A judge has ruled in favor of Anheuser-Busch InBev and dismissed the deceptive advertising lawsuit Molson Coors (then-MillerCoors) filed against the world’s largest beer manufacturer over its 2019 Super Bowl campaign.
The three-plus-year legal battle began in March 2019 and was dubbed “Corngate” because Molson Coors alleged that its rival was spreading kernels of uncertainty about the ingredients in some of its products. The campaign kicked off with a Super Bowl commercial set in the Bud Light kingdom that called out the use of corn syrup in Miller Lite and Coors Light, then spread to a transparency campaign that highlighted the lack of corn syrup in Bud Light.
In the years since, courts have ruled in both big brewers’ favor on different points. Molson Coors was granted an injunction in September 2019 that gave A-B until March 2020 to cycle through all Bud Light packaging that read “no corn syrup.” In May 2020, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in A-B’s favor to dismiss the case.
Two years later, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, where Molson Coors filed its initial complaint, ruled that “judgment is entered in favor of defendant Anheuser-Busch Companies” and dismissed the case.
A Molson Coors spokesperson said in a statement the ruling is nothing new and the company is focused on the future, which includes “growth for Coors Light and Miller Lite, driving the fastest growing seltzer portfolio in the country and progressing 2021’s top new energy drink.”
“The only thing new is the judge’s comment in the dismissal which says, ‘… the court would be remiss not to note that [MillerCoors] has now unearthed overwhelming documentation of [A-B’s] intent to mislead consumers as to the presence of corn syrup in the finished products despite it knowing that none or virtually none were present,’” the statement continued.
A-B plans to file a new complaint – based on a previously filed counterclaim – that Molson Coors misused its trade secrets throughout litigation, an A-B spokesperson told Brewbound.
“We have said since day one that this lawsuit was baseless, and the dismissal of it in its entirety following our decisive victory at the Seventh Circuit confirms that,” the spokesperson said. “We are also pleased that we can now pursue our previously filed counterclaim that Molson Coors misappropriated our trade secrets, including the proprietary recipes from some of our most valuable beer brands.”