Circana is one of the biggest names in consumer-market research and analytics, and its Total Store Model offers a useful lens for understanding where hemp beverages fit into the broader retail landscape. Rather than looking at categories in isolation, Circana tracks how shopper behavior, merchandising, and sales interact across the full store. THC drinks are not entering the market through a single category; they are influencing purchasing patterns across alcohol, energy, functional beverages, and convenience.

It Started With White Claw

I caught up with Karl Nemitz, Circana’s Director of Sales & Client Insights on the ABI Commercial Performance team. He’s been tracking THC-infused beverages for the past two years across departments and categories within their Total Store Model, and he took us back a bit to reflect on where the disruption in the alcohol sector really started.

Around 2018-19, brands like White Claw, Twisted Tea, and Mike’s Hard helped reshape the alcohol aisle by popularizing the convenience of a ready-made “cocktail in a bottle,” giving consumers easier access to portable, flavor-forward alternatives to traditional beer, wine, and spirits. While ready-to-drink beverages cracked open consumer willingness to experiment, adjacent categories like energy drinks, functional beverages, and non-alcoholic options expanded what “drinking occasion” could mean. While data has been showing sharp declines in beer, wine, and spirits, Nemitz believes consumers are not necessarily drinking less alcohol — they are choosing different options for the same stimulation.

1,000 Products and Counting

One of the biggest challenges is that THC beverages are still not a formally defined syndicated retail category.

Circana is essentially building the language as it goes.

Nemitz has personally developed an internal cannabinoid hierarchy using UPC scan data to track products that specifically include THC-related compounds, like Delta-9, or THC-plus-CBD, CBG, or CBN formulations. Products without THC are largely filtered out. His goal is to isolate what consumers would more accurately recognize as the emerging THC beverage market.

Back in May 2024, he was tracking around 105 items that met his threshold of roughly 50 scans across the U.S. Today, that number sits between 1,000 and 1,100 items he deems truly THC-infused to some degree — and that’s likely an undercount. There are potentially hundreds more in Circana’s back-end that haven’t hit scanning thresholds yet, which could mean they’re being sold at retailers Circana doesn’t currently have coverage for.

His data spans food, convenience, and liquor retail channels, though he notes the data is still directional as the category continues to take shape. That infrastructure gets built over decades. This is being built month by month.

Where Growth Is Showing Up First

According to Nemitz, convenience stores are one of the biggest breakout channels right now.

C-store activity has become especially notable, suggesting that hemp beverages may be following a faster, impulse-driven retail path, similar to energy drinks and single-serve alcohol purchases.

Circana’s occasion-based analysis also shows THC beverages crossing multiple consumption moments. Some overlap with beer, wine, and spirits, but there are also strong daytime-use occasions that align more closely with energy drinks and functional beverages.

When Nemitz looks at the flavor data, berry dominates across a wide range of blends. He’s also starting to see THC wine and beer knockoffs appear in the data, and if he had to call it, he thinks the beer category gains traction first, followed by spirits.

Where the Market Is Moving Fastest

Not surprisingly, Nemitz noted that the Southeast has emerged as a major leader in hemp beverage momentum, given its cluster of states without adult-use cannabis markets. This is useful information for those brands deciding on which markets to enter.

Retailers, distributors, and brands now need to think about hemp beverages the way they think about alcohol alternatives, RTDs, and functional beverages: by occasion, by channel, by merchandising strategy, and by regional adoption based on regulations.

The Retailer List Keeps Growing

Circana pulls its data from POS systems across retail channels, and Nemitz breaks it down by food, C-store, and liquor. Right now, C-store is still the largest channel by a significant margin — but about 95% of that C-store activity comes from independent operators, which tracks with the earlier conversation about smaller retailers being less exposed to the regulatory and GMP pressures that give larger chains pause.

Food accounts for roughly 35-40% of total U.S. store-level activity in his dataset. For most of the past year and a half, the names showing up there were regional players like Rouses and Coburns, alongside food co-ops like UNFI and AWG. But in his most recent data refresh, two new names jumped to the top of the food sector: Topco and Alex Lee.

Nemitz noticed Alex Lee and immediately went to work connecting it back to the regional sales trends he’s been tracking.

In the C-store, Circle K is showing meaningful activity, particularly in Florida and the South Atlantic. EG Group, which owns Cumberland Farms, is showing up primarily in the Northeast. GPM, another large gas and convenience co-op, has recently started appearing in the data. And then there are the smaller, newer entrants: Hucks popping up in the Midwest for the first time, Wakefern showing up in the Northeast. The sales volumes at those smaller retailers aren’t close to the top names yet, but Nemitz has learned not to dismiss them.

Of the roughly 30 retailers showing up in his data, only a handful have ever stopped carrying THC beverages — meaning once a store starts stocking them, they rarely pull back, says Nemitz.

The liquor channel has its own story. Total Wine and More has been the clear leader, but ABC Fine Wine and Spirits has come on fast. Nemitz wasn’t even seeing ABC in Q3 of last year, and by Q1, it had appeared in the database and quickly pulled neck and neck with Total Wine. There’s also emerging activity within Winn-Dixie’s liquor stores specifically, which Nemitz ties back to Southeastern Grocers, the co-op that owns Winn-Dixie, and estimates accounts for roughly 40-50% of what he’s seeing in that Southeast region number.

For Nemitz, the steady appearance of new retailers each month indicates that hemp beverages are moving toward being a real category. He’s helped build category languages from scratch at other companies, and he sees all the same early signals here. The category is still early, but the groundwork is being laid, and conversations with people in the industry are already helping him refine the hierarchy, correct legacy Delta-8 UPCs that need to be reclassified as Delta-9, and make the case internally for the resources this category will eventually need.

“It’s showing all the right signs of trending toward becoming its own category,” he said. “I’m just paying close attention until it gets there.”