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For much of its development, the global no/low drinks market has focused on the liquid itself: how to remove alcohol, replicate familiar flavours and create products that give consumers a convincing alternative to alcoholic drinks. But what if the more important question is not what is in the glass, but why people are reaching for it in the first place? Italian food and beverage innovation specialist Riccardo Astolfi argues that the market may be looking at the problem from the wrong end. Italy’s aperitivo culture offers a useful lesson for manufacturers: build for the drinking occasion first, then design the liquid, format and story around it.

Walk into an Italian bar at around 6.30pm and look at the tables. You might see a Spritz, a beer, a glass of white wine, a bitter aperitif, a tonic water or simply sparkling water with lemon. There will probably be olives, crisps and enough food to create an argument about whether aperitivo has accidentally become dinner. What you probably will not see is somebody explaining their identity through the alcohol content of the glass.

People are having an aperitivo. This apparently banal distinction may be useful for the global no/low industry. After years working across product development, buying, category management and beverage innovation, I increasingly think we often approach no/low from the wrong direction. We build a product, define a category and then search for an occasion in which consumers might drink it. Aperitivo works the other way around. The occasion already exists. The product has to earn its place within it.

Aperitivo is an infrastructure

This matters for manufacturers because 'aperitivo' is not really a product category. It is a small piece of social infrastructure. It has a time of day, a temperature, a glass, a food context, an expected flavour intensity, a price range and a social function. The liquid can change without destroying the ritual.

That makes aperitivo a useful model for no/low category building. A non-alcoholic bitter is not only competing with another non-alcoholic bitter. At 6.30pm it is competing with beer, wine, a Spritz, cola, tonic water, sparkling water and the decision to order nothing at all. This sounds obvious, but it changes how a manufacturer might brief a product.

Instead of starting with 'we need an alcohol-free gin,' the questions become more practical. When will people drink it? With food or without? Is it one serve or two? Does it need to work over ice? How much dilution can it tolerate? Does the product still feel satisfying after ten minutes in the glass? Can a bartender understand the serve immediately? Can a retailer explain where it belongs without creating a new shelf for a category consumers do not yet understand? These are product development questions as much as marketing questions.

Designing for the occasion

Alcohol performs several sensory jobs at once. Remove it, and the formulation problem is not simply how to recreate its aroma. You also lose weight, warmth, persistence and part of the structure of the drinking experience.

The Italian aperitivo tradition offers a useful toolbox because it has never depended on alcohol alone.

Bitterness creates persistence. Acidity creates tension. Carbonation brings movement and refreshment. Botanicals create aromatic complexity. Sugar, used with some restraint, can carry flavour and build body. Temperature, dilution and ice change perception again. Food adds another layer. None of these tools is revolutionary. That is precisely the point.

The no/low industry sometimes behaves as though complexity must arrive through a new ingredient, a proprietary technology or an increasingly imaginative functional claim. Yet a drink can feel adult and gastronomic for much simpler reasons: because it is bitter enough to make you slow down, acidic enough to make you salivate, dry enough to invite another sip and structured enough to survive next to food.

The lesson for R&D teams is to formulate for the entire serve, not only for the liquid leaving the production line.

The pack is part of the drink

The same logic applies beyond formulation. If the occasion is the starting point, packaging, format and pricing have to follow it. A 750ml bottle suggests sharing and the table. A small single-serve bottle can belong naturally at the bar. A can may create another occasion entirely. None is inherently more premium than the others, but each tells the consumer what to do with the product. The same is true of price.

Consumers do not calculate value by comparing the cost of ethanol removed from a drink. They compare the experience with the alternatives available at that moment. A premium alcohol-free aperitif therefore has to justify its price against the alcoholic Spritz, the craft beer, the tonic and the soft drink sitting beside it.

That value can come from ingredients, process, flavour, design, provenance or service. But it has to be perceptible. 'Alcohol-free' alone is not a premium proposition.

And this is where I think the usual distinction between the 'alcohol consumer' and the 'no/low consumer' becomes less useful. Most people are not joining a new drinking religion. They move between alcoholic, low-alcohol and alcohol-free choices according to the day, the company, the next morning and probably what they had at lunch.

The commercial opportunity is therefore not necessarily to convert an alcohol drinker into a no/low consumer, it is to win one more occasion.

Participation, not abstinence

This is where aperitivo culture becomes more interesting to me than another set of no/low market forecasts.

A lot of category communication still carries a faint moral tone: control, wellness, better choices, better sleep, better mornings, perhaps a better version of yourself by Tuesday.

There is clearly an audience for that language. There is also an entire beverage world increasingly built around mood, energy, relaxation and focus. But drinking is also pleasure, habit and social participation. Not every beverage needs to improve us.

At its best, aperitivo makes a much simpler promise: come to the bar, sit with everybody else and have something good.

For no/low brands, this suggests a different ambition. The goal should not be to build a parallel alcohol-free world with its own consumers, shelves and occasions forever. Specialist spaces are useful while a category is young because they allow discovery and education. Maturity, however, means integration.

The real breakthrough arrives when the alcohol-free option requires no explanation and no sacrifice. It is simply one of the good things available.

This means manufacturers should think beyond ABV, instead asking whether the product has a clear occasion, whether the sensory architecture is strong enough, whether the format makes sense, whether the price survives comparison and whether the serve can become habitual rather than merely interesting.

The future of no/low may eventually look less like a separate drinks category and more like a crowded Italian bar at aperitivo time: alcoholic and alcohol-free drinks sharing the same table, selected according to taste, mood and moment rather than identity.

Paradoxically, the moment we stop talking so much about no/low may be the moment the category has really succeeded.