Growing Alcohol Category’s Mish-Mash of Grade School and Grownup Creates Concerns
How much are our childhoods worth to Big Alcohol? Considering the surge in profits taken it by “crossover” brands—alcoholic products sold under the label of youth-friendly, nonalcoholic alternatives—the answer seems to be “quite a lot”. Or at least, if the rhetoric coming out of the industry is to be believed, it is worth a lot to adults. When it comes to how appealing these drinks are to kids, there seems to be a rush to make sure nobody ever asks.
Crossover drinks, brand-a-likes, alcopops-but-for-real-alcoholic-pop… the product lines seem like they have been on shelves forever. But the scope of their recent surge has been astonishing, with domestic sales rising from $1.5m nationally in 2020 to over $600m in 2023. Since 2020, The efforts to capitalize on these have led to a widespread cannibalism of overtly youth-oriented brands. SunnyD, nee Sunny Delight, is a heavily flavored orange drink, introduced in 1963 and a staple of cafeteria fare since. It is now, citing “nostalgia,” also an orange-flavored hard seltzer. Simply Juice, a straightforward Coca-Cola owned line of fruit juices, is now “Simply Spiked,” a brand popular despite the fact that the brand itself implies someone put alcohol in your juice without your consent. They are joined by dozens of other products that recycle well-known soda, energy drink, snack food, or related brands—any label that has received lifelong recognition in the corner store.
The concerns are clear. These products are highly recognizable even to kids who do not drink. They are readily confused with their nonalcoholic progenitors. They encourage kids to view drinking alcohol as no riskier than drinking sodas. The industry typically dismisses allegations of inappropriately youth-oriented products on the grounds that they appeal to adults too. In this case, however, the companies themselves call back to “nostalgia” as the appeal—that is, nostalgia for the brands adults drank when they were kids.
The alcohol regulatory apparatus has been characteristically slow to react to these products, a torpor deepened by the fact that the research literature on these particular forms of alcopops have been little studied. This creates the danger that the rules for safety for these products can be set by the alcohol industry itself, and a coalition led by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) leapt into that gap. In conjunction with alcohol wholesaler and retailer trade groups, DISCUS pushed a set of criteria, including: crossover drinks should be sold only in space dedicated to alcoholic products, not their nonalcoholic brand-a-like originators; packaging should be readily distinguished from nonalcoholic versions; that producers should follow existing voluntary advertising codes; and that crossover products should be mainly appealing to adults.
The irony, of course, is that time and time again, producers extol the evocation of one’s own youth as a central draw to these drinks. The voluntary nature of these codes means that, in the end, nobody is subject to them.
Meanwhile states have slowly awakened to the risk from these products, and moved to put some official guardrails in place. In 2023, Virginia HB 1979 mandated clear physical separation of alcoholic crossover brands from their nonalcoholic cousins. In addition, it puts the onus of informing consumers about the alcohol content of the crossover drinks on the retailer, not just producer. Shortly thereafter, Illinois put similar emergency restrictions in place, signing them into law in 2024. Outside of those two states, regulators have been loath to call out these products. Even the policies put into place codified only a fragment of the industry’s own voluntary guidelines, with substantial carveouts to make sure that no store would feel pressured to simply not carry crossover drinks. Neither Virginia nor Illinois expressed any intention to tighten their regulations beyond 2023’s policies.
Both the industry and state plans are concerned only with the possibility that youth would inadvertently purchase these products. Nowhere do they broach the possibility that these products may initiate kids into drinking, much as heavily flavored Four Loko and Bud-A-Ritas did a decade ago. Nowhere do they talk about how brand recognition goes two ways, and that a boozy Simply Juice could make kids think Simply Juice needs booze. Missing is any sense of a bright line where an existing brand is simply too clearly youth-oriented to be appropriate for a crossover product. Boozy Pediasure? Spiked Squeezit? Hard Go-Gurt?
Careful analysis of the industry’s history of voluntary regulations suggests this is by design. The regulations are meant to provide plausible deniability for any other harms arising from these products. After all, if the industry has already acted to protect youth, there is no reason for regulatory bodies to do anything that might hurt sales. Yet by giving the industry this out, oversight bodies risk a continuous pushing and distortion of both legal boundaries and common sense, until there is no meaningful distinction at all between the jungle gym and gin.