“For me, it all started with seeing someone as high-profile as Bella get involved,” says Victoria Watters, cofounder of Dry Atlas, a media and insights company focused on the nonalcoholic beverage category. Watters had long been familiar with Kin Euphorics when Bella Hadid joined the alcohol-alternative brand in 2021; Kin was a mainstay on the shelves at Spirited Away, the N/A bottle shop in Manhattan founded by her husband, Douglas.
For Watters, Hadid’s involvement was “a big validator of the space quite early on in its popularity cycle.” She’s been tracking the trend ever since.
Fast-forward a few years, and there are now at least a dozen or two celebrity beverage brands and endorsements that are decidedly alcohol-free. We have De Soi from Katy Perry, Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz and Almave from F1 star Lewis Hamilton; nonalcoholic bubbly from the likes of model Constance Jablonski (French Bloom) and Kylie Minogue’s eponymous wine brand. N/A beer company Athletic Brewing counts many athletes among its investors and has a fitting brand ambassador in former NFL player JJ Watt.
This isn’t the first time that famous people have crept into the beverage industry. Since the 2010s, celebrities from Michael Jordan (Cincoro) to Kendall Jenner (818) to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Teremana) have launched tequila brands seemingly daily, a trend that’s drawn both scrutiny and protest. But is celebrity N/A simply a new version of an old cash grab? Or is there more to it?
“Celebrity-backed brands have an advantage because they start with an already engaged customer base,” says Chris Budzik, a senior market analyst at IWSR, a data and analytics company focused on the global beverage industry. While some inevitably flop or fade into obscurity, others—like Skims or Fenty Beauty—become empires of their own. Given that the N/A category is expected to grow by billions of dollars in the next few years, with this expansion driven by social media–savvy millennials and zoomers, is celebrity interest really so surprising? In Budzik’s view, “Endorsing a no-alc product is lucrative, low-hanging fruit.”
Drinks writer and Prix Fixe founder Oset Babür-Winter says that the barrier to entry for N/A is a lot lower: For one thing, there are fewer regulations compared to full-proof drinks, especially tequila, which must be produced in specific parts of Mexico. It also avoids some prickly issues. Many have rightly noted that tequila is a culturally significant spirit and a source of income for many agricultural communities, whose livelihoods can be threatened by brands that rely on industrial agave production—details that some celebrities involved appear to have little concern about.
In that context, N/A might be a more ethical and acceptable way to go. It also may be less likely to ruffle any feathers, at least for now. “I’m less judgmental or skeptical of celebrities getting into that space,” Babür-Winter admits. Traditional alcoholic products like tequila have whole worlds of specialized knowledge around them, developed over centuries: “It’s agriculture, it’s farming, it’s not something that you can just do in a lab,” Babür-Winter says. “But you can do nonalcoholic drinks in a lab.”
There are also other factors that make N/A, like tequila before it, particularly marketable with a famous face. Slickly packaged nonalcoholic drinks are often positioned as lifestyle products—aspirational and wellness-adjacent, a manifestation of affordable luxury. See, for example, the brands’ marketing language. “With Bero in hand, you’re not just drinking—you’re embracing a badge of pride,” announces the website for Tom Holland’s new N/A beer, also described as “a signal for style.” Kin helps the drinker “achieve an elevated state of health, mood, or well-being” with various “energy-transforming ingredients,” while drinks from G Spot, the new sparkling soft-drink brand from Gillian Anderson, can “uplift your spirit” or help you “taste what pleasure feels like.”
These kinds of signifiers and amorphous assurances are hardly limited to alcohol alternatives with big names attached—the N/A category still has porous edges and no agreed-upon definition, so whether you’re buying or selling, it can be kind of whatever you want it to be. And who better to project aspirations onto than a celebrity?
Of course, these wellness and lifestyle narratives aren’t all necessarily constructed for marketing purposes. A lot of the celebrities getting involved in N/A are sober themselves: Holland, for example, is sober, as is Danny Trejo, whose Trejo’s Spirits offers alcohol-free tequila, gin and whiskey alternatives. Hadid has discussed her sobriety journey publicly, as has Cara Delevingne, whose Della Vite brand (co-owned with sisters Poppy and Chloe) announced Della Vite Zero last summer. Others may be keeping their abstinence from alcohol more private, though it’s not only committed teetotalers who are driving the N/A boom—surely celebrities are allowed to be as sober-curious as the rest of us.
Some consumers, though, remain skeptical. Alex Jump, director of operations at Focus on Health and the forthcoming Peach Crease Club in Denver, says she’s always excited to see the category grow and evolve, but cautions that “it’s still important to ask all the same questions, and to taste the product critically.” In an October 2024 survey, Watters asked Dry Atlas readers about the impact of “celebrity involvement,” and 48 percent of respondents indicated it would make them less interested in trying a product. “And that’s up from one-third when we asked six months prior,” she says. Some might perceive celebrity brands as more “mass” or less interesting, and even Watters grants that she’s “not sure how novel and craft they’ll really get.”
But she also notes that her sample group is mostly folks who are already serious about this category or even embedded in the industry—and even the strongest skeptics acknowledge that more brand recognition might be just what it takes to bring more people into the fold. “So even if they personally aren’t interested in the product, they’re thankful that celebrities are bringing positive attention to the space among mass consumers,” she says. In the end, it seems, the more the merrier.
