Animée is the result of two years product development, driven by industry and consumer insights from the BitterSweet Partnership, a multi-million pound business set up by Molson Coors in 2009 to remove the gender imbalance around beer consumption and women.
“The research told us that we had to consider what we produced allayed concerns about the perceived fattening nature of beer and ensure it was served it in a way that appealed,” a spokesperson for Molson Coors told BeverageDaily.com.
According to Molson Coors, women are vital to growing the shrinking beer market, which currently attributes just 17 per cent of its sales to females.
The company claims that 79 per cent of women in the UK never or rarely drink beer.
"Women are an essential part of future growth for the beer industry and can no longer be ignored,” said Kristy McCready a spokesperson for Molson Coors in the UK and Ireland.
The four per cent “lightly filtered” ABV beer product is available in three variants, clear filtered, crisp rosé and zesty lemon.
The company said it achieved “a fresher and lighter taste” in the beer by reducing carbonation through the brewing process.
In addition, the firm said it opted for an ultra filtration process to make the beer lighter.
Image problem
It makes a lot of sense to go after female wine drinkers in an attempt to grow the market, Tom Vierhile director of Datamonitor’s Product Launch Analytics team told BeverageDaily.com.
One reason why beer suffers from less female purchases may be due to an image problem compared to other types of alcohol, said the analyst.
“For one, beer is not as sweet as wine or flavoured alcohol beverages and this appears to be something Molson Coors is addressing directly with Animée.”
“There is no doubt that beer can be an acquired taste. Moreover, beer has a reputation of being high in calories – regardless of whether or not that is really the case.”
Although some companies have launched beers that tend to skew more females, such as fruit flavoured varieties, most brewers have tried to avoid creating products just for women, the analyst said.
He said this maybe because doing so may detract from the image of other products sold under the same brand.
From the beer industry’s perspective, manufacturers may be looking at the beer market and wondering why there cannot be a more even gender split, like there is for wine, said Vierhile.
“If beer makers were able to persuade even a relatively small percentage of women to shift their purchases from wine to beer, it could have a major impact on product sales,” he said.