Placeholder. There are two fundamentally different ways to make non-alcoholic beer — brew it so it never really becomes alcoholic in the first place, or brew a normal beer and then strip the alcohol back out — and the market leader built its entire competitive advantage on choosing the harder, more expensive of the two options.
What we've found so far: Athletic Brewing (12.8% US market share, the category leader) uses arrested fermentation to avoid developing significant alcohol in the first place, while most of the category instead brews normal beer and removes alcohol via reverse osmosis or vacuum distillation — peer-reviewed sensory-panel research confirms these methods produce measurably different flavor-compound profiles.
Open research: Get a side-by-side technical/tasting comparison of an arrested-fermentation beer versus a dealcoholized one from the same style; interview a brewing scientist on the cost differential between the two approaches at scale.