Four years later, his son-in-law-Adolphus Busch-joined the company as a salesman. Adolphus eventually became a partner and then president of the company. As the driving force that took a struggling local brewery and transformed it into an industry giant, Adolphus is considered the founder of the company.
The strategic vision of Adolphus included a dream for a national beer market and a national beer that would appeal to virtually every taste. To accomplish this, he created a network of railside icehouses to cool cars of beer being shipped long distances and launched the industry's first fleet of refrigerated freight cars. Later, he pioneered in the use of pasteurization to ensure beer's freshness wherever it was consumed.
In 1876, Adolphus collaborated with his close friend, Carl Conrad, to create a new beer brand-Budweiser-which now outsells all other brands in the world. Twenty years later, Adolphus developed another beer brand-Michelob-that soon became the pre-eminent superpremium U.S. beer, a position it retains to this day.
Several successive generations of Busch family leadership have contributed to the company's present-day success.
August A. Busch, Sr. ) guided the company through three major crises in succession-World War, Prohibition and the Great Depression by innovating and diversifying the company into several new areas, including the production of corn products, baker's yeast, ice cream, soft drinks and commercial refrigeration units. (Many of these operations were discontinued after Prohibition ended in 1933.)
Adolphus Busch III ) turned the company's baker's yeast operations into the nation's leader, a position it held until this subsidiary was sold in 1988.
Through the leadership of August A. Busch Jr. ), the company built eight regional breweries; increased its annual sales from 3 million barrels in 1946 to more than 34 million in 1974; and began diversifying into family entertainment, real estate, can manufacturing and transportation.
Under the current leadership of August A. Busch III (1937-), the company hasd three breweries and acquired one, introduced numerous beer products to meet changing consumer preferences, acquired SeaWorld, making Anheuser Busch one of the largest theme-park operators in the country. Anheuser Busch has also launched the largest brewery-expansion projects in company history and diversified into international brewing and marketing, container recovery, metalized label printing and creative services.
