“Farm Sales Customers Use More Alcohol”
Drugnews reports:
“Those who drink relatively large amounts of alcohol are overrepresented among those who have used the farm sales option. This is the finding of a CAN analysis covering the second half of 2025.
“People who bought alcohol directly from producers also drank significantly larger amounts of alcohol than both Systembolaget customers and alcohol consumers as a whole. Compared to those who had only bought alcohol at Systembolaget, those who bought directly from producers drank approximately 50 percent more,” says Björn Trolldal, researcher at CAN.
Other Articles on the Same Topic
- CAN: This Is How Many Buy Alcohol Through Farm Sales (SvD)
- Farm Sales in Sweden – Who Is the Buyer? (CAN)
Assessment
Less than a year after Sweden’s alcohol “farm sales” system took effect on 1 June 2025, the first independent data have arrived – and they contradict nearly every reassurance the government offered when pushing the worsening of the state-run alcohol retail monopoly system through Parliament.
CAN’s analysis of the second half of 2025 reveals three findings that should concern policymakers:
- First, people who buy alcohol through so called “farm sales” use approximately 50 percent more alcohol than those who only purchase from Systembolaget.
- Second, the youngest adult age group (20–29) is the most likely to use the system, with four percent buying from producers each month, compared to under one percent among those over 65.
- Third, the most purchased product category is strong beer – not wine, and certainly not the small-batch artisanal products that were the centrepiece of the political narrative used to justify the move to undermine the state-run alcohol retail monopoly system.
This matters because the entire political case for so called “farm sales” was built on an image of small-scale rural winemakers welcoming occasional tourists for a tasting and a modest purchase. Even the name for the proposal was meant to paint such idyllic picture.
Movendi Sweden exposed this framing as a manufactured myth well before the parliamentary vote, documenting that the majority of breweries and distilleries in Sweden are located in urban areas, not the countryside, and that the real beneficiaries would be larger commercial operations.
The CAN data now bear this out: the customer profile is not a middle-aged tourist visiting a vineyard, but a young, urban person with higher-than-average alcohol use, buying strong beer.
The CAN data illustrates that criticism of the move to introduce so called “farm sales” were also correct in questioning the very name of the move.
The finding that farm sales customers have significantly higher alcohol use than the average consumer is particularly important in the context of Sweden’s alcohol retail monopoly model. Systembolaget exists precisely to prevent market-driven targeting of higher-risk groups. When a parallel retail channel emerges that disproportionately attracts younger people with heavier alcohol use, it undermines the public health logic of the entire system. This is exactly the dynamic that WHO has warned against when countries worsen their standards for alcohol retail.
The Swedish government’s own inquiry released earlier this year confirmed that Systembolaget and alcohol taxation are effective instruments that save lives, estimating that abolishing the monopoly would lead to a 16 percent rise in alcohol use and approximately one million additional illness cases per year. Yet the same government continues to erode the monopoly’s effectiveness through so called “farm sales”, proposed tax cuts for small breweries, and now the removal of the food requirement for alcohol serving licences.