Two former Pernod Ricard staff, South African botanicals and Swedish water.

Ceder’s is an alcohol-free botanical drink made in the manner of a gin. It was created in 2017 by the husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Craig Hutchison and Maria Sehlstrom, according to Pernod Ricard, which owns the majority of it today; The Spirits Business dated the launch to early 2017. Before starting the brand, both had worked for Pernod Ricard, Hutchison in strategy and Sehlstrom in communications, Connexion reported in March 2020.

The name is a place. Pernod Ricard says the recipe distils classic gin botanicals such as juniper alongside more exotic ones, rooibos and buchu, sourced from the Cederberg Mountains of the Western Cape in South Africa, “where Ceder’s gets its name.” Hutchison told the Morning Advertiser in July 2018 that the name came from a “magical valley” the couple had discovered in the Cederberg. Connexion described the Cederberg as Hutchison’s home region and reported that the rooibos and buchu come from a property the couple bought there.

The other half of the story is Swedish. The Morning Advertiser described the drink as combining a Swedish-style approach and pure water with wild, rare South African botanicals, and Connexion reported that the plant flavourings, made by distillation and infusion, are taken to Sweden, Sehlstrom’s home country, and blended with Swedish water. The Spirits Business summed the recipe up in 2021 as South African botanicals and Swedish water, and Pernod Ricard lists the brand under Sweden on its brand page. Hutchison told Connexion that a gin without alcohol was much harder to make than an ordinary one, because alcohol carries flavour so well, and that the couple went through many failed attempts before they had a recipe.

From a UK distribution deal to a Pernod Ricard brand.

Pernod Ricard arrived as a distributor before it became an owner. In July 2018 Pernod Ricard UK became the exclusive UK distributor of Ceder’s, the Morning Advertiser reported, and The Spirits Business later noted that this first agreement made the French group the brand’s distributor and marketer in the UK without an equity stake. The launch range had three drinks: Classic, mostly juniper with floral hints; Wild, with juniper, ginger, clove and rooibos; and Crisp, with juniper, citrus, cucumber and camomile. The Morning Advertiser called it a hand-crafted “alt-gin” made with natural botanical distillates and extracts, sold in 50cl bottles.

A fourth blend, Pink Rose, was unveiled in April 2020, and Ceder’s made its debut in the United States in October 2020, The Spirits Business reported. In January 2021 Pernod Ricard bought a majority stake in the brand for an undisclosed sum; the group said global marketing of Ceder’s would be driven from Paris and that the brand would grow through Pernod Ricard’s distribution network. Pernod Ricard has owned a majority stake in Ceder’s since January 2021, and its brand page, as archived in September 2025, still described the four blends: Classic with juniper, coriander and hints of Cape floral fynbos, Wild, Crisp, and Pink Rose with notes of rose and hibiscus, all in 500 ml bottles.

Pernod Ricard positions the drink as a category of its own. Solène Marchand, Pernod Ricard’s head of marketing for non-alcoholic drinks, told Just Drinks in January 2023 that Ceder’s was not a back-up option for spirits but a new category of gin-inspired botanical drinks, made with aroma extracts from fifteen botanicals across the four blends, drawn out by distillation or maturation depending on the product. She said the bottle, the pack and the website were used to explain how to serve it, and that a ready-to-drink tonic had recently been launched under the Ceder’s name.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are cider and alcohol-free drinks names: Old Mout, Dunkertons, Sheppy’s, Henney’s, Ceder’s, Big Drop and Lucky Saint. Four are ciders, and three were built around drinks without alcohol: an alcohol-free alternative to gin and two alcohol-free beers. Brands like these sit at many different points in the trade, from family cider makers that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and to young companies started to fill a gap on the shelf.

A cider or an alcohol-free drink is usually recognised less by what is in the glass than by a label, a name and the place or story it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or had its drinks made by someone else from the start. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its labels and cans have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Campaigns for January and a name to search with care.

Much of the brand’s public face has been built around the start of the year. The Spirits Business reported in January 2021 that Ceder’s was running a Dry January campaign with the television presenter Fearne Cotton. Two years later, Global Drinks Intel reported on 5 January 2023 a campaign titled “January, It’s Anything But Dry,” built around a television advertisement that debuted in the Netherlands, with targeted digital campaigns elsewhere, starting with Canada. The same report said Ceder’s would donate 1% of its sales to the non-profit 1% for the Planet, and that several of the range’s botanicals come from the Cederberg.

The name needs a little care online. The brand’s own site is cedersdrinks.com, the address Pernod Ricard links from its brand page, and its social accounts use “CEDERSdrinks” and “ceders_drinks”; the shorter ceders.com is a parked domain with no connection to the drink.

For a design guide, Ceder’s shows how a place name, two home countries and the familiar vocabulary of juniper and botanicals can be carried into a bottle with no alcohol in it. Compare Monkey 47, the Black Forest gin in an apothecary bottle, and Plymouth Gin, distilled in Plymouth since 1793; both also belong to Pernod Ricard. For this guide we use fynbos green, rooibos red and Cape white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ceder’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.