Archive for July 2025

Each month, consumer insights platform Sightlines will share one quick hit you can use to make confident decisions. Remember, ACA members get 50% off a Sightlines subscription. Find the discount code in the Resource Hub.

Getting Creative With On-Premise Sales Channels

No doubt the on-premise is a critical sales lane for cider—that’s nothing new. But thinking about that stalwart channel through the lens of other categories like wine or non-alcoholic beer can unlock creative opportunities. 

Craft brewery taprooms and spirits tasting rooms offer one example. These establishments tend to specialize in one type of alcohol—but drinkers are increasingly demanding more variety. It opens up space for cidermakers to place their products in other manufacturers’ spaces, helping them fill gaps without having to make the liquid themselves.

It’s something non-alcoholic beer brands have been able to capitalize on: A Craft Beer Professionals survey, conducted this April, found that small breweries are 370% more likely to say they’re offering a non-alcoholic beer made by another company than they were just six years ago. This makes sense. Members of Craft Beer Professionals are small breweries; 63% produce less than 500 barrels of beer annually. They likely don’t have the capacity, expertise, or equipment to make quality NA beer (or cider) on-site. Yet they recognize these are beverages drinkers have come to expect in 2025. This can extend to beer bars or distilleries as well, with a myriad of benefits for a cidermaker that go beyond sales. 

Offering packaged or draft options from another producer has benefits for both the retailer and the “guest” brand: 

• The on-premise account attracts a larger set of customers, particularly those in group occasions. Show us a group of six friends in which at least one person doesn’t like or can’t tolerate a given type of alcohol.
  
• Management can observe the ordering behavior of a more diverse set of drinkers—not just their existing, dedicated fans.
  
• For suppliers of the “guest” brand being served, the taproom is a place to gain consumer traction. It’s an ideal environment to win a new cider drinker with an educated staff and a vibrant social setting. Your cider brand might be one of 15 on the grocery shelf, but it could be the sole option at a brewery’s taproom.

But cider can extend this thinking beyond mere taprooms, beer bars, and distilleries. Thinking like another category might open unique on-premise angles: A spirits brand is often eager to be used in a signature cocktail, for example. Why not the same for a cider spritz? Wine brands strive to be recommended by the glass as a pairing with a particular dish; again, why not the same for a cider? 

Cribbing strategies from other categories is a fresh way to approach on-premise accounts with creative ideas—and to win new drinkers.