Six years ago, Mélanie Masarin got tired of sparkling water. Having just left her role at Glossier, where she led offline and experiential strategy, she was visiting Milan for design week, she was also newly sober with very limited beverage options. “I complained quite a bit, apparently,” Masarin admits over Zoom. Finally, a friend suggested she create her own drink. “I didn’t even understand what he meant at first, but it was in the back of my mind for the rest of the trip,” she recalls. When she returned home to New York City, she began researching alcohol-free beverage brands and found that many of them sought to mimic specific spirits.
But she didn’t long for the taste of alcohol, she missed the experience. “I was never a big drinker. I think that the ritual of the drink was more crucial than alcohol itself,” she says. “That’s when I realized there was a bit of a disconnect.” Growing up between Lyon and the South of France, Masarin parents always ended their day with a drink of some sort. “Apertivo was almost every night in my house growing up,” recalls Masarin, who now calls Los Angeles home. “Maybe that’s how I ended up here.”
In June 2020, she launched Ghia, a line of non-alcoholic sugar-free beverages inspired by the summers she spent with family near the Mediterranean. The brand’s first offering was an aperitif with a bright, bitter base and hints of citrus. The following year, expanded their lineup with canned sparkling options featuring notes like ginger, lime and sumac.
The brand’s moniker rolls off the tongue with inextricable exuberance, Ghia sounds similarly festive to toasts like “l’chaim” or “santé”. This is particularly apt, as its mission is to drive a wedge between celebration and alcohol.
“When I was thinking of starting the company, I realized that if I were going out to dinner with friends, often I would hear people say, ‘I don’t want to eat out because I don’t want to drink,’” Masarin recalls. “But why do these things have to be mutually exclusive?” The brand is decidedly not preachy or anti-alcohol. Instead, Ghia was created to decenter booze, as a counterpoint to zero-proof options being an afterthought.
“I came up bartending at a time when ‘mocktail’ often meant ‘Make me something that looks like what I usually drink because I don’t want anyone to ask me why I’m not drinking,’” says Ohio-based bar consultant and podcast host Joshua Gandee. On his podcast No Proof, guests unfurl their relationship to alcohol. “Somewhere along the way, it felt like bartenders, owners and management forgot that bars and restaurants are social gathering places and not just places to drink alcohol and order food to wash down with alcohol.”
We appear to be inching away from that. With Ghia and like-minded brands like Kin, De Soi, Edna’s and Seedlip more readily available on shelves and at restaurants, non-alcoholic options are becoming more sophisticated and diverse. Earlier this year, Statistics Canada reported that alcohol sales went down by 1.2 percent between 2021 and 2022, the first decline since 2014 and the largest drop in over a decade. In 2023, NielsenIQ reported that sales for non-alcoholic beer, wine, and spirits grew by 35 percent.
Gandee attributes this shift to the pandemic. “We were able to see what is most important to us, and our general health became placed under a microscope,” he explains. “Getting through the pandemic poised us to be more focused on the future and the micro-changes we can make that buys us more time as we look ahead.”
4 years in, Ghia is making an impact where Masarin least expected it. At the start of this year, her parents participated in Dry January. While they’ve always been supportive, this was unimaginable when she first launched. “They were supportive of me, but they didn’t understand the concept,” she adds with a laugh. “I’m very pleasantly surprised.”
