![white claw white claw](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/eXuHxxfHpfCYmKC6J9gmjPIpRik=/407x90:5620x4000/1200x900/media/img/mt/2019/08/shutterstock_1461529928/original.jpg)
White Claw's 355 ml slim can also offers 100 calories, while the 473 ml can has 140 calories. It's a shift that the big breweries have noticed, too, with Anheuser-Busch courting the market with its 90-calorie Bon & Viv and Boston Beer offering up the 100-calorie Truly, among others. Von Mandl says White Claw drinkers appear to skew slightly male, but he suspects its light sugar and carb count attract both younger and older tastes that are looking for an alternative to beer. That video imagined the prototypical Claw fan as a loudmouth bro, and while von Mandl credits it with pushing sales, he says Mark Anthony was forced to distance itself when unauthorized T-shirts began popping up with the slogan, which he says does not fit the brand: “We were very concerned about the social responsibility side.” Von Mandl says about half of White Claw's “small” marketing budget is devoted to social media promotion but that it didn't fund the online fanbase, nor last summer's viral video by comedian Trevor Wallace which coined the phrase: “Ain't no laws when you're drinking Claws.” Trend-watchers and analysts, too, declared 2019 a breakout year for the low-carb, gluten-free drink, which debuted in 2016 but only caught fire last year when von Mandl says it captured 60 per cent of the rapidly growing hard-seltzer category.Īt the forefront of its fanbase were ardent millennial and Gen Z champions whose Twitter and Instagram testimonials were an odd melange of apparently genuine devotion, ironic snark and comic click bait. Superlatives come easily to von Mandl as he describes the fizzy White Claw, a surprise hit south of the border that surged so much last summer that it sparked nationwide shortages. “This is a disruption very similar to what happened in the coffee business in 1994, when (former CEO) Howard Schultz launched Starbucks.” “This whole thing is an absolute dream,” von Mandl says from Vancouver of a meteoric 2019 rise for the beverage, known for a sleek white can adorned with three cresting waves. Its Vancouver-born creator Anthony von Mandl, CEO of the Mark Anthony Group, says he's bewildered by the stunning rise of the low-cal drink previously only available to cross-border shoppers and tourists. And so the hard seltzer's long-awaited Canadian debut this weekend comes with no shortage of expectations for similarly effervescent fortunes. A tsunami of social media hype and celebratory trend pieces have already made White Claw a sensation in the United States.