Jump to content

Anheuser-Busch

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Wbecker9 (talk | contribs) at 17:48, 6 May 2008 (→Environmental Record). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Anheuser-Busch
Company typePublic, (NYSE: BUD)
IndustryBeverages
Founded1852, incorporated in 1875
HeadquartersSt. Louis, Missouri, United States
Key people
P.T. Stokes (Chairman of the Board), August Busch IV (CEO)
ProductsBeers, lagers, malt beverages, energy drinks
Revenue$15 billion (2006)
Number of employees
24,000 est. (2006)
Websitewww.anheuser-busch.com

Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. (NYSE: BUD) operates the largest brewing company in the United States in volume with a 48.8% share of beer sales. Worldwide, Anheuser-Busch's beer sales volume was 121.9 million barrels in 2005. It is the world's fourth largest brewing company based on revenue, after InBev, SABMiller and Heineken. The company is based in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States. "A-B", as the company is often called, operates 12 breweries in the United States and nearly 20 others overseas.

Anheuser-Busch is the last large-scale American brewery to be majority owned and operated in the United States.

Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. (ABC) is the holding company of Anheuser-Busch, Incorporated (ABI), a beer brewer. The Company is also the parent corporation to a number of subsidiaries that conduct various other business operations. ABC's operations comprise four segments: domestic beer, international beer, packaging, and entertainment, which contributed 74.7%, 6.6%, 10.9% and 7.8%, respectively, of the ABC's net sales, during the year ended December 31, 2006. Approximately 93% of the ABC's net sales are generated in the United States. Worldwide sales of the Company's beer brands aggregated 125 million barrels in 2006, which comprises domestic and international volume. International volume represents Anheuser-Busch brands produced overseas by company-owned breweries, under license and contract brewing agreements, plus exports from the Company's United States breweries.

Anheuser-Busch's best known beers include brands such as Budweiser, the Busch (originally known as Busch Bavarian Beer) and Michelob families, and Natural Light. The company also produces a number of smaller-volume and specialty beers, nonalcoholic brews, malt liquors (King Cobra and the Hurricane family), and flavored malt beverages (e.g. the Bacardi Silver family and Tequiza). Anheuser-Busch also owns interests in RedHook and Widmer Brothers Brewery.

History

Anheuser-Busch began as a small brewery located in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1860, Eberhard Anheuser, a German-born prosperous soap manufacturer, became owner of the struggling brewery. Adolphus Busch, Anheuser’s son-in-law, became partner in 1869, and became president when Anheuser died in 1880.

Adolphus Busch was the first U.S. brewer to use pasteurization to keep beer fresh, the first to use artificial refrigeration and refrigerated railroad cars and the first to bottle beer extensively. In 1876, Busch introduced America’s first national beer brand - Budweiser. In 1877, Busch introduced the company's first cola - King Cola.

Anheuser-Busch became the largest brewer in the United States in 1957. It today produces about eleven billion bottles of beer a year.

Anheuser-Busch's international operations, Anheuser-Busch International, Inc., was established in 1981 and is responsible for the company's foreign beer operations and equity investments.

Today, Anheuser-Busch operates 12 breweries and several theme parks in the United States and has operations around the world.

United States Breweries and Headquarters

In the United States, Anheuser-Busch operates 12 breweries:

St. Louis Corporate World Headquarters and Brewery

See also: Alcohol laws of Missouri
The packaging plant in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Anheuser-Busch World Headquarters is located in St. Louis, Missouri. The brewery there, the largest of the Anheuser-Busch breweries, was opened in 1852 and includes three buildings that are on the register of National Historic Landmarks. At the headquarters, near downtown Saint Louis, free tours of the brewery are available to the public. The tour takes visitors through the complex, and those of the legal age can enjoy two free glasses of any Anheuser-Busch product in the Hospitality Room at the end of the tour. Tourists can see beer being made live in front of them in hot and steamy vats in a working part of the brewery (from behind plexiglas shields).

The company keeps a rotation of its famous Clydesdale horses at its headquarters, and visitors to the brewery can observe the Clydesdales in their exercise field and see their places in the carriage house. The bulk of the herd is kept at the company farm in St. Louis County. The farm, known to many a St. Louisan as Grant's Farm (having been owned by former President Ulysses S. Grant at one time), is also home to a varied menagerie of animals. The current manager of the famous Clydesdales is Benjamin Underwood.

International breweries

Overseas, Anheuser-Busch operates 15 breweries - 14 in China and one in the United Kingdom; In China, A-B operates Budweiser Wuhan International Brewing Company, Ltd. and Harbin Brewery Group Ltd which A-B fully acquired in 2004. Chinese production of AB products in China started, in Wuhan, after their purchase of a local brewery in 1997. In the United Kingdom, the Budweiser Stag Brewing Company Ltd. produces and packages Budweiser.

Budweiser is also locally brewed in eight countries outside the United States. They are: Argentina, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Korea and Spain.

Anheuser-Busch strategic equity investments include:

Beverage products

Anheuser-Busch brews over 40 different beers and malt liquors, which have won 12 World Beer Cup awards.

In addition to brewing its own beer, Anheuser-Busch also is responsible for the brewing of the following international beers:

All of these brands can be verified by visiting Anheuser-Busch.com and clicking on the "beer brands" tab.

Advertising

A pre-1911 "shorty" reefer bears an advertisement for Anheuser-Busch's Malt Nutrine tonic. The product was discontinued in 1942.

The company is known in the United States for its huge advertising presence, including a sports marketing division which creates advertising material for the Super Bowl and many other sporting events. Famous Busch television campaigns have included:

  • Clydesdales, both wild and domesticated, such as:
    • The Budweiser Clydesdales pulling traditional beer wagons
    • The traditional holiday spot featuring the Clydesdales pulling a sleigh through a snowy town, concluding with a closeup of a wreath on a door.
    • Wild Clydesdales playing football (with a couple cowboys as the audience, and a zebra for a referee)
    • A donkey that thinks he's a horse and wants to be one of the Budweiser Clydesdales
    • Dalmatians, also associated with the traditional Budweiser Clydesdales iconography
  • The "Gimme a light" spots;
  • "You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay" (as referenced in Being There and The Simpsons)
  • Frogs saying "Bud-weis-er." The ad campaign later spawned additional characters: Louie and Frankie the chameleons and an inept ferret hit man.
  • The annual Bud Bowl.
  • The "Waazzzup" series.
  • The "Real American Heroes/Real Men of Genius" series of humorous radio and television ads.
  • In the past they have marketed their beer through the name NASCAR Busch Series and on Dale Earnhardt Jr's #8 Chevy Monte Carlo. Currently they sponsor Kasey Kahne's #9 Dodge Charger as well as numerous campaigns in the NHRA such as The Big Bud Shootout at the US Nationals and major sponsorship with Kenny Bernstein Racing
  • Bud Man is an advertising character for Budweiser beer. He is a superhero and appears on many products aimed at coeds on University campuses. He also inspired Duffman, a character on The Simpsons.
  • In the UK when Budweiser became the sponsor of the Premiership football league, a humorous series of adverts showed involving the subsequent (fictional) 'Americanisation' of the game, including such ideas as giving the teams more exciting names (The Portsmouth Pirates) and the merging of longtime rival teams Manchester City and Manchester United into one Team Manchester, all with the tagline "you do the football, we'll do the beer". Ironically, A-B, based out of a city where soccer has always been popular, is sponsor of the St Louis (formerly Busch) Soccer Club and owns the Anheuser-Busch Center in suburban Fenton, whose main attraction is a 10,000-seat soccer park that hosts the Missouri state championships.
  • Current television commercials use the slogan "King of Beers."

Recently, Miller Brewing began a series of commercials which featured "referees" calling "penalties" on people for drinking Bud Light, and they would then take the Bud Light and replace it with Miller. Anheuser-Busch responded with their own "referees" commercials in which referees were taking people's Budweiser and keeping it for themselves.

The company has long been known for its jingles. A few of them are:

Environmental Record

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts have ranked Anheuser–Busch fortieth in the "Toxic 100," a list of U.S. corporations most responsible for air pollution. The study found that Anheuser–Busch released 1,002,786 kg (2,213,657 lbs) of toxic pollutants annually into the air.[3]

Anheuser-Busch has received numerous awards for its efforts to reduce its impact on the environment.[4] In 1995 Anheuser-Busch's Baldwinsville brewery won an award for pollution prevention from the New York Govenor for it's use of a "comprehensive, energy-producing pollution-prevention system - bioenergy recovery - to treat wastewater from the brewing process." The brewery also reduced solid waste by nearly 70 percent from 1990 to 1994. In addition, the Baldwinsville brewery found markets for previous "waste" materials used in the fermentation of Anheuser-Busch beers.[5] The Anheuser-Busch Recycling Corp. recycled more than 27 billion cans in 2006, a number far greater than what was used in its own packaging. Similarly, Anheuser-Busch has set short-term goals to reduce energy consumption 5% and increasing use of renewable feul from 8 to 15% by 2010. Along with these goals, Anheuser-Busch has succeeded in cutting down its water use by 3 % since 2002.[6]

The brewery also operates an environmental outreach program to encourage recycling, energy conservation, and habitat preservation, as well as to prevent littering and water pollution. [7]For past 18 years Anheuser-Busch employees have participated in "Green Week", which focuses on environmental conservation education for employees and their families.[8]

Additional subsidiaries

Anheuser-Busch subsidiaries include:[9]

  • Busch Entertainment Corp. is one of the largest U.S. theme park operators, with ten parks throughout the country including several Busch Gardens and SeaWorld locations.
  • Anheuser-Busch Agricultural Operations Produces and enhances the incoming quality of raw materials for the company's beers.
  • St. Louis Refrigerated Car Co. Manages rail/truck transload operation and other properties in St. Louis. This subsidiary was established on February 3, 1878 as Anheuser-Busch's first subsidiary to facilitate large-scale distribution of the company's products via the U.S. rail network as part of A-B's decision to promote Budweiser as a nationwide beer brand.
  • Manufacturers Railway Co. Provides terminal rail-switching services to south St. Louis industries. Its two trucking subsidiaries provide delivery of cans, bottles and outbound beer for four Anheuser-Busch breweries.
  • Metal Container Corp. Produces cans and lids for the company's brewing operations as well as for U.S. soft-drink companies.
  • Anheuser-Busch Recycling Corp. One of the world's largest recyclers of used aluminum beverage containers.
  • Precision Printing and Packaging, Inc. Produces labels for the company's beer packaging operations as well as for other customers.
  • Eagle Packaging, Inc. Supplies 100 percent of Anheuser-Busch requirements for liner material for both the crowns and closures used in beer packaging.
  • Owens-Illinois Not a subsidiary, it supplies glass bottles to many of the Anheuser-Busch breweries around the world including a brand new plant in Windsor, Colorado. Anheuser-Busch bought Longhorn Glass, a former Anchor Hocking Glass plant providing glass for the Houston Brewery, and has partnered with O-I to make glass bottles for A-B in several other cases.
  • Busch Properties, Inc. Operates resort, residential and commercial properties.

Anheuser-Busch and the St. Louis Cardinals

The St. Louis Cardinals baseball club were owned by Anheuser-Busch from February 20, 1953 until it was sold to a group of private investors on March 21, 1996. Busch Memorial Stadium, paid for and built by the brewery in the mid-1960s, was recently demolished and replaced by a new ballpark. Anheuser-Busch signed an agreement for the new ballpark to retain the "Busch Stadium" name on the new building through 2025.

Wholesalers and distributors

Anheuser-Busch delivers its products to retailers through a large network of wholesalers and distributors.[10] In the United States, there are about 800 of these;[11] one of the largest is Hensley & Co. in Phoenix, Arizona, with yearly sales of over 20 million cases of Anheuser-Busch beers.[11]

Corporate Leadership

Patrick Stokes is the current Chairman. August Busch IV is the President and CEO. Both men assumed their titles on December 1, 2006.

A chronology of past corporate leaders (President and CEO) is as follows:

References

  1. ^ a b Grupo Modelo Appoints Anheuser-Busch as the Importer of its Brands in China, Anheuser-Busch Press Release, 2006, accessed 2008-3-24.
  2. ^ a b Anybody Watching Redhook’s Stock…, What's on tap? Newsletter, accessed 2008-3-24.
  3. ^ Political Economy Research Institute
  4. ^ Anheuser-Busch Environmental, Health & Safety Report
  5. ^ "NYS Governor's Awards for Pollution Prevention - Anheuser-Busch" Accessed May 6, 2008
  6. ^ "Anheuser-Busch To Make Green Beer" Accessed May 6, 2008
  7. ^ Anheuser-Busch Environmental Outreach.
  8. ^ "Anheuser-Busch Employees Seeing Green" "Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire" April 11, 2008. Accessed May 6, 2008
  9. ^ Anheuser-Busch - Business Units
  10. ^ "Anheuser-Busch Wholesalers – Beer Distributors". Anheuser-Busch. Retrieved 2008-03-07.
  11. ^ a b "About Hensley". Hensley & Co. Retrieved 2008-03-06.


38°35′51″N 90°12′43″W / 38.59750°N 90.21194°W / 38.59750; -90.21194

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anheuser-Busch&oldid=210613730"