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Image credit: Anheuser-Busch
Things are getting increasingly ugly in the ongoing Big Beer legal battles which began with a Super Bowl commercial and has now escalated to claims of corporate theft.
Ouch…This is big beer news.
In March MillerCoors sued Anheuser-Busch for its humorous Super Bowl commercial that shamed Miller Lite and Coors Light for using corn syrup. But when the judge sided with MillerCoors and barred Anheuser-Busch from claiming that its products have “no corn syrup,” the battle between the brewing goliaths was far from over…
CNBC is now reporting that Anheuser-Busch filed a redacted counterclaim on Thursday, alleging that a former employee, who now works at a MillerCoors brewery in Colorado, obtained its secret recipes from current Anheuser-Busch employees “immediately before and after the Super Bowl ad aired.”
The Big Beer wars have just gone to 11…
Included in the Anheuser-Busch filing are redacted copies of photographs of recipes for Bud Light and Michelob Ultra dated Feb. 2, the day before the Super Bowl aids aired, suggesting they had been “secreted out of the AB brewery and then texted to someone at Miller Coors.”
The Anheuser-Busch filing called these recipes “extraordinarily valuable,” citing Bud Light’s status as the bestselling beer in the US and Michelob Ultra’s as the fastest growing.
All true, Bud Light and Michelob Ultra are valuable properties. And if true, MillerCoors may need to lawyer-up, even more than they already have.
In a statement Anheuser-Busch alleges beer recipe theft might even involve upper-echelon employees at MillerCoors and they’re having none of it…
“We will enforce our right to uncover how high up this may reach in the MillerCoors organization. We take our trade secrets seriously and will protect them to the fullest extent of the law.”
MillerCoors spokesman Adam Collins, on the other hand, dismissed Anheuser-Busch’s allegations of corporate beer recipe theft as a distraction from the fact that the world’s largest brewer had already lost three rulings in the case…
“MillerCoors respects confidential information and takes any contrary allegations seriously, but if the ingredients are a secret, why did they spend tens of millions of dollars telling the entire world what’s in Bud Light? And why are the ingredients printed on Bud Light’s packaging in giant letters?”
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H/T to CNBC for their succinct summery of this ongoing case…and to the AP for its initial report
