kykNET's Prontuit: where drinking is actually going

On 12 August 2026 I sat down with kykNET’s Prontuit to talk about our relationship with alcohol — the mindful drinking and sober-curious movement that’s taken off worldwide over the last decade, and whether the headlines about it are true.

We recorded it on Women’s Day. The presenter opened by pointing out that a few years ago the two of us would have been at the top bar at Oppikoppi, and now here we were sitting like grown-ups on a television set talking about alcohol-free gin and tonic. Fair.

The show wanted the trend story. What I actually wanted to say on air was the less exciting thing underneath it — because the trend story is the one that gets founders into trouble.

It started with brandy on tap

I was 23 and the coolest thing a young Afrikaans guy could think of was brandy and Coke on tap. That was Brannas Draught. It went well, and we sold it into KWV.

Then I went to the Netherlands looking for the next project. The more people I spoke to, the more obvious it became that there was real demand for sophisticated alcohol-free drinks — not the apologetic stuff on the bottom shelf. And the thought was almost embarrassingly simple:

You can buy alcohol-free beer. Why can’t you buy an alcohol-free gin and tonic?

At the time I didn’t think it would be that big. I certainly didn’t think the entire drinking culture was going to move as far as it has in ten years. But we grew The Duchess across the world, past ten million units, and what started as a gap in the market ended up becoming part of the culture.

That’s the sequence worth noticing. Gap first, culture second. Nobody hands you the culture shift in advance. You get a gap, you get to work, and if you’re right and you’re early enough, the culture arrives and finds you already standing there.

Two ways to make the drink — and only one of them is a brand

There are two ways to build an alcohol-free drink. You can take the alcohol out of something, or you can build the flavour profile up from nothing.

Everything downstream depends on which one you pick.

With The Duchess we built up. We took the flavours a gin and tonic actually is — the botanicals, the elderflower — built it on juniper, and put it with a very good tonic. Nothing was removed, because nothing alcoholic was ever there.

Stripping alcohol out gives you a product defined by an absence. Building up gives you a drink that stands on its own and a brand you can actually price. Same shelf, same category label, completely different business. I’ve written about this before as the difference between Born Free and de-alcoholised — and the reason it matters isn’t purity. It’s margin.

The part the headlines get wrong

Prontuit asked me to bring everyone back down to earth a bit, and I was glad to. The world is not going alcohol-free.

Take the story about France’s wine industry faltering. I saw those headlines too, and went and looked properly. France looks to me much more like a new-world supply problem than a nation of people quitting drinking. It’s a real story. It’s just not the story it’s being sold as.

Here’s what ten years of doing this actually taught me: it was never about drinker versus non-drinker.

One statistic I saw: 92% of people buying alcohol-free drinks are also people who drink alcohol.

Read that number again if you’re building anything in this space. To say there are two separate groups — the drinkers over here, the non-drinkers over there — is simply wrong. It’s the same person. What’s changed is that they now make a choice, occasion by occasion, about how they want to mark the moment and how they want to feel tomorrow.

The unit of analysis isn’t the consumer. It’s the occasion.

Almost every founder I’ve watched get this category wrong made the same mistake: they built for an identity — the non-drinker — instead of building for a moment. Identities are small and hard to shift. Occasions are enormous, and everybody already has hundreds of them a year.

Which is why The Duchess is coming back with both

We sold The Duchess a while ago, and it’s been off the market for a bit. It’s coming back — with full kick — and it’s coming back both with alcohol and without.

That’s not a hedge. It follows directly from the 92%. If someone loves The Duchess, I don’t want to hand them to another brand on the nights they choose to drink. I’d rather say: we’re open to both.

For most of the last decade, brands in this category positioned themselves against alcohol. That was a useful wedge when the category needed defining. It’s a ceiling now.

The next category is functional

You can hardly talk about alcohol-free drinks anymore without talking about functional ones.

I’m working with Rekrd now — hydration sachets, salts, vitamins, the kind of thing you drink to actually feel hydrated. It’s one of the fastest-growing categories in the world right now and it’s genuinely interesting, because it runs on exactly the same logic as the alcohol-free shift.

We always said you are what you eat. People are now realising that what you drink is also what you are. If I want to feel a certain way, I think about what’s in the glass.

That’s the through-line from The Duchess to a hydration sachet, and it’s not a beverage insight — it’s a consumer one. The buying decision moved from what does this drink do to how will this make me feel, tonight and tomorrow morning.

South Africa is still a drinking culture

The presenter put it to me that people want to be present now rather than escape. Some do. Plenty still want to escape, and I don’t think that’s going anywhere.

We are a drinking culture. Look at the weather. We braai and we drink, we watch the rugby and we drink. That doesn’t disappear because a category launched.

What does change is Sunday night. Instead of opening another bottle of wine, maybe you have a Duchess, or an alcohol-free beer, or a Rekrd — because you went big last night and you want to feel good tomorrow and be ready for whatever’s next. That’s the shift. It’s small, it’s undramatic, and it’s worth billions.

What I’d take from this if I were building

Three things, and none of them are about drinks.

One: the trend headline is never the business. “Gen Z is drinking less” is a headline. “92% of alcohol-free buyers also drink” is a business. The first one tells you a category exists. The second one tells you who to build for, how to price, and where to put it on shelf. Go and find the second number for your own market — it’s usually one layer under the story everyone’s repeating.

Two: build for occasions, not identities. Identity-led positioning feels sharper and sells a lot less. Ask when your product gets used, not who uses it.

Three: pick build-up over strip-out. In beverages that’s literal. Everywhere else it’s the same choice — are you making something that’s a lesser version of an existing thing, or something that stands on its own? The first is a feature. The second is a brand.

Prontuit airs Wednesdays at 21:00 on kykNET, DStv channel 144.