Senior Associate, Jigar Majmundar, Discusses PowerPlant’s Investment in Partake Brewing

Over the past decade, the bet­ter-for-you move­ment has been defin­ing the food and bev­er­age cat­e­go­ry. Con­sumers are keen­ly aware of ingre­di­ents, nutri­tion labels, and diets. This is part of a broad­er trend in which US con­sumers are spend­ing more than ever on over­all well­ness includ­ing fit­ness, sleep, men­tal health, etc. With a gen­er­a­tional well­ness trend, it was inevitable con­sumers would begin to recon­sid­er their alco­hol pref­er­ences and con­sump­tion. Accord­ing to Mintel, 44% of US alco­hol drinkers say they try to “select the health­i­est alco­hol option.” 52% of US con­sumers say they want to reduce their alco­hol con­sump­tion based on a sur­vey from Alco­hol Trade Group. These num­bers are even larg­er in younger demo­graph­ics that are lead­ing the health and well­ness move­ment.

Emerg­ing alco­hol brands and incum­bents are begin­ning to deliv­er on this demand with low-calo­rie options (i.e. hard seltzers), increased vis­i­bil­i­ty in nutri­tion labels, and func­tion­al ben­e­fits (i.e. hard kom­bucha). These are all great choic­es for BFY alco­hol, but they don’t ful­fill the occa­sions where a con­sumer wants to be a part of a social event and reduce or avoid alco­hol. Sure they could drink  sparkling water, but that doesn’t ful­fill the social con­nec­tion of shar­ing a drink. On the oth­er hand, the incum­bents in the NA cat­e­go­ry have sub­par prod­ucts and car­ry a stig­ma of abstain­ing from alco­hol.

This is where emerg­ing NA brands are step­ping up. They are chang­ing the per­cep­tion of non-alco­holic beer with bet­ter tast­ing prod­ucts and brand­ing for main­stream alco­hol con­sumers. Today, 78% of non-alco­hol pur­chasers also buy tra­di­tion­al alco­holic drinks. The cat­e­go­ry is grow­ing quick­ly and becom­ing a big busi­ness: non-alco­holic bev­er­age sales grew 33% to $331 mil­lion over the last year accord­ing to Nielsen. Gold­man Sachs fore­casts the cat­e­go­ry reach­es 3% of the $100B US beer mar­ket by 2025.

Both as con­sumers and investors, we’ve been inter­est­ed in the NA cat­e­go­ry for some time. Most of the Pow­er­Plant team enjoys drink­ing alco­hol, but there are many events where we crave a great NA craft beer like Partake’s: Tues­day night net­work­ing hap­py hours, Sun­day night foot­ball, or after a cou­ple of beers on a night out with friends.

We ini­tial­ly met Ted and the Par­take team when they were rais­ing their pri­or round in 2020. We loved Ted’s per­son­al mis­sion to build in the non-alco­holic set. He ini­tial­ly built an e‑commerce mar­ket­place for non-alco­holic brands and then launched Par­take to give con­sumers great craft beers. Par­take has won mul­ti­ple awards for its prod­ucts includ­ing the World Beer Awards, US Beer Cham­pi­onship, Frank­furt Inter­na­tion­al Tro­phy, and oth­ers.

Since our ini­tial meet­ing, the brand has grown almost 100% y‑o-y and has expand­ed from Cana­da into the US. Today, we are excit­ed to announce that we are lead­ing their $16.5M Series B along­side Amber­stone, Cir­cle­Up, EDC, and oth­ers. We’re thrilled to join the Par­take team in its mis­sion to give con­sumers bet­ter drink­ing options and build one of the lead­ing non-alco­holic brands.

Fol­low more from Jigar on Twit­ter.

Drink Par­take!

Sources:

Con­sumer Desire for ‘Bet­ter for You’ Bev­er­ages Per­sists Through Pan­dem­ic

https://www.theiwsr.com/