Patrón Tequila, the Bacardi owned super premium brand, began rolling out a new advertising campaign titled What's Actually In Your Tequila in July 2026, pressing drinkers to ask what hidden additives might be sitting in the bottle they are pouring.
The push builds directly on a fight that started in February 2025, when Patrón first marketed itself as containing no additives and Mexico's Consejo Regulador del Tequila, known as the CRT, responded by suspending the brand's export certification for four days.
What is running on billboards and where
The current campaign was built with advertising agency BBH USA and began appearing across the United States in July 2026. Out of home creative, including billboards, murals and digital kiosks, is running in New York City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Austin and San Francisco. One executional idea, called Guess Which Tequila, blurs the brand's bottle down to its silhouette and sends viewers to a microsite to confirm the guess alongside a rundown of the three ingredients used: Weber Blue Agave, water and yeast. A second idea, Ways of Saying, runs copy that inverts everything the brand says its tequila does not contain.
Roberto Ramirez-Laverde, global senior vice president of Patrón Tequila, said most people would never guess their tequila might carry glycerin, oak extract, sugar based syrup or caramel coloring. Patrón's parent, Bacardi, says the brand has used the same recipe since the distillery's founding in 1989 and that it is still made exclusively at Hacienda Patrón in the Jalisco highlands.
The company is citing two sets of survey numbers to support the push. A YouGov poll found that 61 percent of Americans think producers should be more transparent about ingredients and sourcing. Patrón's own global drinks survey found that 78 percent of tequila drinkers prefer a natural taste over one that has been artificially altered, and that 88 percent would consider switching brands if they learned their tequila carried undisclosed additives. Patrón says the campaign will keep running into 2027, and it followed a July pop up at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans where the brand served cocktails and ice cream named for ingredients it says are absent from its bottles.
The four day export suspension that set this off
Patrón's push to talk about its recipe is not new. In February 2025 the brand launched a campaign declaring itself free of additives, running ads in New York and Los Angeles with lines like no sweeteners, no extracts, no secrets. Weeks later, the CRT suspended Patrón's export certification, the paperwork tied to its official NOM registration, for four days. Ned Duggan, Bacardi's global chief marketing officer, told Forbes the suspension came as a direct response to that marketing language and that it affected the business, though he declined to quantify the impact.
Bacardi's stated position is that the CRT has no authority over marketing or advertising inside the United States, citing a trade agreement between the two countries signed in 2006. As a gesture the company describes as good faith, Bacardi removed the specific claim from Patrón's website while continuing to describe the tequila by its three ingredients. The CRT's secretary of international affairs, Rodolfo Villarruel Franco, told the Financial Times that the council requires alcohol advertising and labeling to be grounded in fact and would apply corrective measures where it is not. In a separate statement to Forbes, the CRT said it does not retaliate against any of the more than 208 producers and 43,000 registered growers it oversees, and that there was no dispute with the brand at the time of that comment.
What the one percent rule actually covers
Underneath the marketing fight is a specific Mexican standard. NOM-006-SCFI-2012, the official rule the CRT enforces, allows tequila makers to add up to 1 percent of a product's weight in substances such as glycerin, oak extract, caramel coloring or sugar based syrup, without disclosing that on the label or in advertising. The CRT has taken the position that any claim of containing no additives is itself misleading, since the standard already treats those small quantities as within bounds for what counts as tequila. In August 2024, Mexican authorities ruled the specific marketing term inadmissible on labels. The council has applied that same logic beyond Patrón: it has also challenged the Additive Free Alliance, a nonprofit that once certified other brands, including Cazcanes and Fortaleza, as containing none of these substances. The alliance pulled its list of certified brands from its website after members said they had received warning letters from the CRT.
What this means
Tequila Watch has not independently tested Patrón's current lineup, and its blind database lists the brand's Silver, Reposado and Añejo as Unverified rather than Verified Pure, the status reserved for bottles whose composition has been confirmed. The underlying dispute is about who gets to police a marketing word, not about what is proven to be in the bottle, and until the CRT and Bacardi resolve that legal question, similar fights across the category look likely to repeat.