Anheuser-Busch is a Logistics Enterprise in Hiding…
…and why this perspective matters in the Trump-Musk world
Since spending a few weeks in St. Louis this summer, and thinking a lot about the continental nexus that is the city, I have been playing with the idea of “logistics enterprises in hiding.” That is, there are companies which on the surface seem to be about a product or a service, but really have built their success upon the logistics of things. At the time, it was a quirky business analysis model. But now, with Trump and Musk interfering with Government function and funding in serious ways, the subject takes on greater import. To illustrate, we will turn our attention to the signature brand of the city on the river.
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Anheuser-Busch is a logistics enterprise in hiding, built around the primal product, Budweiser. You may think it is a brewing company, but no, that is not the core competency. Budweiser is an aggressively sufficient beer, but on its own is not the stuff of a global brand. Anheuser-Busch does logistics, the beer merely defines the nature of the systems involved.
Created in 1876, Budweiser was intended to be a nationally palatable and distributable lager. This is how they promote its origins on their website. What does this mean for our argument? First, it forced a simplified, basic supply chain – no highly specific ingredients or requirements. So, rice, barley, hops, yeast, and beechwood. This is unlike, for example, Marlboro Reds, whose tobacco comes only from one farm in Tennessee, whose specific properties likely accounts for the brand’s excess success over the entire cigarette market. Next, it meant a brewing process that was itself also simple and short. Budweiser is produced in two phases and takes between two to three weeks to finish. As well, it is a beer that can withstand significant physical and temperature abuse across its significant distribution phase from regional breweries, and still in most cases pour out as a decent beverage. Finally, Budweiser is sustained by aggressive marketing to expand the distribution network. The King of Beers is a figurehead that reigns on the back of its ease of production, ability to travel and wait, and its legion of courtiers to spread its message.
But this is more than a fun exercise to create a new understanding by altering the perspective. Because whatever you choose to call Anheuser-Busch, howsoever you choose to define its essential meaning, the facts of its logistics functions do not change. And this orientation towards the logistics of things defines much of the chain and national brand level economy, in large measure because of the nature of public investment and organization in the post-WWII period. Which is a problem for them with the political and economic policies of the Trump-Musk administration.
All of the logistics that Budweiser – and most other enterprises – relies upon to succeed are sustained and defined by the US Government and the public purse. They rely upon a regulatory system that guarantees mass safety for agricultural inputs. They need public investment in multi-modal transportation infrastructure. They depend upon financing systems of trust. And so on.
Yet Trump campaigned, won, and is opening his term with antipathy to the requirements of a logistics nation. If this administration continues as it has begun – if things like highway spending really will be decided by partisan demographics – then Anheuser-Busch’s business model, as well as those of many others across the economy, will be terribly damaged. On regulation, how will chain restaurants maintain costs when sanitary standards of produce are their responsibility? How will Walmart sustain low prices if the financial system is borked with mistrust? What will aluminum tariffs mean to Budweiser’s iconic can and its prices? Of course, while Waffle House might struggle as portions of the interstate highway system are starved of maintenance funding, it can assert a new role delivering the Pothole and Regional Disaster Index.
American post-war power, built upon the logistics foundations developed over a century and accelerated in global war, now teeters on too many fault lines of one man’s choosing.