Anheuser-Busch, still reeling from its recent association with self-identified transgender social media celebrity Dylan Mulvaney, will release camouflage and motorcycle-themed beer can redesigns for Bud Light and Budweiser.
As part of a program to provide college scholarships to the families of slain American servicemen and first responders, an unnamed company executive told the New York Post on Tuesday that the company would make a camouflage Bud Light can. “It’s an aluminum bottle,” the source revealed to the media. I think that’s the only package changing over, but I can’t say for sure.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Budweiser, another Anheuser-Busch brand, posted photos of a limited edition beer can with designs inspired by Harley-Davidson. The product’s impending availability at retailers across the country was announced in one of the posts.
Last month, Bud Light executives offended many people by sending a personalized beer can featuring the image of Mulvaney, a male who claims to be a woman and recorded his supposed gender transition online. In an effort to win back conservatives who formerly enjoyed the drink, executives have minimized the extent of the alliance and even engaged veteran Republican lobbyists.
Sales for the week ending May 6 were down 23.6% compared to the same week last year, according to statistics from Bump Williams Consulting and NielsenIQ. This was a steeper reduction than the 23.3% drop seen in the previous week, ending April 29.
In the weeks ending April 29 and May 6, Budweiser sales dropped 11.4%, Michelob Ultra sales dropped 4.3%, and Natural Light sales dropped 5.5%. Consulting firm CEO Bump Williams told the New York Post that Bud Light sales had “started to settle” around the negative 20% level and that the typical drinker is just “waiting for a genuine and sincere apology.”
Despite this, it appears that Anheuser-Busch has angered people on all sides of the political spectrum; in addition to the conservative response, the company has also been threatened by lefties who want to boycott its products because of its decision to distance itself from Mulvaney. Equally unimpressed by the camouflage makeover were supporters of the LGBTQ community, whose own media site, Pink News, claimed the new campaign was designed solely to appease “fragile bigots.”
Miller Lite, which sponsored a vulgar ad attacking the beverage industry’s history of marketing campaigns centered on objectifying women and promising to donate fertilizer so that female brewers could grow hops, may soon find itself embroiled in the same controversy as Anheuser-Busch. A spokesperson for Molson Coors, the multinational corporation that owns Miller Lite and was the target of social media backlash for the ad and the brand’s references to intersectionality, told media outlets that consumers should “appreciate the humor” of the ad and that nothing in the campaign should be viewed as controversial.
Both Molson Coors and Anheuser-Busch support transgender ideology, but both also promise to increase opportunities for women in the workplace in their sustainability reports. When questioned by The Daily Wire about how the corporation defines “woman,” Molson Coors did not provide a definition.