The latest Westons Cider Review – the11th – has arrived, with the sort of anticipation that Beaujolais Nouveau used to arouse. To start with the good news: over half of all UK cider sales now take place through the convenience channel – a sliver up on the previous year – making cider a vital component of the BWS section in every c-store.
However, as Westons MD Helen Thomas points out in her foreword to the Review, it was a pretty tough year all round, despite a scorching summer, with rising costs and prices (hence an uptick in revenue in the category), leading to lower volume sales at 643m litres, a drop of 2.6 per cent on the year.
And within those broad parameters lurk many individual and wildly different stories: apple cider had a great year, up by five per cent in value sales, with a 67.4 per cent share of the category, while in the same period, fruit ciders saw theirs drop to 28.5 per cent, although four out of five top launches over the past 12 months were in fact fruity ones.*
It's not just price that means less cider is being sold. The general trend of the younger generation to imbibe less alcohol (or at least, fewer beverages) is affecting cider as it is many other alcohol categories, although at the premium end crafted and vintage is performing excellently, rising from 23.5 per cent to 25.1 per cent of market value. In convenience, crafted s the star, in 10.4 percent growth and a 22 per cent value share.
On the other hand, three years ago, 41.5 per cent of UK households indulged in the amber nectar; that is now down to 39.6 per cent. It's not a huge drop but a persistent one. So, says the Report, the challenge is to engage the over 60 per cent of households who do not drink cider, and there are various ways to do that in the pipeline, or maybe the vat.
One is to promote the high end, such as Henry Westons Vintage cider, a c-store best-seller**, and its peers– bottled premium Ciders as a whole were up up 93 per cent last year, although many crafted, high value brews might be slightly esoteric for the typical indie's shelf space. Another strategy is to promote not the low end but the no-and-low end – zero alcohol ciders such as Thatchers Zero and Inch's Zero are winners, and it's worth trying the crafted end of the zeros, too, such as Chance Clean Cider and the wonderfully-named High Sobriety, according to Ciderologist Gabe Cook, one of many experts who contributed to Westons' truly "ecumenical" survey. No-and-low ciders were up an astonishing 37.3 per cent in the off-trade last year. In cider, 5.2 per cent of shoppers buy no-and-low, but make up only 1.3 per cent of total category spend, so there i much room for growth there.
Jourdan Gabbini, beer and cider buyer at Waitrose, adds that a key to future success is to involve cider in more and new drinking occasions, and in that respect, the growth in "sessionable", relatively low-strength and easy-drinking ciders, could well follow the success of medium alcohol IPAs and contribute to higher overall consumption, "broadening cider's appeal without diluting the drinking experience", as the report concludes.
It s also worth noting that 76.2 per cent of off-trade origin cider serves are accompanied by food (or the other way round), and one worthwhile quest for the category would be to normalise cider as a drink to have with lunch and supper as certain ales have managed: Cook mentions Small Beer and The Kernel's Table Beer as successful examples of "beer ordinaire".
Westons' head of marketing & strategy, Sally McKinnon, addressing the assembled cider enthusiasts at the launch, said, "There's so many head and tailwinds at the moment, like EPR and DRS that are putting enormous pressure on our industry and on our category. And for us, it's about making sure we can kind of navigate these in a really, kind of credible way. But we take a long term view, and it just shows that actually, how important just making the right decisions for the category."
*Top 5 2025-26 NPDs
- Inch’s Cloudy Apple Cider (£9.5m)
- Kopparberg Strawberry Variety Pack (£4.7m)
- Old Mout Mango & Passionfruit Cider (£3.5m)
- Henry Westons 1880 Vintage (£3m)
- Kopparberg Vintage Apple (£1m)
- Henry Westons Vintage 500ml
- Thatchers Gold 4x500ml
- Knights Cider 500ml
- Strongbow Dark Fruit 4x440ml
- Strongbow Original 10x440ml
- Strongbow Dark Fruit 10x440ml
- Strongbow Original 4x440ml
- Thatchers Gold 10x440ml
- Inch’s Medium Apple Cider 4x440ml
- Strongbow Original 4x568ml