Bud Light Sales Tanked 21.4 Percent in April Amid Dylan Mulvaney Fiasco

Bud Light beer cans sit on a table in right field during the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays game at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Md., on Sept. 19, 2019. Rob Carr/Getty Images

New industry data show that Bud Light sales plunged in April amid calls for a boycott by critics of the brand’s engagement with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which comes as Anheuser-Busch CEO Michael Doukeris blamed “misinformation” for the backlash.

Sales volumes of Bud Light fell by a whopping 21.4 percent in the four weeks ended on April 29, according to retail scanner numbers cited by Beer Business Daily that were based on Nielsen IQ data.

By contrast, the brand’s competitors in the light beer market saw gains, with Coors Light sales rising 10.9 percent and Miller Lite’s up 12.8 percent over the comparable period.

News of the sharp decline for all of April comes on the heels of an earlier report showing volumes of Bud Light sold in places like supermarkets and liquor stores (off-premise sales volumes outside of restaurants and bars) fell by an annualized 26.1 percent in the week ended April 22.

“The shocking deterioration of Bud Light Blue’s market share continued apace through the third week of April—and actually somehow worsened,“ Beer Business Daily wrote in commentary on last week’s scanner volume data. ”We’ve never seen such a dramatic shift in national share in such a short period of time.”

Overall, sales volumes for Anheuser-Busch, the company that makes Bud Light, fell 12.5 percent in April, the industry data showed.

Anheuser-Busch did not immediately return a request for comment.

Mulvaney Controversy

Bud Light has been dealing with the fallout from its promotion by Mulvaney, a male who identifies as a woman.

Some conservative influencers and several country music singers have called for a boycott over Mulvaney’s marketing engagement with Bud Light, which involved a custom-made beer can provided by the brewery featuring Mulvaney’s face emblazoned on it.

Mulvaney rose to fame for chronicling a transition he dubbed “365 Days of Girlhood.”

“This month I celebrated my day 365 of womanhood and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever—a can with my face on it,” Mulvaney said on April Fool’s Day.

Mulvaney, who has over 10 million followers on TikTok, posted a series of videos advertising Bud Light and showing off the personalized can, sparking outrage among conservatives, some of whom accused the brand of promoting a transgender agenda and called for people to stop buying Bud Light in protest.

Singer Kid Rock used Bud Light cans as target practice to express his anger at the promotional campaign, while Florida governor Ron DeSantis said he would be boycotting Bud Light.

Former president Donald Trump also weighed in on the controversy over the weekend, suggesting that boycotts could be an effective way to send a message to brands whose critics say are pushing a leftist agenda.

“It’s time to beat the Radical Left at their own game,” Trump wrote in a post via Truth Social on Sunday. “Money does talk—Anheuser-Busch now understands that.”

Boycott Based on ‘Misinformation’?

CEO Michael Doukeris told the Financial Times in a recent interview that that the boycott was fueled by “misinformation and confusion” circulating on social media and that Mulvaney’s involvement wasn’t part of a Bud Light marketing campaign.

Doukeris said many people thought that Mulvaney’s involvement was part of a broader advertising campaign by Bud Light, which he insisted “it was not.”

“It was one post. It was not an advertisement,” Doukeris told the outlet.

The Anheuser-Busch chief also said that there were viral videos of billboards with images of the Bud Light can allegedly inserted “electronically” and “10 million people [were] watching it and commenting ... that had nothing to do with Bud Light, it was just like pure social media creation.”

He said that Bud Light never planned to mass-produce cans with Mulvaney’s likeness on them for sale to the general public.

During an earnings call last week, Doukeris said Anheuser-Busch would be tripling its investment into Bud Light over the summer.

Amid the backlash, two Bud Light executives—Alissa Heinerscheid and Daniel Blake—took leaves of absence, though the company did not say whether the departures were connected with the Mulvaney fiasco.

A video interview featuring Heinerscheid went viral in the wake of the Mulvaney controversy. It featured Heinerscheid saying that she wanted Bud Light to distance itself from the “fratty” image it has cultivated to become more “inclusive,” a buzzword that critics say signals an adherence to a “woke” agenda.

The chief executive of Anheuser-Busch’s U.S. operations, Brendan Whitworth, issued a statement in mid-April saying that the company “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” although he stopped short of explicitly mentioning Mulvaney or the campaign.

Anheuser-Busch later released an ad steeped in patriotic symbolism, including the company’s signature Clydesdale horse mascot trotting by iconic landmarks and people raising the American flag.

The ad was met with a lukewarm response by many online users, some of whom framed it as a hypocritical attempt to win back conservatives outraged by the brand’s previous campaign.

While President Joe Biden has not addressed the controversy, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre alleged that calls for the Bud Light boycott had led to bomb threats and that it “has to stop.”

“We should be able to speak out, and others should be able to speak out, against hate and discrimination,” the press secretary told reporters at a briefing last month.