Zacal’s new canned cocktail, the Zacalita, started as a small run poured for a bar event in Soho last November, built by Chris Tanner of London’s Dram and Rory Shepherd of De Vie in Paris. It’s now a real product launching into a category that grew fast enough last year to actually matter to a mezcal brand’s bottom line: spirits-based ready-to-drink cocktails brought in $3.8 billion in 2025, up more than 16 percent, and agave spirits have been one of the fastest-growing corners of that market.
The packaging shift underneath that trend is easy to miss but genuinely relevant to mezcal’s sustainability math. Cans now account for roughly 78 percent of the RTD cocktail market, and aluminum has a real recycling advantage over glass — it’s more widely recovered in the US, and in Europe more than 70 percent of RTD cocktails already ship in recyclable cans. That’s a sharp contrast with the heavy, artisanal-look glass mezcal brands have leaned on for years specifically because it signals craft. A can can’t carry that same visual weight, but it also doesn’t carry the same carbon cost to produce or ship.
None of this means canned mezcal cocktails are a sustainability fix on their own — a canned cocktail is diluted, mixed, and packaged differently than a bottle meant for sipping neat, and the two aren’t really substitutes for each other. But it’s a real data point in an industry that’s spent most of its growth years getting heavier and more ornate at the top of the market. The RTD boom is proof there’s real demand for mezcal in a format that happens to weigh less, ship cheaper, and recycle better — even if nobody built it with that in mind.