It’s June, but in the month hijacked by LGBTQ identity politics, “Pride” has vanished from Oreo‘s website.
The brand’s dedicated “oreo.com/pride” page, once a showcase for its partnership with activist group PFLAG, now redirects to a gentler page titled “Bringing Families Together.”
PFLAG is still there, listed as a “supporting partner” beside a military-family charity. The celebration is gone; the relationship is not.
That sleight of hand says more about Mondelez International‘s confidence in its own strategy than any press release could.
For years, the maker of Oreo did not whisper its activism — it broadcast it. Between May 2021 and June 2023, the @Oreo account posted dozens of times in praise of PFLAG and identity campaigns, marking “Trans Day of Visibility,” “International Pronouns Day,” and a RuPaul’s Drag Race finale.
In 2021 the brand gave away 3,000 limited-edition boxes stacked to resemble five different flags — trans, lesbian, pansexual, bisexual, and rainbow — and asked followers which they would choose.
This is a cookie that American children have ranked their No. 1 favorite brand — ahead of Netflix and the iPad. NLPC has chronicled the whole arc and asked, in 2023, whether Oreo was about to become “the next Bud Light.”
Is your favorite sandwich #cookie … #grooming children? Watch below #Oreo pic.twitter.com/8xPp4VfAnV
— NLPC (@NLPC) February 7, 2024
The comparison was not idle. After a 2023 stunt with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light lost its long-held title as America’s top-selling beer, with sales falling 23 percent in a single month as Modelo Especial overtook it.
Here the story turns from ironic to remarkable.
Dirk Van de Put/PHOTO: Fortune Brainstorm Reinvent (CC)
This week, Anheuser-Busch InBev — Bud Light’s parent — named a new chairman of its board: Dirk Van de Put, the chairman and chief executive of Mondelez. The change took effect June 16. He keeps running Oreo’s parent while presiding over the boardroom of the brewer whose Mulvaney misadventure became a business-school case study — which van de Put himself observed first-hand as one of AB InBev’s directors.
The executive who turned a sandwich cookie into a pride billboard now holds the gavel at the company that learned, the hard way, what happens when a beloved product picks a side.
The optics run deeper than one swap of titles. Budweiser and Bud Light sell themselves as pure Americana — the Clydesdales, the flag, the word “America” stamped on the can. Yet the brewer has been Belgian-Brazilian-controlled since InBev’s $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch in 2008, and runs from Leuven, Belgium.
Van de Put, a dual Belgian-U.S. citizen, replaces American Martin Barrington in the chair. The chief executive who helped boost him, Brazilian-born Michel Doukeris, is the same Doukeris who spent 2023 explaining the Bud Light collapse to investors.
So the most American of beers now answers to a Belgian chairman, a Brazilian chief executive, and a Brussels-listed parent — executives an ocean removed from the customers who made it an icon. That distance from the buyer was the through-line of the Bud Light debacle. It just gained a new chapter.
What makes the appointment more than a curiosity is the Mondelez scoreboard. Over five years, the company’s shares are close to flat on price even as the broader market climbed, and total returns have lagged.
Van de Put blames cocoa costs and inflation. Those headwinds are real.
Yet every chocolate maker buys cocoa. The test of leadership is not whether a business faces costs it cannot control, but whether it heaps avoidable trouble on top of them.
Politicizing a children’s cookie was avoidable. Pointing at commodity markets is a way to dwell on the problems management did not create while skipping the ones it did.
The sharper charge is one a directors’ table should dread: leadership manufactured reputational exposure it never needed, then refused to let shareholders examine the fallout. That stonewalling is why NLPC opposed the company’s directors last year.
Follow the sequence. For two years, Oreo broadcast its PFLAG partnership under a “Pride” banner.
As the criticism mounted — NLPC among the most persistent voices — the posts thinned, then stopped. The standalone “Pride” page came down, and PFLAG reappeared under “Bringing Families Together,” alongside a military-family group.
This is not a company that discovered a sudden passion for “family.” It wanted to keep a relationship it could no longer afford to celebrate, and went looking for a quieter place to keep it.
Drop the word “Pride,” which had become a liability. Keep PFLAG, so the activist side cannot cry abandonment.
Tuck both under “family,” next to the troops, where no one picks a fight. Have it both ways.
Oreo will not admit that is the maneuver. It does not need to.
The before-and-after sits on its own website. Now it sits here too — indexed, dated, and permanent.
Now the same instinct heads to a second boardroom. AB InBev investors are entitled to wonder what they are getting in a chairman who would not stand behind his own brand’s choices once they grew unpopular.
The beer giant that wrote the cautionary tale has, in effect, hired its sequel. And Oreo’s owners are left with a chief executive splitting his attention between two companies that each discovered how costly it is to lecture the customer.
Cocoa will get the blame. The boardroom decisions that turned a children’s cookie into a culture-war prop will not.
Shareholders deserve a fuller accounting than that.
