Anheuser-Busch Employee Hints Company Sabotaged Bud Light on Purpose

A former Anheuser-Busch employee has suggested in an interview that the brewing company deliberately sabotaged Bud Light in an attempt to cut costs.

Starting in April, Bud Light has been subjected to a relentless backlash for a small branded partnership it had with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. In a video posted to Instagram on April 1, Mulvaney said the beer brand had sent her a can with her face on it to commemorate her 365 days living as a woman.

Mulvaney's partnership with Bud Light drew condemnation and boycott calls from several conservative figures, including U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican. Since the calls for a boycott began over two months ago, Bud Light has seen a rapid drop-off in domestic sales, and revenue remains consistently below what it was the same time last year. It has also lost its crown as America's most popular beer, with Mexican rival Modelo Especial now No. 1.

Modelo Especial store sales were $333 million in the four weeks ending May 28—a 15.6 percent increase compared with the same period last year—while Bud Light took in $297 million, a 22.8 percent drop, according to Circana, a consumer behavior adviser.

The former Anheuser-Busch employee, who said he worked for the company for 10 years before being laid off in recent weeks, told conservative commentator Tomi Lahren in the interview that he believes the downfall may have been orchestrated.

Speaking anonymously on Lahren's OutKick.com show, the former employee said he had previously worked for the company in Houston, where "everybody was upset [with the Mulvaney collaboration], including management."

"Nobody's happy about it," said the unnamed man. (Lahren confirmed his employment at the company through pay stubs.) "Everybody thinks it was a very bad idea. Obviously, you know, it's sales, and everything shows that. So, I mean, they express the fact that they were shocked. Why would they do this? What were they thinking, especially now?

"It's, like, the worst time, yet the best timing if a company were to try to change the way it operates from a corporate level," he continued. "That's just my opinion, and many of us are talking about that. Like they planned it in a way. That was, like, a strategic destruction of Bud Light."

The employee went on to say that since the company was acquired by Belgian brewer InBev in 2008, several years before the employee joined the company, the new owners moved to change the working culture.

"When the company was bought by InBev, a lot of things changed," he said. "You know, it's an American brand...that pays extremely well, with benefits and things of that nature. When InBev [took] over, they didn't like that. So they've been trying to get rid of many benefits of working for an American company like Anheuser-Busch. And they just can't because we have a strong union."

The employee speculated that Bud Light had been experiencing deteriorating sales numbers "for many years," prompting executives to say, "Let's put this nail in the coffin.' And now we have a lot of layoffs, a lot of loss of production."

He continued: "It will be easy for [the company] to restructure, let's say pay or contracts—we have a contract coming up—in a way where [they will say], 'Well, we don't have the business anymore, so we're forced to change these things.' And that's kind of what everybody feels like. It's too obvious that they would just mistakenly do this and not expect these repercussions. I mean, anybody could tell you what was going to happen."

The former employee went on to say that things are so bad that there is no overtime work available for the upcoming Fourth of July holiday—despite it being the company's busiest time for business.

He also said that laid-off workers are hoping to eventually return to the company once sales "ramp up" again, "which is the hope because nobody wants to lose your job. I mean, I agree with the boycotts, because I have children and see what's happening. But we suffer because we have veterans that work there, American citizens, our neighbors. We're losing jobs. So it's a double-edged sword.

"I'm angry at the company at the corporate level," the man continued. "Just because they had to have known this was gonna happen and they let it happen.... They have 100 people on staff that literally sit there and monitor all this stuff. So pretty sure they had the conversation.

"As for why, it's only speculation, but from previous years and the way they tried to take away the way the company has run in the past until now, it's not the same company," he said. "It was when I started. It was a really good company. I mean, you can see the difference of American families working there to now. It's just the bare-bone go to work, do your job, go home. Just not the same."

The interview comes weeks after Lahren said "mass layoffs" were in the pipeline at Bud Light as a result of the backlash.

Newsweek has contacted representatives of Anheuser-Busch via email for comment.