There’s been a headline doing the rounds recently declaring that “Generation Z is drinking again”. Cue the dramatic gasps, pearl-clutching and industry handwringing. But before anyone panics, let’s get something straight: they/we didn’t stop drinking. 

What’s really happening is far more interesting than a generational U-turn. We’re not saying “no” to alcohol – we’re just not saying “yes” to it by default anymore. In fact, if you look at our latest research, Low & No 2025: Drinking Differently, you’ll see that what we’re witnessing isn’t a bounce-back to binge culture but the solidification of something new and powerful: a flexible, dynamic drinking culture that’s being embraced by people of all ages.

In partnership with alcohol-free beer brand Lucky Saint, we spoke to a nationally representative sample of 2,000 UK adults about their drinking behaviours – the annual study is now in its sixth year. What we found is a shift in how people are approaching alcohol – 76% of UK drinkers now say they’re actively moderating. Not abstaining; not swearing off pints forever; just being more intentional. 

People are tailoring their drinks choices to suit the moment. Essentially, “going out for a drink” doesn’t automatically mean defaulting to alcohol.  A third (34%) are now “zebra striping” – alternating between alcoholic and alcohol-free drinks within the same occasion. It’s something many (sensible) people have been doing for years – but now there’s much tastier alternatives than water or lime and soda. Meanwhile, 30% will go fully alcohol-free on certain “drinking occasions”, 20% are “coasting” on mid-strength options throughout a session. We are, quite literally, mixing it up. 

As an industry, we need to think less about customers being a “drinker” or “non-drinker”. It’s simply about being a drinker with options. And let’s be clear – this isn’t just some Generation Z wellness trend. Sure, younger consumers led the charge, but the behaviour has gone mainstream. In fact, according to the research, the biggest drop in heavy drinking this year came from the over-55s. 62% of them now say they’re moderating. They’re just doing it quietly, without hashtags. So, no, Generation Z haven’t suddenly rediscovered snakebite. The teetotal population has been pretty stable for years (currently at circa 15% of UK adults, depending on the data source). What’s changed is everything in between.

One of the most important things to take away from this year’s low and no research is that moderation isn’t a Dry January-only affair. We’re seeing moderation tactics across every occasion: big nights out, brunch, weddings, work dos, summer barbecues. It’s not “I’m not drinking”. It’s “I’ll have one then switch to alcohol free” or “I’m pacing myself”. Or “I’ve got parkrun in the morning”.

And let’s not underestimate the role of quality here. The rise of genuinely great alcohol-free products has been an absolute game changer. When alcohol-free beer was warm and watery, moderation was about missing out. Now, with flavour-packed options on draught, grown-up alcohol-free cocktails and low-ABV wine that doesn’t taste like vinegar, moderation feels more like a flex than a compromise. It’s not about saying no. It’s about no longer feeling the need to say yes.

If you're in hospitality, there’s good news and a wake-up call. The good news? Flexible drinking doesn’t necessarily mean fewer drinks. It’s just different drinks. A total of 29% say they stay out longer when choosing low and no options, 24% say they actually drink more drinks overall. And when they’re not drinking alcohol, they’re more likely to splash out elsewhere – on food, desserts and premium serves. 

The wake-up call? Expectations are rising. A total of 37% of UK adults say they’ve left a venue early or felt disappointed by the low and no range available. And six years into doing this research, 24% still default to tap water when not drinking alcohol – that represents a whopping £800m missed opportunity for the on-trade. That’s serious lost revenue. 

The low and no category has helped fuel this shift. But as demand grows, the industry needs to keep pace – not just in terms of availability, but also in terms of visibility, variety and quality. A single bottled alcohol-free beer next to the lemonade on the bottom shelf isn’t going to cut it anymore. Consumers expect choice and they want to see it, feel it and taste it.

This shift isn’t just about product development; it’s about messaging too. As an industry, it’s time to rethink how we categorise, market and sell these drinks. Alcohol-free can no longer be an apology. Low shouldn’t mean low effort. And if your wine or spirit brand hasn’t yet explored a credible 0.0% or low-ABV option, now’s the time. Because the demand is there. And the flexibility of this new drinking culture means that low and no isn’t a separate occasion anymore – it’s right in the mix. Literally. Consumers are no longer just asking if you have an alcohol-free option; they’re asking which one.

So no, we’re not sliding back into binge culture. Nor did Generation Z ever stop drinking. We’re evolving. Alcohol is no longer the default, and that’s not bad news – it’s an opportunity. Flexible drinking is the new norm – and those who understand it, embrace it and serve it well will be the ones who thrive. Cheers!

Ask a random person on the street about Marks & Spencer and their response is likely to include a reference to the recent cyber-attack that has exacted a heavy toll on the business. As well as impacting massively on its operational abilities and therefore profits, it also pretty much stole the narrative around the retailer.

 

There is no doubt that since Stuart Machin was appointed chief executive of M&S in mid-2022, he has given a masterclass in controlling the storyline around the business. His communications to employees, shareholders, media and customers have been nothing short of world class. 

 

A critical factor in his engineering an amazing turnaround at the company, which has seen its share price rise from a low of 90p at end-November 2022 to a high of more than 400p before the cyber-attack, has been down to the clarity of the story he has told to all stakeholders at each step of the company’s journey to recovery.

 

The value of a powerful narrative had become increasingly important to companies from all sectors, and this very much includes the hospitality industry. This can encompass highlighting the values of the business, such as its stance on issues around sustainability, but increasingly, it has also come to involve storytelling. People want to know the provenance around businesses. What’s the idea behind a restaurant, the food, the concept and the founders’ pedigree, among other things? 

 

Whether this story is true or a well-crafted fairytale is largely immaterial, it just needs people to buy into the reality or the fiction. Sitting atop the tree of storytelling is, arguably, Dishoom. The company writes an incredibly rich back story for each of its restaurants. In the early days, the founders handled this process, but it has become tougher as the business has grown.

 

Shamil Thakrar, co-founder of Dishoom, told the audience at the Propel Multi-Club Conference earlier this year that a creative team now writes the stories and also sources the furniture and artefacts. A 50-page design guide is produced to deliver on the individual stories for each outlet. The forthcoming Glasgow restaurant will be centred on a spy from India, while the recently opened Permit Room in London’s Notting Hill is based around the story of an artist who drinks a lot. 

 

Thakrar firmly believes that all this effort underpins the business. He said: “It all changes the experience. That’s what hospitality does. It’s the culture of the business, and the chefs cook better food if they are inspired by the culture. It’s the same with the servers.”

 

If anybody is in any doubt about the value of all this effort, then consider the rumours suggesting the valuation of Dishoom in its current funding round has hit £350m. For 14 sites, all leaseholds, this is pretty good going.

 

But it’s not easy. Consider the experience of Harneet Baweja, founder of the Gunpowder chain of restaurants, who recognised the value of having a storyline when he opened the Empire Empire restaurant in 2023 in Notting Hill and injected a disco theme to the venue, harking back to the carefree days of youth. However, he had soon had reservations about the move when Jimi Famurewa reviewed it for The Standard and gave him a roasting for not having committed more fully to the concept.

 

He’s the first to admit he’s not a fantastic storyteller and that developing rich storylines doesn’t come cheap – with investment required in the art, written content, fit-outs, marketing collateral and PR output. But, even so, Baweja does have some concerns that establishments now seem to need a storyline in order to succeed.

 

The downside to this is that many restaurateurs are, therefore, more focused on feeding diners a narrative than serving them decent food. Maybe this should not be too great a surprise, because a mindset of style over substance sits very comfortably within the current criteria for success determined by dishes going viral on Instagram and TikTok.

 

The great risk here is that visuals and stories can sometimes win out over whether the food and the service is actually any good. Those for whom storytelling doesn’t come so naturally will be hoping that such a vacuous situation has a finite lifespan.

The covid pandemic was a watershed in world history. In decades, perhaps centuries, to come, historians will look back on the 21st century and come to some conclusions about the impacts it had. Just now, it’s still a little too close for us to focus properly. Yet some shapes are beginning to emerge, including around drinking behaviours in the UK.

 

Drink had a strange time of it. This week is the fifth anniversary of the lifting of the first lockdown, when pubs were allowed to open the doors after nearly four months of enforced closure. Yet through all that time, alcohol was granted a special status that allowed it to be produced and sold. Perhaps it was good for morale, or perhaps the risks of a black market were too high.

 

Anyway, there were soon scare stories about how much we were drinking, even though the early evidence suggested that many of us (including me) were consuming rather less than usual. For most, drinking was a part of social life. Remove the social life and alcohol had no place. Others took the opportunity to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

 

And there were some who did, indeed, turn to drink to relieve the stresses and uncertainties of an extraordinary, bewildering and often painful and scary event that none of us had experienced before.

 

It’s now understood that there was a polarisation in drinking behaviours between those cutting down and those consuming more, and a new analysis suggests that the difference between the two groups was larger than we thought.

 

Colin Angus, chief number-cruncher (that’s not his exact title) at the Sheffield Addictions Research Group (SARG), has dived into the data on duty revenue to reveal that, compared with what we might expect from pre-pandemic trends, there was a sharp fall in receipts during each lockdown, followed by a surge in sales as restrictions were lifted. I’m less surprised by this than he is. For most, drinking is determined by social occasions rather than individual compulsion. 

 

Nevertheless, he writes: “Across 2020 and 2021, we estimate that we drank almost exactly as much as we would have if they had been ‘normal’ years – it’s just that this conceals significant variation, both in when during the year we were drinking more or less and also in how much people were drinking at the individual level, with some people drinking less and others a lot more.”

 

From 2022, however, in part thanks to the soaring cost of living in the wake of covid, overall sales have fallen below the expected levels and have continued to decline – as anyone trying to flog the stuff will tell you.

 

Indeed, over the past five years, Angus estimates that the Treasury’s receipts from alcohol are a staggering £10.3bn lower than what might have been expected in “normal” times, a shortfall of 12.3%.

 

Broken down by category, we see how beer was, naturally, hardest hit by the lockdowns, but recovered well when the pubs reopened. There was a sharp increase in spirits sales too, probably reflecting the fashion for cocktails coming out of the pandemic and a craving for experiences that can’t be fully replicated at home.

 

This is probably telling pub and bar operators what they already know, but it presents a conundrum for SARG and the public health community. For since 2019, the decline in drinking has been accompanied by a shocking rise in alcohol-specific deaths, which are up 42%.

 

Since the mid-1970s, the theory that it’s alcohol consumption at a population level that ultimately determines harm has asserted itself in public health circles, supplanting the previous disease model.

 

Yet the past few years appear to have overturned that. There are ways to explain the fact that more people are dying of drink, but it can’t be that we’re all drinking more. The pandemic exposed a hard core of vulnerable people drinking at dangerous levels who then came under heightened stress, and at the same time were abruptly deprived of easy access to already weakened alcohol services.

 

Obviously, this is my rough and ready analysis, but it seems logical to assume that this cohort is the one suffering the increased fatalities. While there’s no going back to a disease model that stigmatises the “alcoholic”, it could be that future historians of medicine will find that the pandemic led to the development of a new paradigm for understanding the problem.

 

And there is surely a case for an alcohol policy that spends less time and effort trying to reduce the consumption of the mass of moderate drinkers and focuses on the vulnerable. This is, of course, a more difficult and more costly strategy, but it has the potential advantage that it might just work.

In the not-so-distant past, landlords viewed restaurant leases through a relatively simple lens: the stronger the covenant, the stronger the deal. A blue-chip brand – often a large chain with national presence and balance sheet clout – was the golden ticket. Long leases, upward-only rent reviews and the security of an established operator were enough to lock in what was considered a safe and sustainable return.

 

But the restaurant business has never been static. Tastes change, neighbourhoods evolve and even the most reliable names can fall victim to stagnation or over-expansion. As cracks began to show in some of the high street's biggest players, landlords and agents started rethinking what security truly meant. A lease with a stagnant, albeit creditworthy, operator began to look less attractive than one with a smaller, more dynamic concept perfectly suited to a specific location.

 

This ushered in a new era of suitability over covenant. Landlords and leasing agents adopted a more curated approach. They backed emerging chefs, challenger brands and well-resourced independents that offered genuine potential – not just a big name on a lease. For several years, this strategy breathed new life into streets and schemes, as fresh, site-specific operators redefined what made a location thrive.

 

Landlords began segmenting their target tenants into tiers – ranging from local independents with just a few units to growing regional operators, and finally, to more established national and international brands. The goal was no longer just financial security – it was cultural fit, customer connection and a vision aligned with a location's potential.

 

But the winds are shifting once again. Recent moves on the corporate chessboard suggest that covenant strength may be reclaiming some of its lost ground. McWin's investments in brands like Big Mamma and Sticks’n’Sushi show that international capital is flowing towards lifestyle-driven, experience-first restaurant groups – many of which were once considered “alternative” plays. These aren’t traditional giants, but they’re backed with serious firepower and global growth strategies.

 

Then there’s Wingstop. Its franchise-led model and focused menu may seem simple on the surface, but the recent UK deals are anything but. The numbers are eye-watering, and the trajectory is hard to ignore. This is covenant strength redefined: operational excellence paired with scalability and private equity backing.

 

And on the horizon? All eyes are on two of the UK’s most cherished restaurant exports: The Ivy and Dishoom. Both started as ambitious homegrown concepts. Both have built passionate followings and serious infrastructure. Now, both are poised for significant international expansion. If the right deals are struck, they could help redefine what blue chip means in the modern restaurant landscape.

 

Importantly, when a restaurant group raises significant finance, it signals to landlords that something exceptional is happening. Serious investors don’t back average. They follow proof: brand strength, team quality, operational discipline and potential for scale. These businesses have been tested, scrutinised and built for growth.

 

Some might argue that private equity damaged parts of the sector during the last cycle, and in some cases, it did. Cookie-cutter expansion, hundreds of identical units and growth for growth’s sake led to saturation and eventual collapse.

 

But this is different. The model has evolved. Today, investment chases best-in-class operators, not mass rollout machines. The bar is higher, and the rewards, for those who meet it, are greater. The rest are being left behind. And for landlords, that kind of backing brings real confidence.

 

At the same time, shorter leases have reshaped the risk equation. Gone are the 20-25-year commitments that tied landlords to underperforming tenants. Today, landlords can back bold, well-capitalised concepts without long-term exposure. If a brand falters, they can re-gear or re-let, especially with the trend toward leases outside the Landlord and Tenant Act. That flexibility makes this new generation of ‘power independents’ more attractive than ever.

 

All of this raises the question: Are we witnessing the return of the covenant? It’s not a binary shift – we’re unlikely to return to a world where financial metrics eclipse story, soul, or site suitability. But with rising build costs, macroeconomic pressures and a sharper focus on asset value, financial resilience is once again becoming central to the leasing conversation.

 

Crucially, today’s “new covenants” aren’t faceless corporates. They’re design-led, culturally aware, operationally sound and often purpose-driven. But they’re also backed by smart money, strategic growth plans and institutional discipline.

 

So, what does the future look like? Most likely, a blend. The savviest landlords will continue to curate with care, choosing operators for their potential to transform space and build community. But in a more competitive market, covenant strength may once again be the tiebreaker.

 

Suitability, profitability and credibility are no longer in conflict – they’re becoming part of the same package. And in this new era, the winning tenants will be those who can prove they’ve got the story and the strength to go the distance.