Red Bull: the advent calendar that comes in two very different UK versions

On the site

The Red Bull advent calendar, at a glance

We track a single listing for this brand: 24 full-size 250ml cans spread across roughly sixteen flavours, filed on our site under the Foodie Advent Calendar and Adult Advent Calendar categories, useful shorthand for what this actually is: a drinks gift, not a beauty box. As of 4 September 2026, it’s priced at £70.32 and marked ‘Available soon’, with no confirmed release date for a 2026 edition.

The brand

Who is Red Bull, and why its calendar keeps confusing shoppers

Set up

1984, Austria

Revenue

€12.2bn (2025)

Cans sold

~14bn (2025)

Ownership

Yoovidhya 51% / Mateschitz 49%

First calendar we recorded

2024, £77.49

Red Bull GmbH was set up in 1984 by Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz and Thai entrepreneur Chaleo Yoovidhya. The drink itself only reached Austrian shelves in 1987, a reworked, carbonated version of a Thai energy tonic called Krating Daeng that Mateschitz had come across on a business trip to Thailand in 1982. Red Bull GmbH’s Wikipedia entry covers the deal that split ownership between the two families.

Mateschitz died in October 2022, and the company he built now sits with Chalerm Yoovidhya holding 51%, and Mark Mateschitz the other 49%. The business itself keeps growing: group turnover reached €12.2 billion in 2025, up 8.6% on the year before, on nearly 14 billion cans sold, its strongest year in three, according to results reported by financial press coverage of the 2025 figures. Against that scale, an advent calendar is a rounding error, which is probably why it took until 2025 for the brand to give the format proper, nationwide backing in the UK.

Red Bull’s better-known December habit is sponsorship, not gifting: it owns the Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team, six-time constructors’ champion, plus Racing Bulls and a growing stable of extreme-sports and esports ventures. That’s the identity most UK shoppers already have in mind before they ever type ‘advent calendar’ after the name, which is part of why the search volume is so high and the actual product so unfamiliar.

Data · evolution over time

£77.49 to £61.55: the only two seasons we can prove

Our picture archive only goes back to 2022, and it doesn’t tell a clean story. That year’s file is a plain logo. The following year’s shows a box with 24 numbered windows in a blue-and-silver design, its packaging carrying Scandinavian text and the cans pictured labelled in French, quite different from the box we track today, and we can’t confirm it was ever sold here as pictured. The trail only firms up from 2024, when our archive settles into the same ‘Adventskalender’ box, in German retail branding, that we still track today: 24 cans, laid out across roughly sixteen flavours with some doubled up to fill every door.

That’s the listing behind our two proven prices, and the drop from £77.49 to £61.55 is real, but we’re cautious about what caused it. It isn’t an official RRP cut announced by Red Bull: nothing we’ve read frames this as a brand markdown. The likelier explanation is the channel itself. This is a cross-border import sold through a general marketplace, not a dedicated retail deal, and that kind of listing is repriced by whoever is holding stock, not by a pricing committee. A currency swing between the pound and the euro could account for part of the movement too; we can’t rule either in or out with only two data points.

2025 is also the year a second, unrelated version turned up: a Tesco-exclusive calendar, in different packaging, with roughly half as many named flavours, sold for one week only. The two products coexisted in the same season without ever being the same listing, which is the real reason this brand’s search results are so muddled.

Reception

A calendar that came and went before most shoppers saw it

Trade and consumer press covered the Tesco launch as a supply story: stock levels, exclusivity and a one-week countdown. Grocery Gazette and FoodBev both reported the calendar as available for one week only, while stocks lasted, priced at £35 or £20 with a Clubcard, with Tesco framing the Clubcard price as at least half what the same 24 cans would cost bought individually. Verge Magazine called it Red Bull’s first-ever advent calendar and described it as set to be one of the most in-demand Christmas drops of the year; a separate write-up from Stack3d, published after launch, noted the UK box differed from the American release in its flavour line-up and left out the Festive Edition that American shoppers got.

Red Bull ran the same idea in the United States that same autumn, spread across Costco, Kroger, Target, Walmart and Circle K, several retailers at once instead of one exclusive, according to trade coverage of the US launch. That’s a different market with a different retail line-up, so we’re not reading it across to the UK: 2025 was the year the brand committed to the format on both sides of the Atlantic, through different partners and different boxes.

Data · against the field

Red Bull against four other food and drink calendars

A Red Bull calendar isn’t really competing with beauty boxes; the closer comparison is other everyday-consumable calendars sitting near its own price. None of the listings we track states a value, so the comparison here rests on price alone.

Prices recorded across our catalogue on 4 September 2026, one calendar per brand, matched to our own listing where we sell it. Each brand name links to its own page.

These four sit within a few pounds of each other, so what actually separates them is the habit each one feeds. Red Bull suits someone who already reaches for a can most days; Whittard and Nespresso reward a cocoa or coffee routine that’s already in place; Bettys leans traditional; the John Lewis box is built around opening a bottle with dinner, night after night through December. None of them work well as a first introduction to their category, you’re paying to keep doing what you already do, just with more variety and a countdown attached.

Data · price and promotions

Where and when to buy the Red Bull advent calendar at the best price

As of 4 September 2026, the listing we track shows £70.32, with a stock status of ‘Available soon’ and no confirmed release date. Edition 2026 is not announced at 4 September 2026.

There’s no live UK supermarket exclusive to point you toward right now. The one that made headlines, Tesco’s, ran for a single week from 26 November 2025 and has been gone since; it isn’t something you can still walk into a shop and find. If a 2026 version of that deal happens, it will most likely surface the same way, late in the year and without much notice, so Black Friday is a better time to check back than September or October.

For the listing we do follow day to day, the price on the product page is updated whenever it changes. Given that this is an imported product with a history of large year-on-year swings, treat any price you see today as a snapshot, not a guarantee.

You can also browse every advent calendar currently on offer.

Frequently asked questions

The questions this calendar’s odd history keeps raising

To go further: the current listing on our product page, and the calendars from Whittard, Bettys and Nespresso.