Natural Lite Beer Cans Go Retro

, Natural Lite Beer Cans Go Retro

(What was once old is new again: Courtesy Natural Light)

Introduced in 1977, Natural Light was Anheuser-Busch’s first reduced-calorie light beer, instantly becoming a hit at colleges across the nation.

In 1995, Natural Ice debuted, featuring a higher ABV that quickly made it America’s best-selling ice beer.

In 2008, Natural Light shocked the world, taking bronze at the World Beer Cup for “American-style light lager”. With that honor in pocket, Natural Light went into orbit in 2011, becoming the first beer in space.

In 2015 the youth-oriented budget brand reclaimed the world’s slip and slide record and in 2021 offered to send the parents of two winners to Alaska, and provide them with beer so they could throw a party at home while the Ps were stuck is a frozen wasteland.

, Natural Lite Beer Cans Go Retro

(See ya!)

And now with sales of the budget beer off their 2020 highs, the beer brand that has profited from successfully tapping into a youthful “college kid meets slacker zeitgeist,” is targeting older consumers with new “retro” cans.

It’s part of the company’s broader campaign to mature the beer’s identity, an identity that has become synonymous with college-aged drinkers.

Natural Light’s new (old?) retro-inspired can mirrors the budget brand’s 1979 design, complete with a throwback logo, crest and colors.

“There’s been a lot of conversation about how ‘what is old is now what is cool,’ so we wanted to look back into our archives, so the can itself is harkening back to the design of the late 1970s,” Krystyn Stowe, head of marketing for Natural Light told CNN Business.

When the retro design was tested a few years ago in North Carolina and South Carolina, the response was “completely off the charts,” Stowe said. And now Anheuser-Busch, who have produced the beer for over four decades, is taking the new (old?) retro cans national in February.

“We realized is that it’s not just legal drinking-aged people that are drinking our beer, but all the way up to 30- to 40-year-olds,” Stowe said. “We’re not pivoting away from college, but now we’re welcoming in a whole new cohort that has always existed, but that we hadn’t paid the attention they deserve to.”

“Traditionally, people think of us as college beer — and we’re graduating.”

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(All Image credits: Natural Light)

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