THE GIST
Following years of declining sales for Fat Tire, New Belgium Brewing’s once-flagship Amber Ale, the company has completely revamped the beer—apparently changing its packaging, branding, and the liquid itself. No longer an Amber Ale, Fat Tire is now lighter and more golden in color, a move that New Belgium presumably hopes will help reverse steep sales declines. Since a peak year in 2016, Fat Tire has lost -52.2% of its volume in chain retail nationally. Even in its home market of Colorado, five consecutive years of declines in liquor, grocery, convenience, and other stores have cut its sales volume by -33.7% between 2017-2022.
Fat Tire’s deflating sales haven’t stalled the brewery’s overall momentum, however. Total retail volumes for all New Belgium beers are +58% since Fat Tire’s 2016 apex, buoyed by the brewery’s collection of Voodoo Ranger IPAs, which includes some of the best-selling hop-forward beers in the country. By rebranding and reformulating one of America’s most iconic craft beers, New Belgium shows it isn’t ready to give up on Fat Tire as a brand quite yet.
The redesigned Fat Tire has already hit shelves in some markets, including Colorado and the Detroit area, though New Belgium has yet to formally announce the move. This has created consumer confusion, with several people tweeting pictures of the can and sending frustrated questions to New Belgium about the “new Fat Tire” they’re seeing on shelves. New Belgium spokespeople declined three requests to provide details about the beer, its release, or new marketing plans for the brand, although labels had already been found by MyBeerBuzz.com in July 2022.
From what’s publicly available, it appears that New Belgium has removed some prior aspects of Fat Tire’s branding. The style classification of “Amber Ale” can’t be easily seen on cans that people have posted; instead, the packaging features references to "alternatively powered," “high quality,” and “low impact.” The side of one can states “carbon neutral,” a callback to a 2020 announcement that the brand had become the first “nationally distributed beer to earn carbon neutral certification in the United States.” These posts match what was shared on MyBeerBuzz, in which no beer style is found on Fat Tire labels, just a reference to a "bright and balanced beer" with 5% ABV, slightly less than the previous level of 5.2%.
At Big Bear Wine & Liquor in Pueblo, Colorado, owner Brian Lucas says he received 16oz cans of the new Fat Tire last week. He has yet to receive any type of packaging for the new version beyond those 16oz cans, so he has stocked them in his coolers alongside 12-packs of what is now the older version. Lucas says he wasn’t informed by his distributor, Keg 1, what style of beer the new Fat Tire is, but he was told it’s “an all-new formula” and “easier drinking.”
“Over time I’ve seen [Fat Tire] sales dwindle. It was probably time. It’s a bold move, but their sales data is showing it’s time to make a change,” Lucas says.
Meanwhile, the brewery’s Voodoo Ranger line of IPAs is white-hot: Its collection of brands grew chain retail sales by almost +30% in 2022 while craft as a category declined -7.9%. Fat Tire has been a stark contrast. With the Voodoo Ranger line now making up nearly 80% of New Belgium’s total volume share in stores, Fat Tire doesn’t need to prop up the company’s bottom line so much as it needs to fight for a reason to be in the portfolio at all. Fat Tire’s share of New Belgium’s chain retail sales went from a high of 43.2% in 2016 to 13.1% last year.
New Belgium, which was acquired by a division of Kirin in 2019, will now learn whether the combination of a new look and new beer style is enough to jolt Fat Tire back to life.
WHY IT MATTERS
Brewed since 1991, Fat Tire has undergone two branding refreshes in five years without rekindling its magic with drinkers. In 2017, New Belgium swapped “Amber Ale” on the beer’s packaging for “Belgian-Style Ale,” along with releasing the brand’s first spinoff, Fat Tire Belgian White. In 2019, the packaging changed again, this time to reflect Fat Tire's positioning as an outdoor lifestyle brand. Gone was the “Belgian-Style Ale” descriptor in favor of the original “Amber Ale” on packaging. The brewery also added live yeast to its bottles (and later, cans) to improve freshness. Still, the sales losses continued.
This new formulation is the first time New Belgium has taken Fat Tire away from its Amber Ale roots. Packaging for the beer does not appear to mention a beer style, instead leaning heavily on an environmental message core to the company’s ethos. As of 2020, New Belgium donated $17 million to climate and environmental advocacy and the new, sustainability-themed terms on cans are likely a reference to the brewery’s use of wind, solar, and biogas energy. Moving forward, it appears New Belgium will lead with this environmental pledge rather than a stylistic one.
From a company perspective, it makes sense. Sustainability has always been important to New Belgium, but has become more explicitly part of its marketing in recent years. As a company, it’s committed to:
Operate on 100% renewable electricity by 2030.
Make all New Belgium beers certified carbon neutral that same year.
Provide a carbon neutral toolkit free to all breweries, which provides insights into how to measure a carbon footprint, buy offsets, and earn certification.
The cost to minimize environmental impact is not cheap, however. New Belgium has its own energy engineer and in the future, estimates budgeting about $1.50 per barrel of beer produced for offsets to reach carbon neutrality. That means by 2030, when the company intends to be carbon neutral, it would spend at least $1.5 million a year for offsets alone, based on current production levels. For companies who want to also work toward adopting such a strategy, that price doesn’t include thousands of dollars that New Belgium estimates would be required for other breweries to work with experts to measure greenhouse gas emissions, set goals, and then invest in projects. Whether this level of commitment is financially viable for business peers small or large is yet to be seen.
New Belgium has embraced the kind of leadership role to show others how such a thing can be done. In 2022, the brewery’s Fat Tire Torched Earth beer—made with ingredients that reflect the ravages of climate change, such as smoke-tainted water—made national headlines in part for mimicking the flavor experience of “eating a Band-Aid.” The new Fat Tire packaging indicates its carbon-neutral attributes will become a more focal point of its marketing than they have been previously.
But will this solve Fat Tire’s existential sales problem? It’s a gamble. Market research shows that sustainability is important to consumers, but some experts are skeptical that it’s the most important factor driving consumers’ choice to purchase one brand over another.
“Acknowledging that sustainability or being eco-friendly is important is very different than actually acting on that with your wallet,” says Rob Engelsman, co-founder at Quick Study, a brand strategy company that’s researched sustainability marketing in fashion and other categories. “A lot of brands, it seems, have conflated those two facts and have tried to create scenarios where their lead story is all about their sustainability.”
Engelsman cites a survey by GlobalWebIndex conducted in mid-2022 that showed while 43% of respondents said that helping the environment is important to them, only 30% say they care about the environmental impact of products they buy when compared to other purchase drivers. (Engelsman was addressing sustainability marketing broadly, not commenting specifically on the Fat Tire relaunch.) When choosing between brands in fashion and alcohol, for example, Engelsman says research shows most consumers consider sustainability to be a “supportive” reason they choose a certain brand, not a primary one. This means people who already buy a certain product will use sustainability messaging to justify that purchase, but that factor alone won’t likely win over new customers.
Engelsman uses denim as an example. Quick Study has found that shoppers like the idea of jeans made using water-reducing methods, but ultimately, the choice of whether or not to purchase the jeans comes down to whether they fit well and look good on a person’s body. He says that for beer or any type of alcohol, the top factor that drives purchasing will always be flavor.
“At the end of the day, it’s taste. It’s ‘I enjoy consuming this product,’” Engelsman says. “The most lasting impression is going to be taste above all else.”
This would presumably be the reason for a reformulation of Fat Tire’s recipe, as referenced by drinkers who’ve shared images and reactions online. If customers were already moving away from Fat Tire for years, offering something new to taste and look at could be used as a dual effort to reinvigorate sales.
Sustainability marketing, Engelsman says, also requires long-term follow-through. If a company doesn’t continue to explain these efforts to customers, there’s likely to be backlash or accusations of “greenwashing.” But that commitment is a double-edged sword when shoppers have short attention spans. Every time a brewery talks about sustainability, it’s an opportunity that’s not spent talking about flavor, ABV, or other reasons to buy a certain beer. By restructuring how Fat Tire exists within its portfolio, New Belgium would effectively make Fat Tire the anchor to its climate messaging, while Voodoo Ranger brands, Dominga Sour Beer, and a Belgian Trippel fulfill New Belgium’s messaging around everything else.
Fat Tire’s new packaging illustrates this: Environmental phrases take up the space on a can that would normally state the beer’s basic stats, including style, flavor, or ABV. But it’s those very things that have catapulted New Belgium’s most successful brand, Voodoo Ranger, to the top of beer sales charts. At 9.5% ABV and marketed as “fruit-forward,” Voodoo Ranger Juice Force IPA was in 2022 the best-selling craft beer launch ever by overall dollar sales.
“We were able to bring in drinkers that do not normally drink craft beer, tasted this, and it unlocked this idea of: ‘Oh wow this is what craft beer could be.’ It’s creative, new flavors, different experiences that some of these drinkers have never had before or didn’t associate with craft beer,” David Knospe, New Belgium’s senior marketing manager, told Brewbound regarding the success of the Voodoo Ranger line.
At Big Bear Wine & Liquor, Lucas has seen the combination of Voodoo Ranger’s branding, flavor, and ABV translate to sales.
“If it has a skeleton on it, it sells here,” he says. “Customers don't want to just enjoy a drink; they want the big bang for their buck.”
Where it was once a flagship, Fat Tire has become an also-ran to Voodoo Ranger, both in Colorado and nationally. With this relaunch, New Belgium indicates that major changes—both to the Fat Tire beer and marketing—are necessary if it hopes to reverse the fate of its longtime flagbearer. Whether today’s drinkers are willing to join them for the ride may not make or break the brewery’s fortunes, but it could signal whether Fat Tire continues to be a viable brand for New Belgium at all.
[Disclosure: New Belgium is a client of Feel Goods Company, Good Beer Hunting's parent company.}
Words by Kate Bernot