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I was looking at Latin America and who was the richest guy in Venezuela? A brewer (the Mendoza family that owns Polar). The richest guy in Colombia? A brewer (the Santo Domingo group, the owner of Bavaria). The richest in Argentina? A brewer (the Bembergs, owners of Quilmes). These guys can’t all be geniuses...It’s the business that must be good.
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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But no matter how good the beer, how many honors or awards, how innovative Goose Island would ever be again, someone deep in the crowd would always boo.
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Josh Noel (Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business)
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having a big dream brings as much work as having a small dream’...
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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We usually had four big targets a year: market share, expenses, EBITDA and cash.
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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When your corporate motto is “Making friends is our business,” it forgives a lot of sins.
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William Knoedelseder (Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer)
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Most of the wine in the world sells for two dollars a bottle. Quite a bit sells for four dollars to five dollars a bottle, and there are many that sell for ten dollars a bottle. Then you have wines that sell for three hundred dollars a bottle. What the world needs is a beer that's worth five dollars a bottle. I think that would be great. If all beer prices are forced down to the level of Busch Bavarian, none of us will be there.
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Fritz Maytag
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Eager to reestablish their brand as the “King of Beers,” the company’s board of directors had authorized August Jr., the superintendent of the brewery, to buy several teams of Clydesdale draft horses “for advertising purposes.” Gussie, as he was called, purchased sixteen of the massive 2,000-pound animals for $21,000 at the Kansas City stockyards. He also found two wooden wagons from back in the days when the company employed eight hundred teams of horses to deliver its beer, and set about having them restored to the exacting standards of his late grandfather, brewery founder Adolphus Busch, who liked to conduct weekly inspections from a viewing stand, with his son August at his side as all the drivers passed in parade, hoping to win the $25 prize for the best-kept team and wagon.
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William Knoedelseder (Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer)
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How, then, can Apple claim to be 100 percent renewable? It purchases a fraudulent “100 percent renewable” status from electricity producers. The basic way this works is that Apple pays utilities to give it credit for the solar and wind that others use—and to give others the blame for the coal, gas, and nuclear that Apple uses. It’s as if Apple CEO Tim Cook were traveling with nine other people on a yacht powered 90 percent by diesel and 10 percent by a sail—and Cook claimed that he traveled just using the sail, while the others traveled using the diesel. This energy accounting fraud is shameful and destructive, because it leads us to think that we can have innovators like Apple without the uniquely cost-effective energy we get from fossil fuels. Even worse, leading company after leading company, including Facebook, Google, Bank of America, and Anheuser-Busch, is claiming to be 100 percent renewable.[18]
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Alex Epstein (Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less)
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was enough to understand what Marcel wanted... On a normal day he would sit at the table,
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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of the 2000s – mainly to preserve future relations among their heirs. Establishing the rules that will guide future generations of partners has been a concern for
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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Individually, the changes were small; together they became something significant.
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Josh Noel (Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business)
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American beer drinkers had been conditioned to believe they were choosing Anheuser-Busch's beer, but that was only half true; Anheuser-Busch had left them few other options.
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Josh Noel (Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business)
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Times were good at Goose Island. They couldn't make enough beer! But they were also dire. They couldn't make enough beer.
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Josh Noel (Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business)
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Now, if you have a very good [brand] recognition and revenues that do not match the size of this recognition, that means that you have a great opportunity...
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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It is easy, however, to miscalculate the staying power of one’s adversaries. Price wars drag on long and painfully, especially when the players have backers with deep pockets, for example PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay versus Anheuser-Busch’s Eagle Snacks in the US snacks market, a war that waged for over a decade with no one emerging as the winner.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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American brewer Schlitz was a highly successful brand of beer in the United States, but it saw its sales tumble from 18 million barrels in 1974 to one million barrels in 1988 through sheer mismanagement.1 The American brewer underestimated the effect of reducing quality to gain cost savings. It accelerated its fermentation process, substituted corn syrup for the traditional barley malt and changed stabiliser. The consumer spotted these cost savings, and their perceptions of the brand’s quality fell. Heavy advertising expenditures and a return to the previous quality were in vain. The mindspace had been taken by competitors Miller and Anheuser-Busch, and could not easily be retaken. The once strong Schlitz brand was relegated to cheap beer status and became increasingly difficult to find in bars and restaurants, especially
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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Subway restaurants agreed to remove the “yoga mat chemical” from their bread following a petition I started.1 Kraft decided to remove artificial food dyes from their kids’ mac and cheese products after I stormed their headquarters with over 200,000 petitions.2 Chick-fil-A’s chicken went antibiotic free following my meetings with them urging them to do so.3 Anheuser-Busch and Miller-Coors both agreed to publish their ingredients for the first time in history following another of my petitions.4 I was finishing up my first book, exposing the chemicals in our food, and it was slated to be out in a few short months. I had just published an investigation into Starbucks’ famous Pumpkin Spice Latte,5 calling them out for their use of “class IV” caramel coloring (a chemical linked to cancer).6 This piece went viral, with millions of views and shares (which ultimately led to Starbucks dropping this coloring from their drinks).
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Vani Hari (Feeding You Lies: How to Unravel the Food Industry's Playbook and Reclaim Your Health)
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Follow-up Call (Script) Seller: “Hello Mr. Prospect, my name is Tom Freese, and I’m the regional manager for KnowledgeWare in Kansas City. I wanted to contact you about the CASE application development seminar we are hosting at IBM’s Regional Headquarters on August 26. Do you remember receiving the invitation we sent you? (Pause for a response) “Frankly, we are expecting a record turnout—over one hundred people, including development managers from Sprint, Hallmark Cards, Pepsi Co., Yellow Freight, Kansas Power & Light, the Federal Reserve Bank, Northwest Mutual Life, American Family Life, St. Luke’s Hospital, Anheuser-Busch, MasterCard, American Express, Worldspan, and United Airlines, just to name a few. “I wanted to follow up because we haven’t yet received an RSVP from your company, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t get left out.” Granted, this was a highly positioned approach, but it was also 100 percent accurate. I wanted prospects to know that IBM was endorsing this event. I also wanted to let them know that I expected “everyone else” to participate. I accomplished this by rattling off an impressive list of marquee company names that we were “expected” to attend. Most importantly, I wanted to make sure that they didn’t get left out.
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Thomas Freese (Secrets of Question-Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results (Top Selling Books to Increase Profit, Money Books for Growth))
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Tobias Brewers and Maltsters Collection, located at the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at
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William Knoedelseder (Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer)
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the Riverfront Times, and the books Making Friends Is Our Business, by Roland Krebs and Percy J. Orthwein; Under the Influence, by former Post-Dispatch reporters Peter Hernon and Terry Ganey; October 1964, by David Halberstam; and Dethroning the King, by former Financial Times reporter Julie MacIntosh. PROLOGUE: “AUGUST IS NOT FEELING WELL
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William Knoedelseder (Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer)
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For two months, between the crash of Lehman and the end of negotiations, we were really anxious,” recalled Brito. “Things were out of our hands and nobody knew where the world was going... We announced the transaction in one world and signed the contract to buy it in another... Some of the banks in our consortium almost disappeared... It was as though we had entered a tunnel and, somehow or other, had to get to the other end – only by the other end, it had suddenly started to rain. What could you do? Begin to think of a plan B, a plan C, on other ways of financing...
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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In the United States, most boards are benign, and the power resides primarily with the chief executive; boards tend to only become significant when it comes time to replace a failing CEO. The AB Inbev board, however, is the primary power center in the company. It exemplifies that boards can play a central role in setting BHAGs, developing strategy, sustaining culture, seizing opportunities and leading through tumultuous times. Without such a strong and unified board, AB Inbev would not have come through the 2008-09 challenges as strong as it did (and perhaps even not at all). The AB Inbev board pays constant attention to its own culture, disciplines and vibrancy, with as much fanatic attention as building and preserving the management culture of the company. Most important, it makes decisions and allocates capital for long-term shareholder value, measured in multiple decades, not in terms of quarterly moments. If more boards behaved this way, we would have better performing enterprises and lasting companies.
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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When Americans sip their iconic Budweiser, they are in fact enjoying a beer produced by a company engendered by a 2004 merger of Brazilian and Belgian breweries that in turn managed to gain control of Anheuser-Busch in 2008, thus forming the world’s largest beer company. Its CEO, Carlos Brito, is from Brazil.
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Moisés Naím (The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be)
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Andujar, Joaquin, 183 Anheuser-Busch, 181–82 Animal Rescue
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Tony La Russa (One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season)
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when one of Anheuser-Busch’s competitors uses social connection, consumers will think of Budweiser as well.
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Anonymous
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You can’t compete with your own partner. You can’t get upset about who gets credit for a deal. The idea that one has to win doesn’t work in any
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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Target isn’t alone in its desire to predict consumers’ habits. Almost every major retailer, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Kroger supermarkets, 1-800-Flowers, Olive Garden, Anheuser-Busch, the U.S. Postal Service, Fidelity Investments, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Capital One, and hundreds of others, have “predictive analytics” departments devoted to figuring out consumers’ preferences. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” said Eric Siegel, who runs a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “The data doesn’t mean anything on its own. Target’s good at figuring out the really clever questions.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)
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In the open-plan offices where everyone scrutinized everyone else, anyone who got up to leave earlier than usual to go home was usually greeted with a round of applause. This was done in a sarcastic way and usually accompanied by an awkward question: “Are you working part-time?
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Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
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US Craft Brewery Sales to Anheuser-Busch InBev March 28, 2011: Goose Island Beer Co. (Chicago) February 5, 2014: Blue Point Brewing (Patchogue, New York) November 5, 2014: 10 Barrel Brewing (Bend, Oregon) January 23, 2015: Elysian Brewing (Seattle) September 23, 2015: Golden Road Brewing (Los Angeles) December 18, 2015: Four Peaks Brewing (Tempe, Arizona) December 22, 2015: Breckenridge Brewery (Littleton, Colorado) April 12, 2016: Devils Backbone Brewing (Roseland, Virginia) November 3, 2016: Karbach Brewing (Houston) May 3, 2017: Wicked Weed Brewing (Asheville, North Carolina)
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Josh Noel (Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business)
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If we do something in the public interest which at the same time is profitable to the company, then this is, indeed, very good business,” he said.
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William Knoedelseder (Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer)
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Each sunrise in America ushers in new opportunities to those who keep their chins up … who never lose that lusty courage and willingness that made ours the most envied nation on earth,
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William Knoedelseder (Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer)