Canadians aren’t quitting alcohol. They’re ‘zebra striping’ to pace themselves

Walk into a Toronto bar on a Friday night and some of the drinks in people’s hands have no alcohol in them at all. The customers holding them are not sober, just pacing themselves.

The industry calls it ‘zebra striping’, alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks during a night out. In Canada it has grown into a $223-million business, and the people driving it are mostly still drinkers.

Low- and non-alcoholic beverage sales climbed from $171 million in 2023 to $200 million in 2024 and $223 million last year, according to NielsenIQ. About 20 per cent of Canadian households bought them over the past year.

Ryan Ringer has been bartending since 1998. He sees the trend from behind the bar at Grey Tiger, a Toronto cocktail bar he co-owns that opened in 2015 with a menu section called the Path of Temperance.

“People will come in and they’ll have an alcoholic drink, but then maybe between alcoholic drinks, they’ll have a non-alcoholic,” Ringer said. “I think it’s less about people drinking less. It’s more about moderation. It’s more about people really thinking twice about where they’re spending their money and what kind of experiences they want to have.”

“A lot of people are like, I’m tired of the hangovers,” he said. The four drinks on the Path of Temperance — the Crown Spritz, the Finest Timeline, the Sky Reset and Love in the Shadows — all cost $15 versus alcoholic cocktails that start at $18 and climb to $26.

Ringer makes his own non-alcoholic ingredients rather than buying them, and builds the drinks to come as close to a cocktail as he can. “We really want people to be like, are you sure there’s no alcohol in this?” he said.

In Ontario, non-alcoholic beer and cider sales grew 14 per cent over the year ending in November, and de-alcoholized wine grew 126 per cent, the LCBO reported, adding that large national brands are launching new styles this year.

Molson Coors is one of them, Michelle Ramos, senior director of global brands at Molson Coors Canada, said in an email. Its lineup runs to Coors Edge, Molson Excel and Heineken 0.0, which is its largest non-alcoholic brand and grew by double digits in June.

The category once served people who did not drink, Ramos wrote, and now many want both.

Non-alchohol drinks are filling a gap. Alcohol sales fell to $25.8 billion in the year ending March 31, 2025, down 1.6 per cent even as prices rose, according to Statistics Canada.

The average Canadian of legal drinking age now buys about eight standard drinks a week, down from 9.7 a decade ago.

That pullback has been building for years, said Rod Phillips, a history professor at Carleton University who studies alcohol. Younger people are leading it, he said, in the same way they gave up smoking first, proving more risk-averse than older generations.

“That’s a kind of a recognition I think on the part of a lot of young people that you don’t need to drink alcohol to have fun,” Phillips said. “Younger people are just more aware of the health dangers and they’re acting on it.”

Yet the trend toward zero alcohol may already be peaking. Low- and non-alcoholic sales grew 17 per cent in 2024, then another 12 per cent last year, but are up only four per cent so far in 2026, according to NielsenIQ.

The fully sober bar is still rare in Canada. One of the few is Spilt in Edmonton, a mocktail bar whose co-founder, JoAnne Pearce, told Global News it was the first of its kind in Alberta.

Chris Elliott, chief economist at Restaurants Canada, is not sure a bar with only non-alcoholic drinks will ever be common, though the drinks themselves are spreading fast. “Most restaurants are adding this to the menu,” he said. “It’s something that we have seen.”

For Ringer the argument over the menu is already settled. “Now it’s like, oh, we couldn’t have a menu without the path of temperance,” he said. “Like any good cocktail menu should have a solid non-alcoholic offering.”