High Noon, a popular brand of vodka-spiked hard seltzer, may have mistakenly sold alcohol in energy drink cans.But this mistake, egregious as it seems, still hews closely to the business plan for this category of beverages—creating products that can be sold en masse to young consumers who dislike the taste of alcohol.
On July 30th, the EJ Gallo-produced ready-to-drink cocktail brand announced they were recalling cases of their variety packs because they contained cans labeled with the Celsius energy drink. Despite the labeling on the can, however, the drinks contained the intended alcoholic drink—meaning consumers not carefully tracking their own cupboard could end up inadvertently chugging alcohol in lieu of caffeine. Celsius, which is made by a different, Pepsi-affiliated company, has not reported shipping cans containing alcohol, but High Noon advises customers to be shop with care nonetheless.
The risks for inadvertently drinking an alcoholic seltzer are clear. Most prominently, individuals with alcohol use disorder, some medical conditions, or taking contraindicated medications may suffer severe consequences. Consumption by youth, especially those who are unaware of what alcohol should taste like or what the effects are, also could result in injury or illness. But all of that begs a larger question, namely, what kind of alcoholic product could a consumer drink without knowing it contained alcohol?
High Noon is a high-profile example of two relatively recent commercial trends. It is both a hard seltzer and a ready-to-drink cocktail. The first category—hard seltzers—began rapidly rising in prominence about a decade ago, and exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally, they were made from the same denatured malt alcohol base as alcopops, ensuring the product was cheap and omnipresent. High Noon, however, combines that trend with the rising popularity of “cocktails in a can,” also called ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails. RTDs use distilled spirits, which are much cheaper to produce in strength and bulk and are ideal for cross-marketing with nonalcoholic mixer brands.
The upshot is that these products are poised to become the new alcopops. Although the hallmark of the alcopop is heavy flavoring and added sugars to disguise the unpleasant taste of the alcohol itself, hard seltzers arrive at the same place from a different direction. Hard seltzers, especially those made with characteristically flavorless vodka, have very little taste, alcohol or otherwise. This often leads their producers to push deceptive health claims that would be harder to support with, for example, a virulently colored sticky-sweet Four Loko.
Marketing based in health claims and flavor-masked alcohol, although a concerning factor in all underage drinking, is particularly compelling for young women. Hard seltzers and low-flavor and/or flavor-masked RTDs are not by themselves the cause of the surge in dangerous drinking among teenage girls and young women, but their popularity may have amplified the risks posed by alcopops. The payoff for Big Alcohol is windfall from closing the alcohol use gender gap. The payoff for U.S. women is a soaring rate of alcohol-related mortality.
All of which casts additional shadow on High Noon’s mistake. The explosion of alcoholic brands that are packaged similarly to non-alcoholic products, sold in a way to minimize the significance of an alcoholic versus non-alcoholic beverage choice, and flavored in a way that it might not be immediately obvious from taste and smell that the beverage contains alcohol, is all meant to lower aversion to consuming alcohol. High Noon’s concerns that people would not know what they were selling with the labels swapped are explicitly caused by their efforts to market an easily confused product.
READ MORE about the science and concerns about alcopops.
READ MORE about deceptive health messaging in alcohol sales.
Published on: July 31, 2025