired can design and edgier beer names (Straight Outta Alcohol, Burn it Down IPA), Go Brewing has carved out an edgier brand identity.

It’s the official NA beer sponsor of Riot Fest, a Chicago-based punk rock festival (which I happen to frequent). It even appeared on a recent season of FX’s The Bear (also set in Chicago).

In only a couple of years, Go Brewing has established a large footprint in its Midwest home. Given its success on Amazon, it seems like Go Brewing will capture more of the non-alcoholic beer market on Amazon.

Where will non-alcoholic beer go from here?

If the Amazon keyword search data is any indication, the appetite for non-alcoholic beer will only continue to grow. But this graph, showing sales trends in Jungle Scout Cobalt, indicates a late-summer beer lull is upon us.

Seasonality on Amazon is normal. If last year’s trends are any indication, things should pick up in the fall and escalate when the holidays and dry January come around again.

Either way, Athletic Brewing Company’s and Go Brewing’s success is a testament to brands identifying emerging market trends and capitalizing on them with great products, savvy marketing, and Amazon-specific investments. 

Have you tried non-alcoholic beer? Do you think the surge is here to stay? Let us know in the comments.