Bubl Shots Interview: Why the RTD category is a sea of sameness, and what it takes to build something genuinely different

Spirit-based RTDs now account for 28% of total US off-premise spirits dollar sales, up 30% in a single year, according to WSWA SipSource Q1 2026 data. IWSR confirmed in 2026 that RTD overtook vodka in global value – a milestone that marks how far and how fast the category has moved in under a decade. By volume and by value, RTD is now one of the most commercially significant formats in beverage alcohol.

Most of what is growing within it looks the same. Flavoured malt beverages, hard seltzers, canned cocktails – the formats differ in name and colour, but the underlying delivery mechanism is almost universally the same aluminium can, the same chilled shelf placement, the same occasion. Jack Parker, CTO and Partner at Bubl, has a phrase for it: a sea of sameness.

Parker has spent over three decades at PDI Foods, a New Jersey-based food science and R&D company he leads, solving problems other people said could not be solved. Bubl is the most complex product his team has ever worked on. The idea came from Justin Peckerofsky, one of Bubl’s founders, a hospitality and wine and spirits professional, who conceived of it while on holiday eating boba. “He started thinking about whether you could make popping boba larger and have it filled with alcohol,” Parker says. “The problem as he – and the rest of my partners – saw it was that RTDs were a sea of sameness, mostly flavoured cocktails in a can. Other than the liquid, there is no other sensory or fun factor to it.”

Multiple food scientists told the team the concept could not be produced at scale. A vodka-based cocktail encapsulated in an ultra-thin, fully edible, pressure-sensitive sphere, available in three flavours – Lemon Drop, Cosmopolitan, Sex on the Beach – requires production precision that none of the scientists approached believed was achievable in a commercial volume context. Parker’s team proved otherwise. Bubl launched in New Jersey in 2025 and is now expanding nationally.

The category bifurcation Bubl is entering

The RTD category’s growth has been real, but it has not been uniform. The formats that drove the initial expansion – hard seltzer in particular – are now in structural decline. Boston Beer’s Truly, one of the largest hard seltzer brands in the US, has been declining consistently since 2023. In Boston Beer’s Q2 2026 results, published 23 July 2026, Twisted Tea, Truly, Samuel Adams, Hard Mountain Dew, and Dogfish Head all reported volume declines in the same quarter. The brands that grew in the same results were Sun Cruiser – an electrolyte-infused, spirit-based RTD launched in 2023 – and Angry Orchard cider.