Surfside: ‘We want to be the Coca-Cola’ of RTDs
Ready-to-drink (RTD) brand Surfside sold more than 11 million cases last year and is aiming to grow volumes by 50% in 2026, its co–founder tells SB.
This time last year, Surfside experienced triple-digit growth for 2024, becoming the fastest-growing alcohol brand in US retail (according to Nielsen IQ data) and selling nearly five million cases.
Looking back at how 2025 went, co-founder Clement Pappas recalls it was the brand’s strongest year since it was established in 2022. “We did about 11.15m cases last year,” he tells The Spirits Business of doubling growth, adding that he wants to repeat the feat again for 2026: “We want to grow by 50%, so it’s a little more than 15 million cases.”
Pappas believes this ambition is achievable. “With our growth pattern throughout the US, which is such a large country and geographically so vast, we came up in the northeast part, so Philadelphia and then New York and DC and Boston, huge population centers,” he says.
“We’re now getting very strong in the southeast and we’re spreading into the Midwest where Ohio is a really good state for us, but there’s still plenty of runway.”
Pappas sees room for growth in markets like Illinois, Texas, California, or Michigan where “we still think we can grow triple digits easily, by 300-400%.
“The more mature markets are going to experience lower percentages of growth as they get more and more saturated, but there’s still growth in those markets [like New Jersey, one of the brand’s best states from day one], but it’s maybe more at 10% on a very large base,” he adds.
Co-founder Matt Quigley, meanwhile, says: “We’ve been doubling more or less almost every single year since the start of this company. It would be foolish to expect its going to continue in perpetuity and whatnot, but we’ll ultimately see the crest of the hill.
“But just looking at the data coming out of the first month of this year, it’s strong. We think we’re going to put up some banner numbers again, as we close out 2026.”
Quigley, who spearheads the brand’s partnerships, also notes how Surfside has captured the sporting audience. “As we went into our national expansion, we looked at Minor League Baseball [MiLB] and a deal with that organisation was a nice mechanism to get the message out. Some of the teams are small, 5,000-person stadiums and they’re all intermixed, but they’re all over the nation.”
Now Surfside has entered the big leagues with Major League Baseball (MLB) and has active partnerships with 13 teams, including the New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers.
“Baseball’s a great occasion that hits right at the beginning of our summer, so it tees up the messaging, the adoption and trial and whatnot as people go into that weekend-type mentality,” Quigley says.
Additionally, Surfside has branched into golf, by sponsoring individual PGA tournaments and striking a partnership with Troon.
“We’ve taken the approach where this is a product for the everyman-type golfer and we’ve had such good adoption, just in local, regional golf courses that anyone would belong to. Adding it up I think we’re somewhere carried out in over 3,000 golf courses across America.”
New flavours
The brand’s canned cocktails are made with vodka, real tea and lemonade. Earlier this week, it added four new flavours to the lineup as spring approaches. The latest additions include the launch of Blueberry Lemonade and a half-and-half pack, which includes its original Iced Half & Half + Vodka with three new flavours: Raspberry, Mango Tea and Blackberry.
Regarding Surfside Blueberry Lemonade + Vodka, Pappas says development had already begun in 2024: “We’ve always wanted to do a blueberry lemonade as it’s a classic flavour combination, however, as it also turns out, it’s technically a very difficult flavour to get correct.”
He notes that the team spent the last two years formulating the product so its taste is true to fruit, or to a fresh blueberry lemonade.
“We’re very careful to protect the quality of our brand and the liquid where we won’t put something out until we really do feel like it’s a home run. Blueberries are a flavour that can very easily go artificial and can taste candied.”
For the future, Pappas thinks it can be one of the brand’s top sellers. “I think we landed in a great spot where it’s delicious, but also while we love all of our lemonade flavours – raspberry, strawberry and black cherry, all somewhat similar to each other – we thought blueberry would be a nice differentiator.”
Of the new Half & Half Variety 8-Pack, it extends Surfside’s Half & Half + Vodka (said to be the brand’s second-highest growth SKU, up by 118% in the 2025 full year) with three new flavours.
The original flavour is based on the Arnold Palmer cocktail, which is iced tea combined with lemonade and spiked with a spirit, in this case vodka (the cocktail here is called the John Daly, named after another American golfer).
Pappas notes that in the US variety packs are the “biggest vehicles” for these types of canned cocktails. “Typically, there’s four flavours in a variety pack, but just the natural way of things, and some of them sell better than others.
“Our first half-and-half emerged as one of the most popular sellers, and in some markets, the most popular seller. It is a flavour profile that people really love and it is associated with golf.”
Pappas says mango tea came out as an interesting flavour that “could bring more people into the fold”, while being a differentiator compared to the rest of the portfolio. Blackberry then won out in a debate with peach.
“We’re trying to be the leader in the market, providing more variety, more opportunity, and bringing more people into the category,” Pappas adds.
“So far, they’re just hitting the shelves, but there’s been great reception, and hopefully it’s incremental and gives us more market share and volume.”
Route to success
On pinpointing where the brand’s success comes from – branding, the product, the timing – Pappas says the question is one he is asked a lot, and compares it to a three-legged stool.
“If you kick out any one of those legs, that stool doesn’t stand up… and this is like a 17-legged stool. Surfside is approachable, it doesn’t demand much of you and it’s not carbonated. It turns out there’s a pent-up demand for non-carbonated drinks, as you can drink them quicker than carbonated ones, and they don’t bloat or make you gassy.
“Then there’s also being able to hit that low-calorie area and having a better-for-you alternative than almost everything that’s out there.”
He feels Surfside has been able to play the field with beer and spirits drinkers: “I look at the big picture with RTDs where for years it’s been the beer guys versus the spirits guys, and is beer going to take share from spirits, or is spirits going to take share from beer?
“I look at us as the perfect love child of beer and spirits. It’s got every advantage you want from beer in terms of being in a can, portable, easy drinking and drunk in moderation. It’s about going to a ball game and being able to drink a bunch of them without losing your head.”
“It has all the perfect attributes between beer and spirits, and again being spirits… clean and low in sugar,” he adds.
Pappas also observes that, on the same point, “Surfside doesn’t have all the negatives of beer where you think about it being a bitter, acquired taste for people as they come of age to start drinking, or where it’s not a familiar flavour”.
He compares the consistency that Surfside offers to Coca-Cola: “You’re gonna get Coca-Cola every time you open a can of Coca-Cola. That’s what it is – consistent, easy to drink, portable. You can throw in the cooler, you can take it to the tailgate and don’t have to open a corkscrew wine, or pour out a cocktail, or buy a mixer, or have a cup of ice.”
Pappas also addresses the importance of navigating the business side.
“The big multinationals have great routes to market and distribution partners and relationships with all the chains and the supply chain, and we had to build all that,” he says.
“Executing the business side is not easy, especially as an emerging company. We didn’t have a relationship with Walmart, we had to go and bang their door down. And everybody’s banging their door down.”
The brand now has around 200 distributors nationwide in the US and Pappas notes “it’s a lot of work”.
Explaining how the brand handles its distribution, he says: “We have a three-tier system in the US and you have to use these distributors. We can’t ship directly to the big retailers and we chose to go through beer wholesalers.”
The team felt as though wine and spirits distributors weren’t as well situated in bringing an RTD, so they chose beer, which RTDs act similar to in the trade.
“We felt they [spirits and wine] didn’t have the right infrastructure to deal with it – whether warehouse or truck space, or manpower to stack out displays or frequency. This [RTDs] is a lower ring compared to a full-proof spirit, but it’s a much higher velocity,” Pappas explains.
“Its a different route to market and you need to build out big pallet displays and all these kind of things that the beer distributors just do, because that’s how beer works, and the spirits distributors don’t.”
He notes beer networks “are quite fragmented”, but it is something the company has to overcome as “it’s the right route to market and is what is going to ultimately make us successful”.
He says: “We’ve done it by having the right amount of sales and distributor management support on the ground in every market, which rolls up to regional levels and then national level. In this market with the three-tier system, it’s just critical to be very close to your distributor. They can make or break you and you really need to be very tightly aligned within them.”
International expansion?
Of international expansion, Surfside is already available in Caribbean markets and the team are working on Canada and Mexico. Pappas also notes that the UK is on the radar.
“That’s the goal and we’re working on it,” he says. “We just hired a VP of international, but there’s no definitive plans to announce. We’re in an exploratory phase of looking at the right international markets to target and sizing up the opportunities and starting to go after them.”
Surfside is still a young brand that is being discovered and that also goes with the vodka-based hard tea segment.
“I call it the ‘gold rush’ phase”, Pappas says. “Now you have 30 new entrants all coming in and trying to kind of get a piece of the pie. We’ve seen this shake out in multiple other categories, where originally there was White Claw and its copycats, which went away.
“I’d say we’re probably another year or two away from getting it down to one or two of us. Maybe there’s a place for a regional guy, or a third-place guy, but it’s kind of like soda where there’s Coke and Pepsi, but it’s hard to have 17 brands of cola out there.
“Ultimately, the retailers like sales per square foot and they’re going to stock the brands that give them the most productivity for their shelf space.
“They’re not going to carry 30 of them, so right now we’re in that messy part of the ride, but we have category leadership and as it settles we want to be Coca-Cola, not the third or the second-place guy.”
Related news
Alcohol-free and RTDs outperform spirits in US retail
