Canada: Beer remains Canada’s top selling alcoholic beverage category in 2023/24

Many Canadians have embraced buying domestically-made products in recent months. Canadians are already plenty patriotic when it comes to buying beer, with domestic brew accounting for almost nine out of every ten dollars of beer sold nationally (88.0%) during the fiscal year 2023/2024, Statistics Canada reported.

Liquor authorities and retailers sold 665.4 million litres of regular Canadian beer in 2023/2024, down 3.4% from a year earlier and 9.9% lower than the record high 738.7 million litres sold in 2017/2018. Regular beer domestic brewers are not crying in their beer, however, with sales up for the eighth consecutive year, reaching a record high C$3.1 billion in 2023/2024 on higher prices.

In March 2024, Canadians were paying 4.6% more year over year for beer in bars and restaurants, while prices for beer purchased at stores rose 2.3%.

When it comes to light beer, Canadian brewers dominate, with the domestic share of light beer sales topping 98.6% of the market in 2023/2024.

Nevertheless, the volume of domestic light beer sold declined for the fourth consecutive year, falling 3.6% in 2023/2024 to 254.8 million litres. Sales were also down 2.1% to $1.2 billion.

Sales of domestic strong beer—with an alcohol content of 5.6% or more—rose 10.8% from a year earlier to $522.3 million, accounting for 90.0% of total strong beer sales nationally in 2023/2024.

Beer remained the top-selling alcoholic beverage category in 2023/2024, accounting for over one-third (35.1%) of total sales. However, this was down significantly from two decades ago, when beer accounted for almost half of all alcoholic beverage sales (49.4% in 2004/2005).

The total value of beer sales by liquor stores, agencies and other retail outlets fell 1.3% to C$9.2 billion in the 2023/2024 fiscal year.

By volume, beer sales declined for the eighth consecutive year, falling 4.5% from a year earlier to 1 950 million litres in 2023/2024, a record decrease since Statistics Canada began tracking alcohol sales in 1949.

To put the volume of beer sold into perspective, liquor authorities and retailers sold enough beer to fill 780 Olympic-size swimming pools in 2023/2024, with about 700 of those pools filled with Canadian-made beer.

Beer sales were equivalent to 3.4 standard bottles of beer per week, per person of legal drinking age.