Dry January and Veganuary 2024


A popular trend this month is Dry January – where people in the UK are challenged to go alcohol-free for the whole month.

Many new drink products have been launched this month, as companies innovate to meet the increasing consumer demand for alcohol-free drinks.

To find out more about how many people are taking part in Dry January this year, we ran some research with the nationally representative Vypr Community of 60,000+ consumers.*

How many people are participating?

Around 35% voted that they were taking part.

Using filters on the Vypr platform, it was evident that more younger people are taking part, compared to older age groups.

Previous figures for 2021 indicate an even lower intended participation, so it appears the trend is rising further this year.

Why are people participating?

We asked consumers for the main reason they are taking part in Dry January.

A quarter of the sample voted for their physical health, but 20% are taking on the challenge for their mental health – an effect much larger in younger people, and very small in older people.

In line with the rising interest in going alcohol-free, we wanted to discover consumer behaviour trends and insight specifically regarding favourite types of alcohol-free drinks.

To do this we targeted the subset of our community that drink alcohol-free drinks.

Favourite type of alcohol-free drink?

We set up a follow-up question with those that consume alcohol-free drinks, asking them about their favourite type of drink – which we found out was beer, as shown below.

This preference for beer remained in most age and gender groups, though males showed a larger preference for it.

Why beer?

One interesting bit of insight, seen multiple times, was the consumer opinion that alcohol-free beers have managed to replicate the flavours of their alcoholic equivalents, compared to the other types of alcohol-free drinks.

This demonstrates the power of conducting research to reveal key industry insight that might not be unlocked otherwise – let Vypr be the key to uncovering this insight by putting you in touch with your consumers.