Research & Resources

This study aimed to estimate the proportion of drinks and sales revenue accruing to alcoholic beverage companies that were attributable to underage consumption in 2011 and 2016. The researchers used national survey data to estimate the number of adult and underage past-30-day drinkers, the median volume of alcohol consumed, beverage preferences, and alcohol price by beverage type. Underage youth drank 11.73 percent of the alcoholic drinks sold in the U.S. market in 2011 and 8.6 percent in 2016. Total sales revenue attributable to underage consumption was $20.9 billion out of a total of $208.0 billion in 2011 and $17.5 billion out of $237.1 billion in 2016. Three alcoholic beverage companies represented nearly half of the market share of beverages consumed by underage youth. These findings present an opportunity to enact and enforce policies—such as alcohol taxes or required alcohol industry and company funding of youth drinking prevention initiatives—to recover revenues from the industry and use them to help prevent youth alcohol consumption.

This paper, “Company-specific revenues from underage drinking,” was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.