Beverage giant Anheuser-Busch InBev this week rolled out a series of 11 cans and bottles emblazoned with the names of the states where its flagship Budweiser beer is brewed. The regional Bud cans will include variants for Texas, New Jersey, California, Georgia, and New York, among others.
In addition to the altered names, the new cans also replace other Bud elements with state mottos, initials, and nicknames. They’ll be on shelves through September.
Bud’s state-themed cans follow last summer’s super-patriotic packaging that replaced the Budweiser name with “America” and added patriotic slogans to the containers. The marketing move, which arrived during a rather heated U.S. Presidential election, was polarizing for some.
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The new cans court a different kind of controversy by painting Budweiser, the self-proclaimed King of Beers, as a “local” product. Like other major brewers, A-B InBev has seen its market share eroded by changing consumer tastes as well as the rise of independent craft brewers, who together have grown by as much as 20% a year over the last decade. Last year, craft brewers grabbed a 21% share of the U.S. Market by dollar value.
While Anheuser-Busch has responded by buying craft breweries, it has also positioned Budweiser as a kind of anti-craft beer. (See Coins2Day’s map of which “craft beer” is actually owned by Big Beer.) That effort included a 2016 Super Bowl commercial that proclaimed Bud was “Not Small” and “Not a Hobby.” The director of the American Homebrewers Association was happy to agree that Budweiser’s industrial uniformity and light flavor is exactly what has led so many to explore other options.
