Another decade behind us.
Take yourself back to the year 2010 and recall what the beer industry looked like. Far, far fewer breweries, IPA’s just beginning to emerge as the leading craft style, Anheuser-Busch InBev had yet to acquire their first craft brewery (they purchased Goose Island in 2011) and craft was the darling of both retailers and wholesalers, bringing new excitement and high margin to the beer space.
Thinking back to those times, no one would have ever dreamed that there would be the string of acquisitions by Big Beer, or that venture capital and private equity would rush in to prop up hundreds of craft breweries struggling to keep up with soaring sales, or that sales growth would screech to a sudden halt, falling far short of the “20% market share by 2020” prediction.
And no one definitely ever thought the raging product entering the next decade would be a……hard seltzer!?
With that in mind, can we predict (or guess) what might be in store over the next 10 years? Forbes takes a query of industry experts to see what they have in the crystal ball here.