Did Dunkin' Donuts' CEO announce in June 2025 that a woke ad campaign cost the company $1 billion, forcing it to backtrack? No, that's not true: The story is fiction and copies the idea, but not the words, of a September 2024 spoof produced by a Facebook page specializing in satirical news stories. No evidence-based news organization has published or broadcast a straight-faced report of Dunkin' Donuts launching and then reversing a marketing campaign based on "woke" ideas such as diversity, equity and inclusion.
The 2025 version of the satirical story appeared in a June 17, 2025 post (archived here) on a Vietnam-based page called Animal World under the title "Billion Dollar Mistake: ". It opened:
How Dunkin Donuts' "Woke" Initiative Backfired
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
Lead Stories submitted the keywords "Dunkin AND lost $1 billion AND woke" (archived here) to Google News. The index of thousands of news sites found no such stories contemporaneous to the post about woke marketing backlash in June 2025. Dunkin' Donuts did face criticism from conservatives in 2024 after its CEO refused to advertise on Rumble, saying content there was divisive.
On June 24, 2025, Dunkin' Donuts' public-facing website contained no mea culpas from the CEO. Dunkin' Donuts was bought by Inspire Brands in 2020, so earnings reports are no longer available. Inspire is not a publicly traded company, so its earnings reports are not available.
The claim - that Dunkin' Donuts had lost $1billion in sales to backlash against "woke" marketing - was published in 2024 by SpaceX Fanclub, a Facebook page with a disclaimer that read: "We post SATIRE, nothing on this page is real." SpaceX Fanclub appeared in June 2025 to no longer be publishing news parodies, but a Wayback Machine archive of its 2024 Dunkin' Donuts story can be found here:
(Source: Web.archive.org screenshot by Lead Stories.)
Lead Stories submitted the text of the two stories to plagiarism-checking apps and found zero overlap between the SpaceX version and the 2025 Animal World version, which referred readers to tl.colofandom.com, a site whose tl. domain name indicates it is based in East Timor.
Readers may find more Dunkin' Donuts-related fact checks by Lead Stories here.
