New industry data show that sales of Bud Light have declined for another week amid the controversy over the company’s decision to engage in a social media campaign with transgender influencer and activist Dylan Mulvaney.
In the week starting on May 8, U.S. retail sales decreased by 28 percent compared with the same period a year ago, according to an analysis of Nielsen data by consulting company Bump Williams. That’s an even bigger slide than the 23.6 percent plunge in sales for the week ending May 6, compared with the same week a year ago.
Bud Light’s competitors have seen increases in sales during the same time period. Sales of Coors Light increased by 17 percent, and Miller Lite sales increased by 15 percent during the second week of May, the data show.
In early April, the controversy erupted when Mulvaney, a biological male, posted a personalized Bud Light can and wrote “#BudLightPartner” on multiple social media accounts, drawing confusion along with calls for a boycott of the brand. Some country music singers indicated they would cut ties with the product, and some industry analysts suggested that Anheuser-Busch was seemingly choosing to alienate its customer base by partnering with Mulvaney.
Amid the sales decline, some local distributors have attempted to take action to bring back sales of Bud Light and other Anheuser-Busch products. For instance, the Alabama-based Bama Budweiser distributor released an advertisement that sought to distance itself and Bud Light from the Mulvaney social media posts.
“We too at Bama Budweiser are upset about it and have made our feelings known to the top leadership at Anheuser-Busch,” Steve Tatum, with Bama Budweiser, said in the ad, according to multiple news reports. “The voice of the consumer has been heard, and Anheuser-Busch has taken action.”
The ad also stated: “Mulvaney is not under contract with Bud Light. The videos you may have seen are Mulvaney’s own social media posts that went viral, and many web-based news outlets have distorted the story.” It didn’t elaborate on the distortions.
“You deserve to know the truth, and life is too short to let a couple of individuals decide what you can eat or drink or spend your hard-earned money on. And remember, making friends is our business, not enemies,” the ad said.
Tatum told AL.com that he’s received positive feedback for his ad campaign. However, he said there has been no response from Anheuser-Busch or Bud Light corporate officials. “I’m just trying to look after Bama Budweiser,” he said. “I’ve worked too hard to give it all away.”
Other Changes
Two Bud Light marketing executives, Alissa Heinerscheid and Daniel Blake, were placed on leave, according to the company. Anhueser-Busch told a St. Louis-based news organization last week that Heinerscheid would be replaced by Todd Allen, who recently served as Budweiser’s global marketing vice president.
“Given the circumstances, Alissa has decided to take a leave of absence, which we support,” an Anheuser-Busch spokesperson said in a statement at the time. “Daniel has also decided to take a leave of absence.”
On April 14, two weeks after Mulvaney’s post, Anheuser-Busch U.S. CEO Brendan Whitworth posted a statement stating that the company never “intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” although the statement didn’t mention Mulvaney or the boycott. “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
Weeks later, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, Michel Doukeris, told the Financial Times that the Mulvaney situation was not an official partnership and that one can was produced with Mulvaney’s face, in a bid to distance the brand from the controversy.
Doukeris added that there was “misinformation and confusion” that circulated online that included a Bud Light can with Mulvaney’s likeness on it. He added said that it was “never intended … for general production and sale for the public.”
During an earnings call earlier this month, Doukeris said that Anheuser-Busch would triple its investment into Bud Light over the next summer and that the firm would provide “direct financial support” to affected front-line workers such as distribution workers and truck drivers. The decline in Bud Light sales also represents about 1 percent of the company’s overall global volume, he said.
Robert Lachky, the former chief creative officer at Anheuser-Busch, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a recent interview that the Mulvaney Bud Light can was a significant marketing mistake. Corporate executives, he added, appear to be out of touch with the beer’s consumer base.
“The minute you step into the political or religious spectrum, when you know your target audience is going to have a real issue with this, you know you’ve alienated at least half of your target audience,” he said. “In the end, people don’t like getting preached to, especially when it comes to drinking beer.”
“None of these marketing folks has ever been to a NASCAR race, none has been to a football game or a rodeo,” Lachky noted. “That’s insanity. That’s marketing incompetence.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
I just read something that said Bud Lite was the company’s biggest seller. That said, why did that VP have to tinker with its sales at all? If it’s not broke etc etc.
Anhauser-Busch has a buttload of products that could have appealed to the sexually confused, or shortchanged or whatever. It could even brew something new that targeted this particular demographic and kept Dylan on the payroll if it was so important to them.
That woman partied at Harvard and didn’t learn a thing. I guess her parents have money.
Sorry, Bama Budweiser employees: you’re going to have to get different jobs. Anheuser-Busch has NOT learned their lesson nor done anything to actually improve their image in the eyes of their long-standing customers. AB has actually made it worse. AB leadership clearly doesn’t “get it”…yet they can be convinced that a man can be a woman and all that sad fantasy jazz. Get out while you can. It’s a sinking ship.