What 24,021 Data Points Reveal About How People Actually Use Infused Beverages
There's a story the cannabis beverage industry keeps telling itself. It goes something like this: infused beverages are the new cocktail. They belong on bar menus, at happy hours, in the hands of people clinking glasses at rooftop parties. The pitch is social. The positioning is nightlife. The aspiration is to show up everywhere alcohol already lives.
It's a compelling narrative. There's just one problem — it doesn't match what consumers are actually doing.
The MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study tracked consumption behavior across 24,021 reported consumption days, collecting data from real consumers using real products in their real lives. Not surveys about hypothetical behavior. Not focus groups recalling what they think they did last month. Actual, in-the-moment reporting of when, where, and why people reached for an infused beverage.
The results tell a story the industry needs to hear. And honestly, it's a story we at 23rd State have been building around from the beginning.
The Data Is In: This Is an End-of-Day Product
Let's start with the headline number. Across the full study cohort, nearly half of all consumption — 48.3% — happened at the end of the day to relax. Not at a bar. Not at a party. At home, winding down.
Add in the 22.8% of consumption that happened at home with a meal, the 12.6% that happened alone, and the smaller shares for watching sports (3.0%) and other domestic activities (3.2%), and the picture becomes overwhelming. A full 83.7% of infused beverage consumption is some version of at-home, evening, low-key, and often solo.
Bars and restaurants? That accounted for 0.6% of all reported consumption. Social events came in at 4.4%. Outdoor activities at 5.1%.
Read those numbers again. The industry is pouring marketing dollars into the occasion that represents less than 5% of actual use — while the occasion that represents nearly half of all consumption gets treated as an afterthought.
5:30 PM: The Moment That Matters
The study didn't just track where people consumed. It tracked when. And the timing data reinforces everything the setting data already told us.
The median consumption time was 5:30 PM. The middle 50% of all consumption fell between 2:53 PM and 7:11 PM. And 71.7% of participants used the product once per day.
This is not a "have a few at the party" product. This is not an all-day sipper. This is an end-of-workday ritual. One serving, late afternoon to early evening, at home. The transition from on to off. From work mode to rest mode. From the noise of the day to something quieter.
If you've ever cracked open a 23rd State FRESH PRESS at your kitchen counter after closing your laptop, or dropped a few shakes of SHAKE 24k Gold into a glass of sparkling water while dinner simmers on the stove, you already know this moment. You didn't need 24,021 data points to tell you what it feels like. But now there's research confirming that tens of thousands of other people are doing the same thing.
In Their Own Words
Numbers paint the picture. But the qualitative data from the MoreBetter study brings it to life in a way that's hard to ignore.
The study asked 1,970 participants to write a product review and 1,972 to explain whether and why they would or wouldn't replace alcohol with an infused beverage. Across 20 different products, without any prompting or coaching, consumers described the same ritual over and over again.
One participant wrote about coming to "really look forward to my little end of day ritual of winding down with it." Another described it as something that "satisfies my desire for something to relax me after work without the incapacitating effects and without the hangover." Perhaps the most striking response was also the simplest: "The ritual is the same but the consequences are better."
That last line deserves a moment. It captures something essential about what's happening in this category. People aren't abandoning rituals. They're upgrading them. The glass at the end of the day, the thing you reach for when the workday is over and the evening stretches out ahead of you — that ritual is deeply embedded. What's changing is what's inside the glass.
When participants who selected "Other" for their consumption setting were asked to elaborate, they described working from home, watching TV, cleaning the house, playing video games, cooking dinner, and winding down before bed. Domestic. Quiet. Routine. Not glamorous, not Instagram-worthy, not the kind of occasions that show up in brand campaigns. Just real life, happening every evening, in kitchens and living rooms across the country.
Where Alcohol Still Wins — and Why That's Actually Good News
Here's where the data gets interesting in a different way. The MoreBetter study didn't just ask people about infused beverages. It asked them directly about alcohol, where they'd still prefer it, and where they'd choose to substitute.
The answer was remarkably consistent: 63.6% of participants said there are settings where they'd still prefer alcohol. The top two settings were social events (22.4%) and bars and restaurants (22.0%). Of the 581 participants who said they'd "sometimes" replace alcohol, the explanations were nearly interchangeable in their clarity.
Participants described choosing "alcohol for social parties, THC for nighttime relaxing." Others said they liked their "alcohol drinks especially when out with friends" but preferred "THC when at home and relaxing." One participant put it bluntly: they "didn't feel social" when drinking the infused product, so they would drink it at home instead of wine but "would never drink it in public."
Consumers have already sorted this out for themselves. They're not confused about when to reach for what. Infused beverages own the wind-down. Alcohol owns the social occasion. The substitution the industry has been chasing is real — elsewhere in the study, daily alcohol probability dropped 12.7 percentage points among participants during the trial — but that substitution is happening at home at 5:30 PM, not at happy hour.
Why is this good news? Because the wind-down occasion is enormous, it's daily, and it's wide open for the taking. Tea has built a wellness empire around relaxation. Wine owns the cultural idea of the evening pour. But infused beverages — despite 24,021 data points showing consumers already use them to decompress — have almost no brand intentionally and clearly claiming that space.
That's an opportunity. A massive one.
Why 23rd State Was Built for This Moment
We didn't need this study to know that 23rd State products belong in the wind-down. That's where we started. But it's one thing to believe in your positioning and another to see it validated across thousands of consumers and tens of thousands of consumption occasions.
When we developed FRESH PRESS — our THC + CBG pear cider with 10mg THC and 10mg CBG — we designed it to feel like something you reach for at the end of the day. The flavor profile is crisp but calming. The carbonation is satisfying without being aggressive. The format is a single-serve can that feels intentional, not excessive. It's not trying to be a cocktail. It's trying to be the thing that replaces the cocktail at home.
SHAKE was built around the same insight with a different angle. Our infused edible glitter drops — available in Emerald, Cosmo, and 24k Gold — let you turn anything into your wind-down ritual. Sparkling water, a mocktail, a glass of juice, whatever your evening pour looks like. The ritual is yours. SHAKE just makes it better. Each variant is infused with THC and CBG, designed to support that transition from the day's tension to the evening's ease.
And Blush Crush, our infused bubbly, takes the familiar format of a sparkling wine-style pour and fills it with something that actually serves the wind-down occasion. It looks like celebration. It feels like decompression. That's not an accident.
The CBG in our formulations is part of this story too. While individual results vary, we chose to pair THC with CBG across our product line because the combination supports the kind of experience our consumers are describing in this data — calm, present, at ease. Not checked out. Not impaired. Just unwound.
What This Means for the Cannabis Beverage Category
The MoreBetter study isn't just data for brands to cherry-pick good numbers from. It's a signal about where the entire infused beverage category should be headed.
First, the occasion has already been defined by consumers. Across nearly 2,000 product reviews, people described the same use case independently and unprompted: end of day, at home, winding down, taking the edge off. If your brand isn't positioning around this occasion, your consumers are using you for it anyway. The question is whether you're going to meet them there intentionally or keep chasing an occasion that represents a fraction of actual behavior.
Second, the "alcohol alternative at the bar" positioning has a data ceiling. The substitution effect is real and significant. But the data shows that substitution happens at home in the late afternoon and early evening. The settings where consumers say they'd still prefer alcohol — social gatherings, bars, restaurants — are precisely the settings the cannabis beverage category keeps pouring resources into trying to win. The data suggests that's pushing against the grain of actual consumer behavior.
Third, and most importantly, the wind-down occasion is wide open. No brand in the infused beverage space has definitively claimed it. There's no "the nighttime, sniffling, sneezing" equivalent for cannabis beverages. No brand that immediately comes to mind when someone thinks about unwinding at the end of the day with something better than a glass of wine and less destructive than a few beers.
That's the white space. That's where the category grows. Not by forcing infused beverages into bar menus but by becoming the obvious, default choice for the thing millions of people already do every evening: decompress.
The Ritual Isn't Going Anywhere
People have always had end-of-day rituals. A drink after work. A glass of wine with dinner. Something to mark the boundary between the day's obligations and the evening's freedom. That behavior is cultural, habitual, and deeply personal.
What's changing is the awareness that the substance filling that ritual has options now. Options that don't come with hangovers, empty calories, disrupted sleep, or the slow creep of dependence. Options that let you keep the ritual — the glass, the pour, the moment of pause — while swapping the consequences.
That's what 24,021 data points are showing us. Not that people want to party differently. Not that cannabis beverages are going to replace bottle service. But that there's an enormous, daily, highly personal occasion that consumers have already claimed for infused beverages, and the brands that recognize it and build around it are the ones that will define this category.
At 23rd State, we've known this from day one. Now the data agrees.
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The MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study is an observational study. Individual results may vary. 23rd State products contain THC and CBG. Must be 21+ to purchase. Please consume responsibly.
Interested in learning more about how 23rd State products fit into your evening routine? Explore our full lineup at 23state.com.
