How Alcohol Consumption Has Changed During Coronavirus

Consumers are staying home now more than ever to self-quarantine and practice social distancing. With one-third of Americans heeding shelter-in-place orders, Chicory not only observed surges in usership across our digital grocery platform overall but also spikes in engagement with shelf-stable products and comfort food-style recipes. Stocking up isn’t limited to pantries: it applies to at-home bars, too. So, we dove into the data to determine the changes in engagement with beer, wine and liquor among shoppers using our shoppable tools and browsing recipes in our network. 

As we looked through our data, we compared wine, beer and liquor overall. As shown in the chart below, wine is preferred among shoppers, during the coronavirus pandemic and otherwise. But as we compared beer, wine and liquor, the most drastic changes during the early stages of the coronavirus crisis were among beer buyers.

Our typical seasonal engagement patterns show a consistent “shark fin” style line, with engagement growing throughout the week and hitting its peak on Sundays when shoppers plan for the week to come.  Here, we can see that pattern from late February to through early March. 

And while we saw a dip in engagement across the board early on in the outbreak, we quickly saw behavior change beginning around March 15, and then a spike in traffic around March 22, which was consistent across all alcohol types. This lines up with when both shelter-at-home and social distancing initiatives were instated in major cities: San Francisco issued theirs on March 17 and New York on March 22.

First, we looked at traffic patterns for wine specifically. Partially popular because of its use in recipes as well as a beverage pairing, wines showed the highest volume of views, but the least drastic growth pattern and divergence from our typical traffic patterns.

When it comes to beer usage, we’ve projected our typical seasonal traffic pattern in the chart below (dotted line) and compared it to actual engagement we observed in March 2020. Overall, beer grew in views by 171%.

Shoppers also seem less set on planning for the entire week to come as they had been prior. As consumers spend more time at home, our trends indicate less predictable traffic patterns, with shoppers browsing recipes all week long in greater volume.

Liquor ingredients, including vodka, whiskey, gin, rum and tequila, also grew in popularity among consumers shopping to prepare for staying home during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly when compared to typical weekly traffic patterns during an average March.

We continue to see “stock up” behavior, but not on the same scale as shown with wine. The engagement with liquor was higher in volume than it was with beer, yet did not increase at as high a rate as beer.

While consumers are certainly buying more liquor than they were prior to the coronavirus, they’re more likely to stock up on beer and wine rather than mix up cocktails solo at home. Generally, the most popular cocktail recipes in our network tend to be for batch-style cocktails, which may be less relevant for shoppers isolating at home alone or with just a few loved ones.

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