David Crooch, General Manager, Non-Alcoholic Beverages, Diageo; CEO & Co-Founder, Ritual Beverage Co.

David Crooch is the Person of the Year for 2024 because he’s going to be playing the role of Designated Driver for the Non-Alcoholic Spirits Category.

The brand he co-founded and still leads, Ritual Beverage Co., is already the NA spirits category leader by a wide margin, and it was recently purchased by spirits giant Diageo. The beverage giant then put Crooch in charge of the company’s entire NA Spirits portfolio, including previous purchase Seedlip, one of the category’s pioneers.

Crooch, a repeat entrepreneur, now finds himself with the responsibility of fulfilling the widespread expectation taking root among spirits companies, bars, and restaurants that consumers are thirsty for non-alcoholic analogs of their most popular cocktails. That he’s doing it at one of the largest spirits companies in the world makes the task extra daunting – but also confers resources to him that no one else in his category has had to date.

The normalization of any new category concept has to happen from a brand standpoint. For non-alcoholic beer, that movement has been established by Athletic Brewing. In the realm of non-alcoholic spirits, Diageo has added NA versions of category leaders like Captain Morgan’s, Gordon’s, and Tanqueray to its portfolio, but it has put its biggest stack of chips on Ritual, and on David Crooch.