Bartenders say “no one wants a Bud Light at their event anymore” as consumer demand drops

• The owner of mobile bartending service Barnastics says she’s seeing consumers walk away wanting Bud Light at their events
• Katarina Tucker says demand for Bud Light has ‘completely gone down’ since her partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney
• Anheuser-Busch owned brand It lost billions in market value and suffered a 25% drop in sales.

Bud Light’s popularity continues to decline as corporate and in-person events trend away from showcasing the Anheuser-Busch brand at their gatherings, according to a pop-up bar owner.

– said Katarina Tucker, founder of Barnastics – a mobile bartending company based in New Jersey – Fox News There has been a “huge shift” away from Bud Light among its customers recently.

In April, the Anheuser-Busch-owned brand became embroiled in a controversy over promotions it had done with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Since then, the company has lost billions of dollars in market capitalization and is still boycotted by tens of millions of former consumers.

This month, Modelo Especial dethroned Bud Lite to become America’s best beer, with sales increasing more than 15 percent from the same time a year ago.

The brand has had to buy back expired beer from wholesalers, and is considering how to deal with people at every turn of the sales life cycle who suffer a loss of profit.

Although Tucker said the liquor stores she works with have yet to begin selling Bud Light at a discount, the consumer response has been tangible.

“[Demand for Bud Light] has completely collapsed. “Nobody wants that at their event anymore,” she said.

“A couple of clients have expressed their feelings to me behind it, and he’s not popular anymore.”

She said her customers, and consumers in general, are becoming more aware of whether the brands they support are consistent with their personal and political values.

As a result, people are “actively looking for alternatives to Bud Light, gravitating toward craft beers, specialty cocktails, and premium spirits.”

Tucker said she doesn’t think the brand will regain popularity anytime soon.

From the feedback I’ve had and how many customers feel about it, [the company] Don’t switch gears, I don’t see popularity picking up again.

Tucker’s website allows customers to create a custom proposal that allows the company to see and understand any shifts in demand for specific products.

“Sometimes things blow up,” she noted, but added that Bud Light’s actions as a company “carry a lot of weight” with their customers.

Tucker said she hasn’t seen the same diminishing demand for other Anheuser-Busch products, such as Budweiser, but “anything Bud Light, you’re not going to support.”

Bud Light sales have been in free fall for weeks, dropping about 25 percent in the past month.

In a note last week, JPMorgan analysts said they expect AB InBev’s US earnings before interest and tax to fall 26 percent this year, with a 12 percent drop in volume and a 10 percent drop in sales.

“We believe that there is a subset of American consumers who will not drink Bud Lite for the foreseeable future,” the note said.

Bud Light’s parent company said earlier this month that it would triple its marketing spending in the US this summer as it tries to boost flagging sales.

Michel Docris, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, played down the impact of the backlash, saying the decline in Bud Light sales in the US in the first three weeks of April accounted for only 1% of InBev’s global volumes.

“We believe we have the experience, the resources and the partners to manage this,” Docris said during a conference call with investors earlier this month.

The Conservatives continued the boycott, which led to the Belgian brewer putting two executives in charge of the partnership—Alyssa Heinscheid, vice president of marketing, and its president, Daniel Blake—on sabbatical in April.

Heinerscheid was hired to overhaul Bud Light’s marketing in June 2022 with a vision of revamping its image, while Blake worked at Anheuser-Busch for nearly nine years.

Heinerscheid’s short-lived tenure reportedly included a widely praised Super Bowl commercial featuring Miles Teller and his wife Keleigh Sperry, as well as a ‘Bud Light Carry’ campaign that showed a woman carrying a round of beer to a friends table without spilling a drop.

These ads, revealed by beer brand data, were part of Heinerscheid’s vision to make the brand more female-friendly — something she described just a few months ago as a “passion point.”

But that vision was quickly cut short on April 3 by the brand’s partnership with Mulvaney, a controversial activist with a large social media following, which proved to be a step too far for Bud Light’s loyal customers.

After Anheuser-Busch tried to distance itself from Mulvaney’s promotion, Bud Light also faced backlash from the opposite direction, with LGBT+ groups accusing the company of abandoning the transgender influencer.