The ready-to-drink cocktail category has been pulling in celebrity investors for several years, yet the latest wave shows a sharper strategic instinct than the first. Where early entrants rushed toward low-calorie or non-alcoholic positioning to ride wellness trends, a countermovement has been gathering force. Consumers, particularly those already comfortable with premium bar experiences, have started pushing back against diluted RTDs, demanding products that match the strength and craft of what a skilled bartender would serve. That tension has now drawn in Robin Thicke.
The singer and record producer unveiled a new cocktail brand at the Beverage Forum in Manhattan Beach on April 28, 2026. Named Mimá, the brand’s debut product is a canned espresso martini built around a deliberately high-alcohol-by-volume proposition. A press release from Thicke’s representative confirmed the launch and described the product as a direct response to consumer appetite for full-strength ready-to-drink options, setting it apart from the low-ABV and non-alcoholic alternatives that have dominated RTD innovation cycles in recent years.
“Espresso martinis have a very James Bond feel, and putting that level of swagger in a can was something I had to be a part of. We’ve been able to capture the strength, taste and quality you’d expect from the best bar-crafted cocktail into a ready-to-drink can.”
Robin Thicke, Founder, Mimá
The product is scheduled to reach shelves within weeks of the forum announcement. No retail or distribution partners were confirmed in the initial release.
The espresso martini’s cultural trajectory over the past three years has been well documented across the trade. Once considered a niche cocktail, it became one of the most-ordered drinks across bars and restaurants in major English-speaking markets, generating renewed interest in coffee-spirit combinations and widening consumer tolerance for complex flavour profiles in canned format. The RTD sector broadly has tracked this shift, with premium ready-to-drink cocktails growing as a share of total RTD volume. Drinkabl.media’s earlier coverage of how canned formats are reshaping alcohol consumption patterns across African markets captures how consequential this shift has become even beyond Western markets.
Mimá enters a field that is neither empty nor easy. The celebrity beverage space has bifurcated clearly between brands that find genuine product-market fit and those that fade within two to three years of launch. Miles Teller’s involvement with Finnish-style bubbly alcohol brand Long Drink, which sold for a reported $325 million according to The Hollywood Reporter, represents the upper end of what celebrity backing can achieve when the underlying product resonates. George Clooney and Rande Gerber built Casamigos Tequila into a $1 billion acquisition by Diageo before recently pivoting to non-alcoholic beer with Crazy Mountain. Teller himself told The Hollywood Reporter that genuine success in the space belongs to far fewer than one percent of those who enter it. Mimá’s deliberate positioning against the non-alcoholic and low-ABV tide is a differentiated move, though it places the brand in direct competition with established premium RTD spirits labels rather than the comparatively lighter wellness-drinks field.
For the broader RTD market, Thicke’s entry signals continued appetite from brand builders, investors, and licensors for the canned cocktail format as a distribution vehicle. The espresso martini specifically requires careful formulation to balance coffee intensity, sweetness, and spirit character in a sealed, ambient-stable can. Thicke acknowledged in remarks at the forum that the development process involved more attention to chemistry than he had anticipated, suggesting the brand worked with technical formulation partners, though these were not named in the available press materials. Distribution strategy, retail pricing, and the question of whether Mimá will target on-premise or off-premise channels first remain unresolved publicly.
The launch timeline places Mimá in the market ahead of the northern hemisphere’s summer selling season, the strongest commercial window for RTD cocktail brands. Whether it gains distribution scale quickly enough to take advantage of that window will depend on the trade relationships the brand brings to launch. With celebrity RTD entries continuing to multiply, the market will increasingly separate on the basis of liquid quality, channel execution, and the durability of consumer interest beyond the initial novelty cycle. That is the test Mimá faces in the months ahead.
Read More
- Major alcohol producers are confronting a historic inventory crisis as global demand for premium spirits retreats.
- Breckenridge Distillery is bringing a West African flavour profile to the mainstream spirits market.
- Jameson’s push into Ibadan shows how global spirits brands are finally moving beyond Lagos.
