Why Your Mocktail Costs as Much as the Real Thing

Nonalcoholic cocktails now regularly cost as much as their boozy counterparts, and Bon Appétit asked industry figures why a drink with no alcohol in it can carry a £14 price tag. The short answer given was that these aren’t “fancy juice” — they’re built from the same labour-intensive syrups, reductions and specialty ingredients as any other cocktail. The more interesting answer is underneath that, in how bars actually make money.

The Subsidy Nobody Talks About

A standard cocktail’s price has almost nothing to do with what’s in the glass and everything to do with what it’s covering. Liquor licensing, insurance, spoilage, and the sheer markup a bar can charge on a $20 bottle of gin poured six ways — that’s the margin structure that pays the rent, and it has traditionally been generous enough to absorb a lot of overhead elsewhere on the menu. Take the alcohol out, and that built-in subsidy disappears. The labour to build complexity — shrubs, tinctures, house-made syrups, clarified juices — doesn’t get any cheaper just because there’s no spirit at the bottom of it. If anything, replicating the depth alcohol gives a drink for free means more steps, not fewer.

Specialty nonalcoholic spirits compound this. Bottles positioned as premium substitutes are often priced close to, or above, the everyday well spirits they’re replacing, without the decades of distribution scale that keep gin and vodka cheap per pour. A bar buying those bottles is paying boutique prices for a product category still finding its economies of scale.

Pricing as Signal, Not Just Cost

There’s also a psychology at work that a straight cost breakdown doesn’t capture. Pricing a mocktail well below the cocktail menu risks framing it as an afterthought — the drink for the designated driver, not a considered choice. Charging near parity does the opposite: it tells a sober or sober-curious customer that the same care went into their glass, and it lets the bar avoid discounting a drink that took just as long to make. That’s a deliberate menu decision, not simply cost-plus arithmetic, and it’s been made easier by a genuine surge in demand — the same “sober curious” shift that’s filled shelves with alcohol-free spirits has given bars room to charge what the market will bear rather than what the ingredients strictly justify.

The result is a category caught between two logics: cost recovery for genuinely labour-heavy drinks, and pricing power from a trend that hasn’t yet levelled off. Until nonalcoholic spirits reach the volume and distribution that make everyday liquor cheap, the mocktail on your bill is unlikely to get much cheaper — even as the ingredients behind it keep getting better.

Reported at Bon Appétit; analysis ours.