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

Any good cocktail menu should have some non-alcohol offerings, too, says Ryan Ringer, co-owner and bartender at Grey Tige in Toronto. Photo by Michelle Siu for National Post

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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What is zebra-striping?

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“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.”

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“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.

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On the menu at Grey Tiger is The Finest Timeline, a non-alcohol cocktail made with black rice aperitif, chili lime cucumber shrub, ginger beer and mint bitters. (PHOTO BY BECKY IP)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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Alcohol pullback

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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.

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

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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.