Hedonic pricing and sustainability attributes in the European spirits market

This paper examines the relationship between sustainability-related attributes and pricing in the European spirits market, applying a hedonic framework to 13,432 product launches across 32 countries between 1998 and 2024. Using real price per millilitre as the dependent variable, the analysis jointly evaluates sustainability claims, label communication, packaging and firm-level positioning across gin, rum, vodka and whisky. Organic certification is consistently associated with a positive price premium, whereas generic self-promotional claims such as “premium” display weak or negative associations once observable quality and packaging characteristics are controlled for. Cross-category heterogeneity is established by formal interaction tests rather than informal comparison of separate equations: the hypothesis that label and sustainability effects are common across the four categories is rejected, although several contrasts a category-by-category reading would suggest are not individually significant. Quantile regressions estimated under the baseline fixed-effects structure place organic and vegan premia throughout the price distribution, while scarcity signals strengthen towards its upper end. The organic premium survives country-by-year fixed effects and, at roughly half its magnitude, brand fixed effects; the remaining premia are identified largely between rather than within brands. The study contributes large-scale evidence on how sustainability signals enter pricing in differentiated alcoholic beverage markets, and on the limits of what observational launch data can establish.