Budweiser closed out its 150th-anniversary Super Bowl campaign this year with Clydesdales, a bald eagle, and the tagline “Made in America.” The ad won USA TODAY’s Ad Meter as the game’s most popular commercial and leaned hard into the same red-white-and-blue imagery Anheuser-Busch has used for its “American Careers, American Beers” push, which celebrates the roughly 65,000 U.S. jobs the company says it supports.
What the ad didn’t mention is that Anheuser-Busch is a subsidiary of AB InBev, the Belgium-headquartered brewing giant, and its parent company has spent this year both closing American breweries and lobbying U.S. lawmakers for tax breaks – the latest twist in a rough stretch for a brand still working to revive its image after the 2023 Bud Light boycott.
The Tax Fight Hiding Behind the Brand
A white paper published this month by Consumer Action for a Strong Economy (CASE), a free-market consumer advocacy nonprofit, argues AB InBev has built outsized market power by pairing an “American” marketing and branding identity with political muscle in Washington.
“AB InBev controls nearly half of the domestic beer market. Let that sink in. A foreign company controls half the US beer market. A gigantic tax break for ‘American beer’ would deliver nearly half its benefit to a foreign conglomerate that, when Canadian trade tensions flared after President Trump’s tariff announcements, ran a ‘Made in Canada’ ad campaign celebrating its Canadian workers and Canadian barley,” the report states.
The white paper also warns American policymakers against granting the corporation any further tax breaks while the company faces accusations of squeezing independent craft brewers out of distribution deals, and it revisits AB InBev’s 2013 Department of Justice settlement over its purchase of a controlling stake in Mexican brewer Grupo Modelo.
The message to congress appears straightforward: don’t reward a foreign-owned conglomerate with tax relief if they don’t play by the same rules as smaller domestic competitors.
Federal lobbying disclosures back up the amount of muscle behind that effort. According to OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan nonprofit that compiles data from Senate Office of Public Records filings, AB InBev spent $5.39 million lobbying federal lawmakers in 2025, following $5.08 million in 2024.
Closing Breweries and Plants After a $2 Billion Pledge
Notably, that lobbying push has lined up with a string of brewery closures across the country.
Anheuser-Busch confirmed in December that it would close its Fairfield, California, and Merrimack, New Hampshire, breweries and sell its 75-year-old Newark, New Jersey, facility, affecting roughly 475 full-time employees.
State filings with California’s Employment Development Department, which administers the state’s WARN Act layoff-notice system, listed the Fairfield closure among the plant shutdowns and confirmed roughly 238 workers there were formally notified ahead of the February 22 closure date.
The City of Fairfield’s own economic development office has since set up a resource page connecting displaced workers with the county workforce board, describing a closure that blindsided locals.
Anheuser-Busch calls the closures “modernization,” not retreat, pointing to nearly $2 billion invested across more than 100 U.S. facilities over five years. But plant closures landing in the same window as a campaign celebrating American manufacturing pride has given critics some ammo against AB InBev.
Still Recovering from Mulvaney
The “Made in America” push can’t be separated from where Anheuser-Busch’s reputation stood a few years ago.
As The Dallas Express reported at the time, the 2023 Bud Light boycott sparked by the brand’s marketing partnership with “transgender” influencer Dylan Mulvaney triggered corporate layoffs and executive departures, with Anheuser-Busch confirming the fallout forced some big structural changes inside the company.
DX also covered how U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) pressed Anheuser-Busch over whether the campaign violated industry marketing guidelines that year and reminded the company that Bud Light lost its two-decade run as America’s best-selling beer to Modelo – a title it has yet to reclaim in 2026.
What The Experts Are Saying
Marketing and crisis-communications experts say campaigns like “Made in America” can carry real risk when a brand’s operating decisions don’t match its patriotic pitch.
“Patriotic branding works when the audience feels the brand has earned the flag, not borrowed it for a campaign,” Heath Squier, founder at EVKII and chief AI officer at Joyrise Health, told DX.
“For AB InBev and Budweiser, the issue is not simply foreign ownership. Consumers know large beverage brands are global. The bigger risk is when the emotional promise of ‘Made in America’ sits next to visible business behavior that feels less aligned with American workers, communities or taxpayers. If lobbying for favorable treatment, brewery closures, executive churn and rebuilding campaigns are all happening in the same window, the ad can accidentally remind people of the trust gap instead of repairing it,” Squier continued.
Squier also said the underlying problem is one of consistency.
“The brand story and the operating story have to rhyme,” he said. “When they do not, (being) louder and creative usually does not fix the problem; it just gives critics a cleaner target.”
For Budweiser, the real test isn’t the next ad – it’s whether the company starts acting as American as it advertises while asking the country’s leaders for financial help.
Provided by Dallas Express
