Dropping Data on Canned Wine
It’s Not Worse, but People Don’t Know That (Yet)
Canned wine is easily one of the most controversial topics within the world of wine.
As an emerging category — canned wine tends to be lumped into one generalized bucket and people simply ask… is canned wine good?
I did a small study on this in the past that showed me that some canned wine is really great. But there were still so many open questions:
- Is it possible for canned wine to be just as good as bottled? Does the can impact the quality, or is it the difference in the wine itself?
- Do consumers really want wine in a can? Is this the wine vessel of the future? Is canned wine expanding the “wine consumer pie”?
I decided to team up with my friend Sarah Hoffman, co-founder of Maker Wine, to dig into these questions more. We designed a blind tasting and ran a consumer behavior survey to try to demystify the current state of canned wine.
Below I’m going to share the top takeaways from our research, and you can access the full report here if you’d like!
A quick note on our methodology:
- Consumer Survey: 255 respondents, collected via convenience sampling from The Wine Nerd and Maker wine audience. Questions covered demographics, general and canned wine preferences.
- Blind Tasting Experiment: 40 consumers participated in a blind tasting with canned and bottled versions of the exact same wine. Data collected included rating, guess of vessel, and actual vessel.
Canned wine is a blank slate for most consumers.
Many consumers still haven’t tried canned wine, and exposure to canned wine appears to vary significantly by geography and knowledge level. Canned wine is more popular amongst people who live in coastal US cities, and people who consider themselves to have a significant level of wine knowledge.
But interestingly, canned wine isn’t dominated by brand loyalty (yet). Most respondents who have tried canned wine have no favorite brands (58%), and of those who drink canned wine frequently (once a week or more), only 10% have no favorite brands.
Canned wine isn’t zero-sum, it actually competes across beverage categories.
The narrative around canned wine changes a lot depending on if you think it is cannibalizing bottled wine sales, or if it’s competing against beer, spiked seltzer, etc.
When we asked consumers: 46% said they would be drinking bottled wine if canned wine wasn’t available at a given occasion. Compared to 25% saying they would turn to spiked seltzer, and 21% to beer. However this breakout varies by two important dimensions: gender and age. Canned wine is competing with bottled wine amongst females, and beer amongst males. Canned wine is competing against bottled wine amongst people over the age of 34, and spiked seltzer for those below the age of 34.
It’s no secret that wine has struggled to reach younger consumers as it’s not seen as approachable or fitting within a younger “lifestyle” (aka, the white claw effect). Is canned wine the answer?
Canned wine faces problems with consumer education
(welcome to the wine industry). First, we wanted to understand if consumers have a lower willing to pay less for cans. In two separate parts of the survey, we asked for people’s weeknight wine price, and then how much they would pay for a can of wine equivalent to half a bottle. For 61% of respondents, the price points roughly matched, and 29% had a lower willingness to pay for a can.
However the bigger issue here may actually be around the can-to-bottle-price translation itself.
Since we asked about price specifically for a half-bottle-equivalent can, we may have anchored people to do the mental math of bottle price to can price. But, when we asked people how much wine they thought a “coke sized can” holds, most people thought it was less than half a bottle. This correlates with the canned wine sticker shock that is experienced by the category. Sarah shared that:
Particularly the term “6-pack” reminds people of a lower-priced purchase like beer or water. Given that, a $30+ price point on a “6-pack” of wine can be jarring. We’ve found that education around the amount of wine in a can and translating the can volume into a bottle equivalent on our site helps customers understand the value of premium canned wine.
— Sarah, co-founder of Maker wine
Education isn’t only about size, it’s also about quality.
In our research, perceived quality was not a statistically significant factor in willingness to pay. 62% of respondents thought bottled wine is higher quality than canned wine, but this didn’t lead to significant differences in willingness to pay: the same perception of quality held true amongst respondents willing to pay more, less and equal for bottles versus cans.
If willingness to pay is fairly equal, why do people still perceive the quality to be worse? We think it’s an education problem. 56% of respondents cited the wine itself as being lower quality, and 43% cited the cans as lowering the quality.
The reality is that a consumers’ experience with one low quality canned wine can impact their perception of the whole category. Even though can quality has evolved significantly — modern cans have a wine specific liner and go through a stringent testing and approval process — it’s hard for consumers to know that.
Our blind tasting also uncovered a quality bias.
We held a blind tasting at Stanford in January 2020 with 40 participants and 14 wines. We gave people blind samples of the same wine from seven different wineries, canned and bottled. We asked them not only to rate the wine, but also guess which vessel it came from. Past studies have shown consumers can’t tell the difference between canned and bottled versions of the same wine, but this was the first time that bias was measured as part of the equation.
There was no statistically significant difference in ratings based on which vessel the wine was actually from, but there was a 16% difference in average rating by which vessel people thought the wine was from.
Most interesting was the response at the end when we did “the big reveal”. Consumers were shocked that they couldn’t distinguish which vessel a wine came from. They had expected to taste the aluminum or off flavors they associate with canned wines. They were also shocked that there were no obvious patterns in what they preferred, other than that if they liked it, they tended to assume it was from a bottle.
Canned wine is moving toward product-market fit
As a new category, it’s important that canned wine is able to carve out a niche in some way that helps more consumers feel comfortable trying it. Pre-COVID, this niche was mostly around wine-on-the-go and smaller serving sizes. We saw this in our data with 82% of respondents saying that it’s useful for certain contexts: warm weather, when they are outside, with meals and when doing activities like hiking and picnics.
It’s been fascinating to see how canned wine’s use case has also shifted through COVID quarantine. While consumers have shifted to buying more wine online, lower cost shipping fees of canned wine due to lighter packaging and easier packing have become more attractive. As consumers are also doing more of their wine drinking at home solo or via Zoom happy hours, the single serving benefits of canned wine have also been amplified.
So what does the future hold for canned wine?
This study certainly helped me understand the consumer perception and barriers to adoption around canned wine. But as a new category, it’s natural that education will be a major focus as more and more consumers are exposed to canned wine.
Outside of being friends with the Maker team, I’m generally bullish about premium canned wine. The quality problem is actually no different than bottled wine — you have the Charles Shaw’s of the world, and you have the good stuff. I just hope we can get more of the good canned wine out there in the hands of consumers and educate them on the difference.
