President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration has left many Latino customers fearful, causing a drop in an unexpected market: beer.
Constellation Brands has seen its beer sales to retailers fall for the first time since 2013, when they acquired U.S. rights of brands like Corona, Pacifico, and Modelo. Their sales dropped by one percent in their latest quarter.
In 2023, the Mexico-imported beer Modelo Especial pushed past Bud Light to grab the top spot as America’s best selling beer. Around half of Modelo’s customer base in the U.S. is Hispanic.
Constellation Brands CEO Bill Newlands told The Wall Street Journal Thursday that Latino customers have recently stopped shopping at bodegas and convenience stores.
Rather, he said they now try to shop at larger retail chains to “blend into” the crowd, which has caused a slump in beer sales.
This comes amidst the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration agenda which consists of a constant slew of raids and deportations, with some people even getting mistakenly deported.
According to CNN, RBC Capital Markets analyst Nik Modi said in a note to clients last week that a “consistent theme we have heard over the last several months has been mounting pressure among [Hispanic consumers] stemming from concerns on immigration policy.”
“This has manifested in pull back from retail,” she added.
Beer distributors and analysts said that immigrants have stopped frequenting liquor stores in some states because they don’t want to show identification when purchasing drinks, while others have stopped doing their groceries past 6 p.m. in order to steer clear of night-time immigration raids.
NPR’s radio branch in Austin, Texas, KUT News spoke to long-time Austin resident Rosa in February, who said she was afraid to go into work after hearing that some of her neighbors had gotten detained.
“People don’t want to go out,” Rosa said in Spanish. “Two days ago, I went to H-E-B in the evening and it was empty; there weren’t any people.”
Abdías Domínguez, who runs a jewelry stand in the South Austin food pavilion said in Spanish that “people are afraid of Donald Trump’s policies,” adding that he can feel the effects of Latinos skipping work and staying away from public spaces out of fear.
“The economy hurts us all,” Domínguez said. “ If they don’t work, who will buy from us?”
The beer market has already been struggling for the past few years, data firm MRI-Simmons found in 2023 that Gen Z drinks less than any other adult age group in the country.
Trump’s recent tariffs have been just another hit on the industry, placing a 25 percent tax on aluminum for imported beer cans.
Even though brands like Modelo, Pacifico, and Corona are exempt from these sweeping tariffs, the investment bank TD Cowen predicted that Constellation could still incur an estimated annual cost of $1 billion, said the The Wall Street Journal.
According to Newlands, the price of Constellation-owned beers increases by one to two percent every year. He said that whether or not this pricing plan will need to be modified is yet to be seen.
