Ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktail brand Moth has grown from hand-filled bottles above a pub to a premium drinks business, that has recently secured £11m in funding to expand its grocery and convenience presence in the UK and the US. All of which still feels faintly surreal to co-founder Rob Wallis.

“It’s wild to me that people who aren’t my mum know who we are,” he says. “It never gets old.”

Founded by Wallis and Sam Hunt, Moth transitioned from glass bottles to its current canned format in 2021 before Waitrose provided a critical breakthrough. More recently the RTD brand has turned its attention to convenience stores and the US.

While growing Stateside, Wallis insists the business is far from mature in its home market. “With the funding round and with the scale we’re at now, people think we’re sort of reaching maturity in the UK, and I couldn’t disagree more,” he says. “We’ve barely started. There’s so much room left in the UK, let alone the US, which is also super exciting.”

He notes that emerging brands can look established from the outside.

Wallis recalls: “We did years of no team, no money, no funding, no idea, no cans”. They simply had to “grit our teeth, do our MBA and make our mistakes.”

Putting your money where your mouth is

Waitrose decision to back Moth was not a lucky overnight leap so much as the public arrival of years of hidden graft.

“People think we’ve had a quite rapid trajectory, but going into Waitrose was a three-year overnight success,” he admits.

That Waitrose moment gave the brand credibility in grocery and proved canned cocktails could command a premium if the product justified it. Wallis says the responsibility that comes with that positioning has only grown as the brand scales. “We charge a premium in the category,” he says. “If you take the risk on us and pay twice as much as you usually do to try your first Moth, it’s got to be spectacular. It’s got to be perfect.”

Quality, he argues, cannot become a casualty of growth and the brand has to be “really product obsessive”.

“As you scale, quality often slips down the menu,” Wallis says. “For us, we will just never compromise on it.”

That means guarding the details: real spirits, real ingredients, batch checks and a refusal to let margin pressure dilute what made the brand work in the first place. “If you’re going to charge more and you are claiming to be worth more, you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is,” he adds.

Local knowledge

The next big UK opportunity is convenience. Moth has already established itself in grocery, but Wallis sees convenience as a vast and relatively underdeveloped frontier for the brand.

Wallis admits to only starting taking convenience “semi-seriously” for the first time last year. It has quickly led to staggering results.  Moth’s June convenience-channel revenue matched what it had generated across the whole of the previous year. “That as an opportunity is just blown wide open for us.”

It is an unusual route. Many challenger brands build distribution in independents and convenience before persuading major supermarkets to take a chance. Moth’s path was effectively the reverse, shaped partly by Covid and partly by the momentum that grocery created.

Convenience also changes how the brand sells. Grocery is about central buying relationships and national rollouts. Convenience is more fragmented, more local and more dependent on people on the ground.

For Moth, those shop owners are not simply stockists. Wallis sees them as advocates capable of influencing purchase at precisely the moment a shopper is deciding what to drink.

“There’s no more dedicated fans, brand allies and marketing people than the guy that owns the corner shop and loves the brand,” he says. “Men and women saying, ‘Oh, have you tried this?’ to someone who’s standing in front of their drinks fridge, that is the best ad you can ever write.”

That matters because RTD cocktails are built for impulse. Wallis suggests that RTD is the third most impulse purchase in convenience, only behind bottled water and sandwiches.

Moth’s proposition is therefore designed not just to be a premium cocktail in a can, but a premium cocktail that is chilled, immediate and easy to consume.

“The idea that you could have a Negroni as an incredible bar-serve Negroni just round the corner from your house in 30 seconds, just to open, should not be possible,” Wallis says. “It gives me so much joy that you can just pop into an off-license and have a Negroni better than the Ritz.”

Convenience also demands energy. Wallis says Moth has built a field sales approach that relies on personal relationships, rapid feedback, store visits and event-linked campaigns – most recently a Wimbledon “perfect serve” activation.

“It’s so quick moving compared to grocery,” he says. “It’s people intensive and it’s so relationship based.”

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Cocktail cultural differences

Moth’s UK push sits alongside its US ambitions, but Wallis is clear the two are not in competition. The latest funding, he says, is not a signal that the brand is chasing America at the expense of its home market.

“Our commitment to the UK is really, really important,” Wallis says. “Just because we’ve gone to the US, it doesn’t mean that we’re any less focused on the UK. This raise is not to fund the US. It’s more to fund the UK. That just shows our growth ambition here.”

The US presents a different kind of opportunity. Moth has already entered states including California, Florida and Illinois, with retailers such as Whole Foods Market, Target and Trader Joe’s offering early proof points for the brand.

But Wallis rejects the idea that America can be approached as a simple copy-and-paste expansion. “On a brand level, the brand really resonates over there, which is awesome,” he says. “But we have to say different things.”

One example is ingredients. In the UK, talking about real lime juice is expected. In the US, Wallis says, it becomes a genuine differentiator. “In the UK it’s not a big deal, it’s just: ‘well, what else would you use?’. In the US, they’re like: ‘Oh my god, real limes,’”.

The purchase format is different too. UK shoppers may try a single can in Waitrose or Sainsbury’s. US shoppers are more likely to buy four-packs for hosting, stocking the fridge or taking to a gathering.

“The drinking culture has almost no similarities between the UK and the US,” Wallis says. “You’d be more helpful thinking about it as Brazil is where you’re launching. It’s a massive country on the other side of the world. They happen to speak the same language.”

That cultural divide is particularly clear in cocktails. In UK, a margarita on a Tuesday can still feel like a statement. In the US, Wallis says, it can be as normal as ordering wine or beer.

“In the US, you’re probably going to have a margarita,” he says. “We just think you should have a really good one.”