Energy drink age checks: are you really ready for an under-16s ban?
With a ban on high-caffeine energy drink sales to under-16s moving through consultation in England, many retailers say they already have age verification policies in place. Our latest trial set out to test how well those policies are working on the shop floor.
Serve Legal carried out 110 trial audits across supermarkets, convenience stores, forecourts and food-to-go venues in the UK and Ireland, using young-looking 16–18-year-old auditors to mirror “Challenge 25” expectations. On each visit, they attempted to buy an energy drink without offering ID.
Only 25 per cent of those purchases resulted in an ID check, meaning three out of four went through with no challenge at all.
The full report goes beyond this headline figure. It breaks performance down by sector, till type and region, looks at how often self-checkout prompts actually lead to an ID request, and compares the results with Serve Legal’s wider age-verification benchmarks, where structured programmes regularly achieve pass rates between 66 and 92 per cent.
If you want to understand where energy drink compliance is breaking down, which formats are most exposed, and what “good” looks like ahead of a potential under-16s ban, the detail is in the data.
👉 Click here to download the full Energy Drink Age Verification Compliance Report to explore the findings in depth.
