It’s not like we didn’t know someone from the upper crust would do this: a former Bud Light executive torched his former employer for the Dylan Mulvaney partnership.
Why did the company do it? It was at the height of transanity and DEI nonsense, so the beer company thought its demographic wouldn’t mind. They did. Beer sales plummeted, and to this day, it’s mocked (via NY Post):
A former Anheuser-Busch executive criticized the company’s decision to partner with Dylan Mulvaney, saying it wasn’t “authentic at all.”
“The problem with the Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney partnership was they just were not an authentic partnership at all,” Anson Frericks told Fox News Digital. “They were catering to a lot of those special interests.”
Frericks began his career at Anheuser-Busch in 2011 and was with the company for over a decade. He told Fox News Digital he realized he needed to leave when DEI was preventing the brand from making what should have been no-brainer business decisions, like partnering with veteran-owned Black Rifle Coffee.
[…]
Sales were down nearly 30% year over year in January 2025.
Frericks said Bud Light was pressured by outside interest groups, like the Human Rights Campaign, to go more and more extreme with LGBTQ advocacy and ultimately wound up alienating its core customer base.
[…]
The former executive claimed Bud Light having a European owner, InBev, caused it to lose sight of the American values the brand had come to represent. In Frericks’ view, it is normal for business and government to collude to influence social outcomes in Europe, but that kind of partnership was antithetical to Bud Light’s business values and alienating to its customer base in the United States.
Bud Light went woke and destroyed the brand in less than a year. That’s incredible. It lost the title of America’s most popular beer; Modelo took that crown in the fallout of this preventable fiasco.
“Don’t put avocado on the burger,” aka don’t mess with an already good thing, a simple thing.