Click here to read the Spanish version.
Alarm bells have been ringing throughout the US due to the theft of 4,040 cases of Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar’s Santo tequila in the town of Laredo (Texas). The thieves are said to have made off with supplies from two truckloads of 24,240 bottles of Santo blanco, reposado and añejo, which took 39 months to make. That entire shipment equates to a whopping $1 million, according to brand president Dan Butkus.
‘We’ve worked really hard […] it’s the best year we’ve had in Santo. We had all this momentum, and now whatever is on the shelf is all people are going to get,’ Fieri expresses sadness at what has transpired. In this sense, having run out of stock, and with the Christmas holidays approaching, Santo has accelerated the activity of its distiller in Mexico on a ’24/7 schedule’ in order to replenish the supply as soon as possible.
‘Our distiller is an independent distiller who depends on our sales for his and his team’s livelihood,’ Butkus says. ‘My sales team, my marketing team, the whole Santo Spirits team depends on these sales. … That’s what hurts me the most. We have to support these people both at the distillery and in the U.S., and we can’t do that right now without the revenue from these cases.’
According to an incident report obtained by PEOPLE, Johanson, Santo’s trucking partner, notified Fieri of the theft on Nov. 14. The trucks were ‘illegally double brokered’ to different carriers, Johanson says. ‘We believe the GPS tracking signal we were monitoring was spoofed by a GPS emulator app used by the criminals,’ the report states.
The local police department then contacted Verisk CargoNet to investigate the theft. According to a Verisk spokesperson, Verisk CargoNet data analysis projects that cargo theft has reached an all-time high in 2024 and will be more than 25% higher than in 2023.
Fieri plans to offer a $10,000 reward to anyone who recovers the tequila, ‘the crown jewel of the company that takes about four years to make. Butkus, however, is more pessimistic about it: ‘It’s unlikely they’ll find those truckers. They probably rent the truck, get the offer, get the load, sell it and then disappear. We have some phone lines from them that are already disconnected’.
