Global Agave Spirits (Tequila & Mezcal) Market Report, Size & Forecast 2026–2033

A record harvest and a falling revenue line

The Mexican tequila industry produced 583.5 million litres in 2025, up 17.7 per cent on 2024's 495.8 million — a record year by volume, certified by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila. In the same year, US supplier revenue for tequila and mezcal fell 4.1 per cent to USD 6.4 billion, on volume that held nearly flat at 32.1 million nine-litre cases.

Those two sentences are the report. Production at a record, revenue in decline, and a domestic market absorbing the difference. This is not a category in trouble; it is a category whose supply grew faster than its price, and the mechanism is visible in one number — the price of the raw material.

Everything in that table is measured. Everything in the forecast below is derived, and the derivation is set out in full in the third section rather than buried in a methodology note.

The agave price did the work

Blue agave fell to MXN 7.62 a kilogram at the Jalisco farm gate in 2025 — down 66 per cent from MXN 22.21 in 2024, and from a peak of MXN 24.09 in 2023. Growers report spot sales through intermediaries as low as MXN 0.80. That is not a price adjustment; it is the collapse of the input price that made the category's expansion possible.

The volume response was immediate and rational. Distilleries milled 2.19 million tonnes of agave in 2025 against 1.89 million, and produced 17.7 per cent more liquid. Cheap raw material pulls production forward, and production of a spirit with a two-to-eight-year aging curve for the premium tiers does not respond to demand in the same year — it responds to the cost of the input.

This is the cycle that has defined agave for a century and it is now running at a scale that matters internationally. A grower who planted during the MXN 24 peak is harvesting into an MXN 7.62 market, which means the next planting decision — taken in 2026 and 2027 — is being made at a price that does not cover replanting. The 2029 agave supply is being decided in this year's price collapse, and nothing in the record industry volume of 2025 changes that.

Where the value is measured, and where it is derived

The one place in this category where value per litre is measured is the United States. DISCUS puts 2025 US tequila and mezcal supplier revenue at USD 6.4 billion on 32.1 million cases — 288.9 million litres — which is USD 22.15 per litre at supplier level. That is our price anchor, and it is a supplier price, not a retail one.

Two things about that table should be challenged before the headline is used. The first is the export volume: the CRT certifies 408.0 million litres of exports for 2025 while the Mexican agriculture ministry publishes 397.1 million on a customs basis. The eleven million litre gap is a definitional difference, not an error, and we use the higher certified figure because the CRT is the body that certifies the product.

The second is the domestic price. There is no published domestic price per litre for tequila, so we value the 175.5 million litres that do not leave Mexico at 45 per cent of the US supplier price. At the full US price the category is USD 12.92 billion. The domestic pool is mostly mixto sold at low price points in a country where the category is not premium, which is why 45 per cent rather than parity is our base — but it is an assumption we own and it moves USD 2 billion of headline.

100 per cent agave is now 71 per cent of production

415.4 million of the 583.5 million litres produced in 2025 were 100 per cent agave — 71 per cent — and 168.1 million were mixto. The 100 per cent agave share has climbed for a decade, and it is the clearest evidence that the category's premiumisation is real rather than rhetorical: mixto uses sugar from other sources for up to 49 per cent of fermentable material, and a producer who could sell mixto at the same price would not switch.

The brand structure behind that shift is dense and small. 2,661 brand registrations across 202 distilleries as of August 2026 means an average of thirteen brands per distillery — a category where the brand is a label rather than a business, and where the distillery is the only durable asset. That is the structural fact a buyer should carry: in agave, you can buy a brand cheaply, but the ability to make the liquid at scale sits in a small number of plants.

The one qualification is the aging curve. A record 583.5 million litres produced in 2025 is not 583.5 million litres sold in 2026 — the reposado and anejo tiers rest for months to years, and the extra volume feeds inventory before it feeds revenue. That is where a production record and a revenue decline can both be true at once.

Mezcal: the small series that fell 39 per cent

Mezcal is not sized in this report, and the reason is a measurement problem rather than a judgement about its importance. The Consejo Mexicano Regulador de la Calidad del Mezcal publishes certified production on a 45 per cent ABV basis, while the CRT publishes tequila at 40 per cent — so the two series cannot be added without a conversion that neither body publishes.

What the COMERCAM data does show is volatility at a scale that makes any forecast fragile. Certified mezcal production fell 39 per cent in 2025 from a peak of about 14.2 million litres in 2024 — a swing that in absolute terms is a rounding error against tequila's 583.5 million litres but is a third of the entire mezcal category. Oaxaca produced 89.47 per cent of it in 2025.

That concentration is the risk. A category that is nine tenths one state, made from agave that matures in six to eight years and mostly by small palenques, cannot scale on demand. It is why mezcal commands a higher price per litre than tequila and why it will not close the volume gap.

Forecast to 2033

Our base case is USD 10.79 billion in 2025 rising to USD 13.67 billion in 2033 at 3.00 per cent a year, on volume from 583.5 million to 657.4 million litres at 1.50 per cent.

The forecast is deliberately slower than the volume record of 2025, and the reason is the reversion it assumes. A year in which production grows 17.7 per cent while US revenue falls 4.1 per cent is not a trend; it is an inventory build into a market that traded down. Our value path assumes the US price per litre recovers modestly and that domestic Mexican volume absorbs part of the surplus, which produces a slower value growth than the category has ever recorded in a boom year.

A reader who believes the 2025 volume rate continues should treat this forecast as a floor. A reader who believes the agave price collapse forces a production cut in 2028 to 2030 — which is what happened in the last two cycles — should treat it as generous. Both readings are defensible from the same table, which is the honest condition of this category.

Risk

1. The United States is 82 per cent of exports. One market, one tariff regime, one currency. A US duty change or a US recession reaches directly into about 333 million litres of Mexican production.

2. The agave cycle has turned and the planting response is invisible for years. MXN 7.62 a kilogram does not cover replanting. The supply effect arrives in 2029 and 2030, after the forecast's strongest years.

3. The value anchor is one market. USD 22.15 a litre is a US supplier price. Every non-US figure in this report is derived from it.

4. Two export series, two numbers. 408.0 million litres certified against 397.1 million on a customs basis — eleven million litres of definitional gap in the load-bearing volume.

5. Mezcal is excluded and volatile. A 39 per cent fall in certified production in one year, in a category nine tenths one state, is not a series anyone should forecast from.

6. What is overstated: the idea that a production record means a growing market. In 2025 it meant the opposite — more liquid, less money per litre, and a raw material price down 66 per cent.

Competitive Landscape

Competitive Landscape

The category is concentrated in plant and fragmented in brand. 2,661 brand registrations sit across 202 distilleries as of August 2026 — thirteen labels per distillery — and the distillery is the only durable asset in that structure. A new brand can be launched in months; new distillery capacity cannot. The split between 100 per cent agave and mixto is the line most of those brands compete on: 415.4 million litres against 168.1 million, 71 per cent of production now fully agave.

Ownership sits with two large listed groups and a long tail. Becle and Diageo hold the largest international positions, and the brands that grow fastest internationally are usually distributed by one of them regardless of who makes the liquid.

Two owners, the same size, opposite directions

On the published numbers the two books are now almost identical in value, and they behave nothing alike.

Becle lost volume and nearly doubled its net income. Diageo carried a 12 per cent tequila position inside a group whose operating profit fell 27 per cent. One is a tequila business that had a bad year and a very good margin year; the other is a diversified spirits group for which tequila is the second-largest category by revenue and no longer the growth engine.

The production record came from outside the leader

Mexican production reached 583.5 million litres in 2025, up 17.7 per cent on 495.8 million — an extra 87.7 million litres in a single year. In the same twelve months the largest brand owner’s volume fell 4.4 per cent. The incremental litres did not come from the category leader; they came from the long tail of 202 distilleries and from stock. And the leader’s exit rate was worse than its year: fourth-quarter volume fell 8.8 per cent, with the United States and Canada down 11.6 per cent and Mexico down 11.9 per cent.

The competitive pressure that matters is therefore not between brands. It is between the premium tiers and the mixto base: if international demand trades down, mixto production is the first thing that grows, and the whole premiumisation story reverses without any single brand losing a listing. A record production year alongside a falling US revenue line is that reversal already in the data.

Value Chain

Value Chain

The chain starts in a field with a six to eight year clock. Agave takes that long to reach harvestable sugar, so the raw material for 2031 is being planted now, at MXN 7.62 a kilogram, by growers who paid MXN 22.21 two years ago. Nothing in the chain can shorten that: it is the reason the category’s cycles overshoot in both directions.

Milling and distillation is where the capital sits. A distillery that mills 2.19 million tonnes of agave in a year is a fixed-cost plant running against a variable input, and the operator’s margin is the difference between the farm-gate price and the bottle. The CRT’s own two series give the ratio: 2.19 million tonnes for 583.5 million litres is 3.75 kilograms of agave per litre.

That is the largest single movement in this value chain and it is not a productivity gain: it is a transfer from growers to distillers. It also explains the year’s most misleading number. Becle’s EBITDA rose MXN 2,112m — 6.6 per cent of the theoretical industry-wide saving. The other 93 per cent did not appear as distiller margin, because most of it was competed away into price, promotion and depletions that fell, and because a large share of the crop moves on contracts struck before the collapse.

Per case, Becle’s own accounts give the chain’s arithmetic: MXN 1,774 of net sales and MXN 453 of EBITDA on a nine-litre case. That is a 25.6 per cent EBITDA margin on a product whose raw material cost, at the current farm gate, is a small fraction of the bottle price — which is the structural fact about agave spirits: the liquid is cheap, the brand and the route to market are the cost.

Distribution is the value step the category does not control. About 82 per cent of export volume goes to the United States, where a three-tier system of importer, distributor and retailer stands between the distillery and the drinker. The USD 22.15 a litre this report uses is a supplier price at the top of that chain, not a shelf price at the bottom — and the difference between the two is the reason the category’s brands are worth less than its distilleries.

Investment Activity

Investment Activity

Capital in agave goes into two things: distillery capacity and agave land. Both are long-dated and both are being committed against a raw material price that has just fallen 65.7 per cent, which is precisely the moment when capacity is cheapest to build and least likely to earn.

What the two large owners are actually doing is the opposite of building. Becle closed 2025 with lease-adjusted net leverage of 0.9 times, MXN 8 billion of net cash generated from operations, a MXN 1.8 billion syndicated loan repayment and a MXN 1.4 billion dividend paid in May 2025. That is a balance sheet being strengthened while volume falls — a decision to buy optionality rather than capacity. Diageo spent its fiscal 2026 defending a group whose operating profit fell 27 per cent; the one named capacity commitment in its turnaround is in beer, not in agave.

Brand investment is cheap and reversible. With 2,661 registrations across 202 distilleries, a brand is a label plus a contract; it can be launched, tested and abandoned inside a year. That asymmetry explains why so much activity in the category is brand creation rather than asset purchase, and why the durable returns sit with whoever owns the stills.

The category has also attracted capital from outside spirits — private equity and family offices buying agave land in Jalisco and Guanajuato. That capital is exposed to a crop with a six-to-eight-year maturity whose price fell 65.7 per cent in two years, and it is the part of the investment story most likely to be written down. The planting that follows a price collapse is the planting that arrives into the next oversupply, which is the mechanism that has produced every agave cycle in the record.

The finding for the forecast window: there is no capital cycle here to lift volume. The industry’s incremental litre in 2025 came from existing capacity running harder on cheaper fruit, not from new investment, and capacity that runs harder at MXN 7.62 has no reason to be expanded at MXN 7.62.

Technology & Innovation

Technology and Innovation

In most spirits the plant is a cost centre; in agave spirits it is the product’s legal definition. Tequila exists because a specific plant grows in 181 named municipalities, so no process innovation can relocate it and no engineering change can substitute the raw material. That single constraint decides what technology can and cannot do in this category.

What the still cannot change. Three milling routes dominate — the roller mill, the diffuser and the traditional tahona — and they extract different amounts of sugar from the same fibre, producing different flavour profiles and different kilograms-per-litre ratios. The 3.75 kilograms of agave per litre computed in the value chain chapter is an average across all three, and a distillery moving from tahona to diffuser changes that ratio without changing its appellation. It is the only process lever of real size, and it trades against exactly the provenance claim that the premium tier sells.

What dominates the cost base. Distillation is steam- and energy-intensive, and energy is the largest cost after agave. But set the two against each other: the input-price movement alone was MXN 54.76 a litre in one year — an order of magnitude larger than any plausible energy-efficiency programme. When the raw material can swing two thirds in two years, technology is not where the margin is decided.

Where the innovation actually is. In the field. Clonal selection, irrigation management and mechanised harvest are what move the kilograms-per-litre ratio and the yield per hectare over a cycle, and they are the only interventions that can act on a six-to-eight-year biological clock — not by shortening it, which is impossible, but by making each planting more productive than the last. The planting decision made at MXN 7.62 is therefore also a technology decision: it is the vintage where growers either invest in field productivity or abandon.

What regulation forces. Stillage — vinaza — is a potassium-rich, high-volume waste stream, and the denomination’s rules govern its disposal. Treatment and reuse is the category’s most significant environmental capital requirement and its least visible one, because it sits behind the distillery gate rather than on the label.

The structural asymmetry is the same one visible in gin: with 2,661 brands across 202 distilleries, launching a label costs almost nothing and building a still costs a great deal. Every incentive in this category points to brand innovation rather than process innovation, which is why a record production year produced so little technical change.

Market Risk

Risk Factors and Disruption Threats

1. The United States is 82 per cent of exports. One market, one tariff regime, one currency, roughly 335 million litres. On the published exit rate that market was running down 11.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2025.

2. The margin expansion is an input-price event and will reverse. Becle’s EBITDA margin rose 540 basis points because agave went from MXN 22.21 to MXN 7.62 a kilogram. Our forecast carries today’s margin structure into the later years; when the 2025 planting reaches the still in 2031 and 2032, the arithmetic runs the other way. MXN 7.62 does not cover replanting, and the supply effect of that decision arrives after the forecast’s strongest years.

3. The value anchor is one market. USD 22.15 a litre is a US supplier price derived from the DISCUS revenue and case series; every non-US figure in this report is derived from it. A 10 per cent error in it is a 10 per cent error in the headline.

4. Two export series. 408.0 million litres certified by the CRT against 397.1 million on a customs basis — an 11 million litre definitional gap, 2.7 per cent of the load-bearing volume.

5. The annual decline understates the current run rate. The full year was −4.4 per cent by volume; the fourth quarter was −8.8 per cent, with the United States and Canada at −11.6 and Mexico at −11.9. A category that accelerates downward through the year is not one whose next twelve months resemble its last twelve.

6. Mezcal excluded and volatile. A 39 per cent one-year fall in a category nine tenths one state.

7. What is overstated: that a production record means a growing market. In 2025 it meant more liquid, less money per litre and a raw material price down 65.7 per cent — and the industry’s largest brand owner shrank while the litres grew.

Regulatory Landscape

Regulatory Landscape

Denominations of origin. Tequila is protected in 58 countries, covering 97.5 per cent of exported volume, and the CRT certifies every litre produced inside the 181 municipalities of the denomination. Mezcal has its own DO, certified by COMERCAM, with production concentrated in Oaxaca. The DO is the category’s most valuable asset: it is what stops a spirit made elsewhere from being sold as tequila, and it is why the two large owners can hold international positions that a generic agave spirit could not.

Composition rules. Tequila may be 100 per cent agave or mixto, where up to 49 per cent of fermentable material comes from other sugars. The 100 per cent share — 71 per cent of 2025 production — is a labelling distinction with a large price consequence, and it is enforced at certification rather than at retail.

Trade. The United States is 82 per cent of export volume and the single largest regulatory exposure: tariff treatment under US trade policy reaches the category faster than any change in Mexican regulation. The category is also expanding into China, Brazil and India, where DO recognition is the precondition for protecting the name.

Agave. Planting, harvesting and the price paid for agave are governed by Mexican agricultural policy and the NOM that defines the crop, not by the spirits regulator — which is why a farm-gate price collapse can occur while every litre is legally certified, and why the regulator has no instrument to stop the replanting failure now being set up at MXN 7.62.

Sources

Every figure in this report that carries weight traces to one of the publishers below. The link goes to the publisher’s own site and the specific series is named so a reader can find it. Where a figure is our arithmetic on a published number rather than a published number itself, the closing paragraph of this block says so.

• Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT): crt.org.mx. The 2025 production series of 583.5 million litres, the 415.4 million 100 per cent agave and 168.1 million mixto split, 2.19 million tonnes of agave milled, the certified export series of 408.0 million litres, the 58 countries covered by the denomination and the 97.5 per cent of exported volume inside it, the 181 municipalities, and the count of 2,661 brands across 202 distilleries as at August 2026.
• SIAP, the Mexican agricultural information service: gob.mx/siap. The Jalisco farm-gate price of blue agave at MXN 7.62 a kilogram in 2025, against MXN 22.21 in 2024 and MXN 24.09 at the 2023 peak.
• Mexican Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER): gob.mx/agricultura. The customs-basis export series of 397.1 million litres, which is eleven million litres below the certified figure and is the definitional gap flagged as risk 4.
• Becle, S.A.B. de C.V. (BMV: CUERVO), fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results published 26 February 2026: volume of 24.287m nine-litre cases, net sales of MXN 43,087m, gross margin of 56.0 per cent, EBITDA of MXN 11,014m at 25.6 per cent, net income of MXN 8,654m, net leverage of 0.9 times, MXN 8bn of operating cash, the MXN 1.8bn loan repayment, the MXN 1.4bn dividend and the regional fourth-quarter volumes.
• Diageo plc, Annual Report 2026 filed with the US SEC: reported net sales of USD 19,643m, reported operating profit of USD 3,156m against USD 4,335m, EU2 volume of 227.1m against 230.1m, organic net sales of −2 per cent, and the category mix in which tequila is 12 per cent of net sales.
• Distilled Spirits Council of the United States: distilledspirits.org. US supplier revenue for tequila and mezcal of USD 6.4bn, down 4.1 per cent, on 32.1 million nine-litre cases, which is the price anchor under the value line of this report.
• COMERCAM, the mezcal regulatory council: the denomination of origin for mezcal and its certification. The council publishes no stable English-language corporate site, so this entry carries no link rather than a broken one.

What is ours and not a publisher’s. USD 22.15 per litre at supplier level is the DISCUS revenue figure divided by the DISCUS case count converted to litres, and every non-US value in this report is derived from it. That is the single largest construction in the report and Risk Factors states it as such. The 82 per cent US share of exports and the roughly 335 million litres are the CRT export series applied to the CRT destination split. The 71 per cent 100 per cent-agave share is the CRT volumes divided into each other. The 3.75 kilograms of agave per litre, the MXN 83.36 and MXN 28.60 input costs, the MXN 54.76 a litre removed, the MXN 31,952m industry-wide and its USD 1.68bn equivalent at MXN 19.0, the 6.6 per cent of that saving visible in Becle’s EBITDA increase, the MXN 1,774 of net sales and MXN 453 of EBITDA per case, the USD 2.27bn Becle equivalent and the USD 2.36bn at 12 per cent of Diageo’s net sales are our arithmetic on the published series above. The agave replanting arithmetic and the timing of the 2029 and 2030 supply effect are our reasoning on the SIAP price series, not a published forecast. The forecast values, the 3.00 per cent rate and the 1.50 per cent volume path are our model, with the margin reversal in risk 2 as its most exposed assumption.