Boston Beer Company is hitting the reset button with Truly Hard Seltzer in an effort to reverse the brand’s negative trends.
Ahead of today’s fourth quarter and full-year earnings report, Boston Beer announced it would release new packaging, a new advertising campaign and communicate “clearer messaging” for Truly this spring as the company looks to grow Truly’s share and hold the No. 2 position in the segment behind Mark Anthony Brand’s White Claw.
Boston Beer laid out several objectives, including:
- “making Truly easier to find and shop;
- “more clearly communicating a more refreshing taste profile with the addition of real fruit juice;
- “refining limited-release strategy and going where beer cannot;
- “relaunching and expanding Truly Vodka Seltzer as Truly Vodka Soda;
- “kicking off the U.S. Soccer partnership.”
“The road to return Truly to growth in 2023 is paved with learning from 2022 and a drinker-first strategy,” Boston Beer Company CEO Dave Burwick said in a press release. “With the right tools in place, we’re confident in a Truly turnaround and share gains in the back half of the year.”
The latest brand refresh follows last year’s reformulation of the entire Truly portfolio with real fruit juice and an ad campaign starring fruit flies. The latter campaign did not succeed in driving awareness of the reformulation, as Boston Beer said today “consumer awareness of real fruit juice in Truly remains low.”
Truly Packaging Refresh Incoming
To drive awareness in Q1 2023, Boston Beer said it “will conduct extensive consumer sampling” of Truly and invest in media behind the tagline “Our Best Taste Ever.” Additionally, Boston Beer will roll out redesigned packaging with “a more visually consistent look and clearer communication that it is now more refreshing and made with real fruit juice from concentrate.”
The packaging will feature boldface callouts of “now more refreshing” and “made with real fruit juice.” Each pack will also be identified as “lightly flavored” (berry, citrus and tropical) and “bolder flavor” (lemonade, margarita-style and punch) to set consumer taste expectations.
Additionally, Boston Beer said its bolder flavored variety packs “will more seamlessly integrate into a strong brand block at retail, now featuring pops of color against a larger white background to cue refreshment.”
Truly Hard Seltzer Berry packaging and point-of-sale material will feature the U.S. Soccer logo this summer as part of the company’s sponsorship deal as the “Official Hard Seltzer of U.S. Soccer.”
Trimester Limited-Release Packs on the Way
To meet consumer demand for variety, Boston Beer will “introduce rotating trimester seasonals that are lightly flavored and made with real fruit juice from concentrate.”
The seasonal releases will start with Wonderworld, available now, with three flavor mashups — Life’s a Peach, Citrus Clouds and Strawberry Breeze — and a mystery flavor called “Wonder What …?” In the summer, Red, White & Tru will follow. A third pack will come out later this year. Boston Beer said the trimester releases replace the discontinued Truly Iced Tea pack.
Truly Vodka Seltzer Renamed Truly Vodka Soda
Truly’s vodka-based offering, which launched in the fall, will drop seltzer from its name and instead go by Truly Vodka Soda. The brand will receive new packaging that is “light and colorful,” along with the launch of two new variety packs:
- Truly Vodka Soda Classic: mango, lime, pineapple, and blueberry;
- Truly Vodka Soda Paradise: mango, watermelon, passion fruit, and blood orange;
- Truly Vodka Soda Twist of Flavor: blackberry and lemon, cherry and lime, pineapple and cranberry, and peach and tangerine.
The Twist of Flavor pack will get an 8-pack, as a 12-pack that will hit retailers in April.
Boston Beer will also introduce resealable 24 oz. single-serve cans for Truly in 2023.
Truly By the Numbers
So why is Boston Beer hitting the reset button again with Truly?
In 2022, Truly dollar sales declined -18.2%, to $1.027 billion, and its case volume declined -22.7%, at off-premise retailers tracked by market research firm IRI. Truly’s share of beer category dollars declined -0.54%, to 2.3%.
Nevertheless, Truly finished last year as the 10th largest brand family in IRI tracked off-premise retailers. Twisted Tea, its elder Boston Beer sibling, is nipping on Truly’s heels at off-premise retailers as the 11th largest beer category brand family. In 2022, its dollar sales increased +30.9%, to $886.9 million.
Truly’s best-selling package, its lemonade variety pack, launched in early 2020, and was Boston Beer’s third best-selling brand behind Twisted Tea Original and Half & Half, in 2022. Truly Lemonade’s dollar sales declined -40.2%, to $182.4 million, and case volume declined -43.5%, compared to 2021.
Dollar sales of Truly Punch, which launched before the 2021 summer selling season, declined -14.3%, to $151.2 million, and the brand’s volume declined -9.2%.
Truly Margarita, which launched in January 2022, earned $148.4 million in off-premise dollar sales in its freshman year, enough to make it Truly’s No. 3 SKU and Boston Beer’s fifth best-selling product.
The variety packs in Truly’s “lightly flavored” portfolio all recorded double-digit declines in dollar sales in 2022:
- Berry variety pack, -31.2%, to $144.9 million;
- Tropical variety pack, -41.6%, to $78.9 million;
- Citrus variety pack, -33.4%, to $48.3 million.
One month into 2023, Twisted Tea has overtaken Truly in IRI-tracked off-premise retailers. Dollar sales of the two-decade-old FMB increased +37%, to $63 million through January 29. Truly’s dollar sales declined -25.5%, to $47.6 million, making it the 12th largest beer category vendor, compared to Twisted Tea in the No. 10 spot.
Through the first four weeks of 2023, nearly all Truly SKUs lost share, except for Truly Vodka Seltzer and Truly Extra, the brand’s 8% ABV offering. As a whole, the Truly portfolio accounts for 19.1% of off-premise hard seltzer dollars, according to NielsenIQ data parsed in a recent report from financial services firm Jefferies.
Vodka-based seltzers have recorded the highest dollar sales growth in the segment, increasing +56.9% in the L4W and +52.2% in the L12W through January 28, according to Jefferies. However, the style lost -107 basis points of share to malt- and sugar-based versions, declining to 15.4% of all hard seltzer dollars.
The malt- and sugar-based hard seltzer segment struggled in 2022, posting the second-largest decline in dollar sales in the beer category (-10.4%, only outdone by the assorted segment’s -22%). Hard seltzer lost -1.14% share of dollars, and accounted for only 7.4% of all beer category dollars in the fourth quarter of 2022, its lowest point since the beginning of the pandemic, when heightened off-premise shopping skyrocketed the segment.