Truly Hard Seltzer is releasing its first holiday party pack, featuring four new limited edition flavors, including Pom Ginger Fizz.

The holiday themed variety pack will be available nationwide starting November 1. The winter inspired flavors include Pom Ginger Fizz, Holiday Sangria Style, Cran Orange Sparkler, and Spiked Apple Juice.

Like Truly’s year round flavors, each 12 oz slim can contains 5% ABV, 100 calories, and only one gram of sugar.

Since its initial release in 2016, Truly Hard Seltzer has made a name for itself through innovation. The company was early to market in the spiked and sparkling lemonade, iced tea, and punch categories – after blazing trails with hard seltzer.

“This is a category that is variety driven. We’re continuing to think about what consumers want from a hard seltzer and giving them something that’s a little different,” said Dave Burwick, CEO of Truly’s parent company Boston Beer.

As a result of its product expansions, Truly has enjoyed rapid growth during its time on the market. The brand experienced 44% growth within the category this year, second only to Bud Light Seltzer.

This autumn, Truly appears ready to take on Bud Light Seltzer directly, as the latter also recently announced its Fall Flannel seasonal variety pack, featuring three brand new cold-weather themed flavors.

In spite of Truly’s cushy number two spot in the seltzer segment, its growth has slowed recently. Burwick recently admitted that the company had overestimated seltzer’s growth.

“We overestimated the growth of the hard seltzer category in the second quarter and the demand for Truly, which negatively impacted our volume and earnings for the quarter and our estimates for the remainder of the year,” Burwick said on the Q2 earnings call.

“We increased our production of Truly to meet our summer peak and have had lower-than-anticipated demand for certain Truly brand styles, which has resulted in higher-than-planned inventory levels at our breweries and increased supply-chain costs and complexity.”

Yet it appears that Truly is continuing to lean into innovation, in spite of its last quarter earnings call. Since Burwick’s statement sent the company’s stock prices tumbling by approximately 20%, Boston Beer announced a major partnership with PepsiCo in order to develop HARD MTN DEW, Pepsi’s first foray into the hard beverage market.

The brand is also looking to expand its international footprint, having just launched in England and Ireland.

“It’s the first stop on our international journey,” Burwick said. “There will be other countries because we think this thing can play globally. It’s to be determined where, how and to what extent.”

In addition to new global markets, look for Truly to continue to push innovation into the new year.

“We deliberately accelerated our innovation. In a perfect world [we] would have done fruit punch in January of next year. But we know we have to gather as much share as we can as early as we can,” the CEO added. “Once a category settles out, it’s much harder and much more expensive to gain share.”

Erin Grafton
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