Thanks for the claps. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day two of our Capital Markets Day. It was great to share a beer or two yesterday. Some shared a few more at the bar afterwards, which was also fun. First things first, for the legal friends, on the screen here, you can see our legal disclaimer, again, which is available on our website, and is also relevant to what we will share today. Everything that we talk about today that is not a historical fact is a forward-looking statement, and these are not guarantees of future performance. As a helpful reference, we also have this up in our 20-F, which you can refer to on our website, and that also contains a discussion of our risk factors, including geopolitical and economic uncertainties.
Yesterday, we heard some reflections from Michel on the journey of the company, the progress that we have made in executing our strategy, and our focus as we have shifted into the Reignite phase of the 10-year plan. Tadeu gave some perspective on our category, our footprint, and the unique leadership advantages of ABI. Marcel, Lucas, and Nick talked about our progress and ambitions in the first two pillars of our strategy to lead and grow the category and digitize and monetize our ecosystem. David showed us some real-life analytics products that are embedded in our business today that are driving meaningful value across both growth and efficiency.
We closed the day with Brendan and Kyle, who showcased how our global strategy has been executed right here in the U.S. market, driving market share momentum across total alcohol as we continue to rebalance our portfolio towards the growing segments of the industry. Importantly, we also took some time to experience firsthand our capabilities, innovation, and the cultural relevance of our brands right here at the iconic St. Louis Brewery. The opportunity to socialize, swap perspectives, share a beer together is truly a great privilege of being in our category. As you can see here in our photo collage from day one, we also had the early morning spinning class, where Fernando put me to shame, and probably the less said about that, the better.
Moving swiftly along, today, we're going to start with Michel, who's going to talk a little bit about our culture and the 10 principles of the company. Simon Wuestenberg, our Chief Sales Officer here in the U.S., is going to showcase our route to market and sales capabilities. We're going to head for a market visit around the St. Louis area to see how our strategy and execution is coming to life with our customers and consumers. Let's start the day with culture, and I'd like to invite Michel to the stage. Michel, it's over to you.
Please welcome to the stage, Michel Doukeris.
Hey, good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Morning. Hope you enjoyed yesterday, that you had a good time at the brewery. I always tell people it doesn't matter how many times I go back to that St. Louis brewery, is always different, is always rewarding, and it's fantastic to see everything that is happening there, but connect this with the culture, heritage, and the history of Anheuser-Busch. We'll start today talking about culture. As we put together the program for these two days, of course, there is always more things that we have in hands and in the shelves that we want to fit in the time that we have together, because it's just two days. We need to make choices on what topics we bring forward, what conversations we believe will be more important to you.
And in talking, Shaun, Fernando , and I, we thought that a refresh to you into the 10 principles and the culture, and tell a little bit of what's happening and how we are evolving this over the last five years would be a good kickoff for the day two. I think that we are on the topic because yesterday, through the conversations we had during the visit to the brewery or dinner, many people asking me questions about the culture. It's a frequent topic that time to time when we are traveling, visiting investors, when they come to talk to us, people always have some curiosity about. The next 45 minutes, give or take, will be a little bit about this culture. I will do this in a way that I do internally. I travel all zones that we have once a year.
We have a yearly event that we call LPC inside the company. It stands for Leadership, Performance, and Culture, or as we like to call now, Leadership, Performance, and Cheers, because it's always a very good opportunity to meet people and talk to them. The way that I chose to talk about culture with our teams is by showing them examples, things that we do, and they are in line with our culture. Things that they, on a day to day, as they make decisions, they bring the culture to life. This page is a very important one because it's one that you see in all offices when you visit an ABI office, in all our breweries, in all places. We always have these 10 principles around the office and where the management meets, where our teams come together.
Two messages here on this first page before we go through all of them. The first one is that we have decided on the last five years
To bring forward in a big way this idea of ownership. For those that know us for longer, you remember that we are owners was somehow part of one principle and was described within the principles. We think that this is so important in our culture for our company, that we want to start with this idea of ownership and explain to people why this is so important for us. In a nutshell, if you think about our ownership structure, we have families that for centuries, they are around the business as investors, as owners. We have, in our controlling group, a group of shareholders that they are in the business for the very long run.
The company itself was built, and we teach people in a way, we coach people every single day from the day that they start in the company to the day that they are performing today and in the future, that this idea of treating the company as owners is one of the most important things for us in our company. In our compensation system, there was a question yesterday. We reinforce the culture of ownership because a good portion of the management compensation is linked to shares, RSUs, PSUs, and therefore, the way that the company performs impacts directly the management of the company, their wealth, and their future. Then when you look at the 10 principles: owners who dream big, owners who focus on superior results, owners who lead by example.
Equally, for those who know us for longer, will see that this is a simplified and more straightforward view on our principles. At one point, for those that followed this through the years, those were very wordy principles. Sometimes we were trying to accommodate for a huge amount of things in each and every principle. What we saw was a little bit of a dilution of what the understanding of these principles were. We decided to simplify, as we did for many other things in the company, leave this very actionable so people can clearly understand what these principles are about. When we go talking to people, of course, we explain a little bit, but we give examples. I will give you here two things that I think that can give you more the sense of that.
When we talk about focus on superior results, we do not want to have another 35 words to describe what this is. We want to tell people in a simple way that we cannot do everything, neither we can be everything for everyone. Therefore, our choice is to look at our business, benchmark ourselves versus other companies, and work as hard as we can to do better today than we did yesterday. That is it. Everything else would be a complication. On your canning line that you were visiting yesterday, our operator knows that he needs to have a better yield, that if he can take more production out of that line, he is making a contribution for a future of more cheers. Because for more cheers, we need more productivity.
When you think about the idea of attracting and developing great people, we try to write in many, many ways, what does it mean? Simply put, great people are the right people for ABI that can produce great results and live and uplift this culture each and every day. You do not need more description, because people are people. Great people are those that are able to translate what they have and what they can put together in results. They need to do this with their teams and in the right way. Because, as principle number 10 says, we do not take shortcuts. The idea of putting the principles in a simplified way, actionable, was to make sure that across the globe, this can be translated in a simple way, and that the 130,000 people that we have, they understand what we stand for.
It's never intended to be better than anybody else. It's never intended to over-select people. But it is important fo r us to be able to operate at global level, that we have a set of principles that are very clear for everybody and they work as a glue to bring people from Africa, from Latin America, from North America together under the same company. Then if you go through the principles, as I said, the way I talk about them to my teams across the globe is with examples. So what does dream big mean? I will put two examples here. On the left, I find this a fantastic example of explaining what dream big means. Because who would think that a small brewery from Belgium or a small brewery from Brazil would have a dream to become the biggest brewery globally?
But more than having the dream, would effectively commit and work relentless to achieve that. Many steps on the way, ABI was built. But it's also an important pivot on the history of this company, coming back from this acquisition and inorganic strategy, as I said yesterday, the difference in the words, very small. The work to be done, huge, to transform this company from a company that was built and managed with an inorganic strategy to become an organic compounding machine that can grow over time with smaller deployments of cash, with higher returns on this growth, and fully maximizing this footprint that we built. Interesting enough, not you here, but I have heard from people when we decide to do that, questions like, "Why even bother to try? The only thing you guys are good at is cutting costs. You won't be able to build brands.
You guys are not good at marketing." So we have heard all of that. Part of our culture is benchmarking, is learning, is working hard. I always tell people, "If one day you doubt ABI skills, we're going to be very open to discuss and listen." But one thing that I always tell people, "Don't doubt our will," because these people, they can really do things. Once you set the direction and people understand the value of what they are doing, the will usually becomes stronger than the skill. As you saw yesterday, and we'll see today a little bit more, we can also improve the skill, and we are working very hard to improve our own capabilities. But I love this example, two different times, two different stories, two different outcomes. You see this when we said consistent compounding organic growth.
The reason, very simple. One year is small difference. Two years, good difference. Five years, a meaningful difference. By consistently compounding organic growth at the size that ABI has today, as we translate this to EPS, our returns, they become way better than the CPG median, than the top quartile, and they start to become differentiated. If we can continue to compound over time, that difference will become even larger. That is what is behind our pivot from inorganic to organic. It's our ability to consistently compound growth over time and translate it to superior earnings and shareholder returns. Talking about superior results, we shared this yesterday. As we continue to benchmark, and as we continue to look at each and every opportunity inside the company, of course, we share all these challenges with our own teams.
We want to have not only superior organic growth, but superior translation of this growth into our financials. These KPIs are further breaking down in many areas, where we want our teams to improve their own performance versus last quarter, last year, versus the peer set. They have the responsibility as owners to build the plans, to learn what to do, to make decisions with the investments and resources that they have. This translates in many different ways. One story that I love sharing with our team, because again, it's about consistency, it's about compounding over time, it's about reading trends and deciding when to further accelerate. Think about this, Michelob ULTRA , a brand that 20 years ago was very small and just a small player in the largest profit pool for beer globally.
Today, in less than 20 years, becomes the number one brand in the U.S., is also the fastest growing brand in the U.S., and is now a global brand that we are expanding across Americas, and we know that there is further potential for this brand. So consistent compounding built over time. Always contemporary, so we don't get ourselves into the traps of the past that try to define the brand just in one space, but is a brand that proves what superior results over time is.
If you think about leading by example and taking accountability, this is a very important principle for us as we talk to our management team, as we discuss with them the choices that they make, and we give them time to live with the consequences of that. As we measure the results and we discuss the returns on the investments, the returns of the decisions that they make, what we learn with our own mistakes, and what we want to replicate. I always share this example because I think it's a great example, especially for the young leaders that we have in the company. This, today, looks very obvious that we are investing and we are driving growth with non-alcohol beers. But believe me, that was not obvious at all.
I myself, I have participated in many management meetings inside the company, board meetings, where we had this mix of blue and red teams trying to say whether we should invest more, where we should be selective, not waste time. Interesting enough, the idea of, "This is too small. People don't like it because it doesn't taste good. It doesn't make sense to have beer without alcohol," this team won many, many times. For years, we watched this movie, not participating, showing little to no interest. But there is always, inside companies, people that have different ideas. Right here in North America, a group of people had a different idea for that.
Together with brewmasters, people from the commercial team, people from the insight areas, even though it was not a big priority for the company overall, we thought that the beer could be better, and we kept working on the product. Our colleagues from Belgium, they found a technology that was just incredible, that makes the non-alcohol beer taste as good as any regular beer. I heard a lot of comments yesterday on Tripel Karmeliet . Think how hard it is to make a triple without alcohol that tastes fantastic. This is what is happening today. Our product innovation was a big breakthrough. Still, the pace was not good enough, the focus was not big enough.
During a cold winter in New York, I remember this, Marcel, Tadeu, people that are here in this room, they came to me with an idea that one could think that was crazy. Crazy because we had already closed all our budgets. Our budgets, they close somehow in October. Crazy because no beer brand has ever sponsored the Olympics. We thought that we had the chance, that we had an open. Without thinking about budget, without thinking that this could not be possible, we just decided to try and to go after that. We, on this idea of leading by example, we not only saw the opportunity, but we committed to the opportunity. We invested big. We worked very hard to accomplish in six months what other people take a year or two years planning, which is activate an Olympic game. We decided to go global.
Each and every market, making an effort. In a period of three to four years, we came from basically being part, but not really being there in this segment, to lead this segment globally. Today, there is no one country, one person in the ABI team, that does not believe that we are just at the beginning of what is a massive opportunity for our company. It was necessary to commit, it was necessary to take the leadership, it was necessary to invest ahead of time, and then put the team to play. Across the globe, everybody has targets on that, but more people have a true commitment to lead in this segment. This is really working, and we continue to champion the category. The more we do, the more we learn that the opportunity is really big.
It is an opportunity for more occasions, for more consumers, to make beer more available so we can continue to drive this incredible category. This is another principle that is very relevant for us because we often say that we have many competitive advantages, including our people and our culture. As we work to develop people, this is always a very important part on each and every conversation that we have for our teams. We have several ways in which people can access ABI as a platform. This starts with internship programs across the globe. We have what a lot of people know, the global management trainee, where we have from 150- 200 people coming into the company each and every year. 1% of our population is made of what we call partners.
These people are the people that they reach partnership level, and then their compensation changes, their participation on these events changes. But moreover, their responsibility for the future of the company also changes. Then, of course, we have our senior leadership team, 120 people, 130 people globally. The representation of this team here with the senior management team that you are having the opportunity to meet some of them here this year. It is everybody's responsibility inside the company to make sure that we are improving the quality of these people each and every day. People often ask me, and someone asked me this question yesterday, how I manage my time throughout the year. I always say that 20%-25% of my time is dedicated to what I call governance.
We have a board, we have a senior management team, so we need to make sure that the companies work in the right cadence. I spend another 25%-30% of my time in what we call long-term planning. From the planning for the 10 years, the sessions on innovation, how we translate these plans for each and every BU in which we operate. There is one third of my time, give or take, which is visiting areas, seeing the markets, being close to retailers, consumers. 20% of my time is people. People matters. 10 days ago, two weeks ago, my entire senior leadership team spent a week remotely, we were in Mexico this year, reviewing the talent bench of the company.
We were reviewing people b y people for three, four days to make sure that our people have the right skills, that the right resources are in the critical missions, that people are developing their careers at the pace of their own talent, and where we have gaps, that we don't have the right people, that we are going to search, recruit, bring people along to reinforce the bench of the company. This is a machine that works for many, many years, a machine that people like me, that's over 30 years in the company. I, of course, lived through that, benefited from the opportunities that the company gave to me, and we continue to run this machine in a very oiled way, all across the globe.
It is crazy to think that there were more than 2,000 meetings like the one I did with my team across the company globally, because every country, every region, runs the same process, and this all builds up to the way in which we manage the company pipeline across the globe. People who work with us are not only the people that we have inside the company. I think that a massive change that happened on the last five years is how we are bringing even more people to help and to support our initiatives. We are very proud about the partners that we have working with the company. Those partners are committed. Some of them come and talk to you here as we are running our programs, and we care a lot about these partnerships.
We want people that want to work with us, not because we have great brands, big budgets, a big company, but people that are connected to what the dream and ambitions that we have are. I participate personally in each and every negotiation of that. Of course, I am not often talking about the numbers. What I am doing is cultural check. Marcel and I, one thing that I call chemistry session. We want to get a big name to work with one of our brands. They make the contact. They talk about the budget. I talk about the culture. I talk about what the brands are, what we want to achieve. I want to feel that people are committed to what we want to do, that they are going to be able to work together, that we will have a true partnership that will last.
In this process, sometimes you have great outcomes because I have no doubts that I am talking to someone that will well represent the company, and sometimes you have people that they do not have a real interest on the brand, on the category, on what we are trying to do. In this case, many times we decide not to partner with. This is not to be understated. The quality and the commitment of the partnerships that we have across the globe is second to none. Those are great people with great assets, with great reach, that can make a company like ours bigger, more relevant, more present in consumers' lives each and every day. We are very proud of the partnerships we have. Principle number five, build brands that consumers love. Of course, you all remember this is a principle that was not here before.
It is a principle that was incorporated on this change. I will share this video with you because I never get tired of watching this video that says a little bit of what we mean by love and why we measure this number of lovers all the time.
Love is contagious. If that is true, it explains what fuels everyone here. It is why those who enjoy our beers also catch that passion, that love that brings us together. Where there is love, there are beautiful stories.
You know how they say in life there's always somebody who's out there for you? I found mine already. Mary is technically the love of my life, but so is Michelob ULTRA. She knows me so well. Last week she threw me a party for my 35th. Three words: Michelob ULTRA themed. I love ULTRA, but after that party, I got to say, I love Mary that much more. The competition's fierce, but she's clearly still the one.
In my family, we are very much into traditions. I inherited one from my dad. Every new can that Quilmes releases is collected at home. Now it's my turn to continue that legacy. This last one is from the world champions. This one's in your honor, dad.
Meaningful people and a shared commitment. AB InBev writes stories that blend with people's lives. With each declaration of love we receive, our commitment grows stronger. Together, we're on this journey, striving to turn this shared love into a future with more cheers.
Those are the beer lovers. We start tracking this. We are tracking each and every quarter, each and every year, how many people across the globe declare that they love one of our brands. This is a very important KPI on our flywheel because everything starts there, with people who are beer lovers and connect with our brands. In a very interesting way, many times people ask me how I want people to remember the time in which I was at ABI as an architect, as an engineer, as a financial engineer. I always tell people that I'm a very simple person and I love beer. I want people to remember that I'm a beer lover, and there is no better manifestation of this love than what we do and the care that we have with our brands.
How much we invest, how much we care about the details with which we build these brands. The experiences that people have when they are at a bar, at a stadium, at home, and they are enjoying with their family, friends, these moments that they worked very hard to have. Nobody needs to ask me this anymore. I am a beer guy. If you want to remember me at any time, thank you for that. I am a beer lover, and I love our brands. I have been dedicating 30+ years to make sure that these brands show up in the right way, in the right place, in the right moment, for consumers to have the pleasure of enjoying a cold one and celebrate their great moments. These people, they are the real deal for us. Building these brands is a mix of many things.
Sometimes it is pure talent, sometimes it is a little bit of lucky, sometimes it is talent, lucky, and investments. When you get a brand right, it is fantastic because everything works better for the company. Those brands, they grow, our customers like us more, our consumers interact more with our products. This is a story that I love, is Stella Pure Gold in Brazil, a line extension of Stella Artois that taps into these trends of low carbs, low calories, gluten-free, what we call balanced choices. I could tell you here for hours everything that we learned as the team there decided to build this brand and the way that we build this brand. I think that listening from a customer that sent us an audio, in Brazil, people do a lot of audios on WhatsApp, talking about this brand, will say way more than what I could say.
I will try to play the audio here to you. The audio is translated from Portuguese to English, so the translation can be a little bit lost. I saw that we have some investors, analysts that speak Portuguese, are Brazilian, so pay attention on them and you see that it is way funnier than what you can get in English, which is already good enough, okay? Let us go.
[Non-English content]
Ok, this is a point of sales sending a message to a sales supervisor talking about brand, that he's feeling the momentum. This is what we call consumer love. Brand that represents a lot to people, with platforms that are very premium, with a product that's very modern, that fits for what people want now. They want to socialize, they want to enjoy, they want to feel good about not indulging too much, because tomorrow they need to go and continue to do their activities that now have many more things on the day than they used to have in the past, because that is the gym, that is the work, that is meeting people, that is watching the series, and that is socializing.
As we continue to improve our portfolio, evolve with innovation, we are finding more and more cases like this, of making our product more relevant today for the consumers of tomorrow. So grow with our customers and communities. There is no example to me that speaks louder than this. Nick was telling here yesterday, the very own insight in which this was built is this idea that the small retailers across the globe are underserved. The small retailers across the globe are underserved. We are one of the few companies globally that serve them with a very high service level. They're very important to our business. In a world where people says that proximity is very important, that 24/7 availability is very important, that knowing your customer is very important, the small retailer is right there in the neighborhood, in the corner of the street.
But very few companies were bringing them the best prices, the best product portfolio, the best credit, the best marketing activities, the best service. With this, we were able not only to make our business better and more present in these retailers' lives, but to bring along other partners that start to treat them as very important customers. As they thrive, our business improves. As they thrive, their communities improve. As this grows, more partners have great results and invest more with us to improve the lives of these retailers. Over the 30 years that I'm in the company, for many years, each and every year when we do our plans on the SWOT, we will say small retailers declining volume, big retailers growing relevance.
In the last five or six years, the small retailers grow at the same pace or faster than the small retailers because their business is stronger. Needless to say, that's very important for us, the capillarity of our distribution, the availability of beer. People don't want to travel 2 km, 3 km to buy beer. They want to go across the street or even order on Zé Delivery or TaDa to receive beer in 15, 20 minutes. Cold, preferably. This network serves us for all, for being there when people want to walk and buy, or to be the base in which Zé Delivery and TaDa grows. This is a great example of thinking about our customers and developing solutions to make them stronger and therefore our business will also grow. So simple and scalable solutions.
I love this example, and this resonates a lot with our teams. Instead of many people thinking about small marketing activities, having the opportunity to assemble and put to work these mega platforms unleashes the real benefits of our scale. As I always say, very hard for one brand on a given country to be the sponsor of the Olympics, to be able to have Olympics and FIFA. But because of our scale, because of our 50 mega brands, because of our playbook to activate that, we can build a calendar that our teams across the globe can activate. We can measure the ROI of these initiatives in a centralized way with great benchmarks across all countries. We can buy materials cheaper because we buy at scale.
We can partner with people to activate these platforms and multiply that effect across many brands into our system. Because of that, these mega platforms are even more important today for us than they were yesterday, and they are growing in relevance in the way that we concentrate our marketing investments and the way that we build our brands in combination with relevant cultural moments for our consumers. We pride ourselves of managing our costs very tightly. While in the past, a lot of people only saw this as people cutting costs to improve margins, Fernando will share some examples of what we are doing and how serious we are about managing our budgets. But the way I speak to my team is keeping things tightly so you can own your own decisions. You can have the privilege of reinvesting money when opportunities arise.
Let me give you here one example of that. You all ask this question, how sustainable it is, the levels of CapEx that we have today. How were we able to reduce CapEx from $5.5 billion- $3.6 billion while our revenues are growing, our volumes are growing, our portfolio continues to develop? I keep saying that here is a great example of this ownership in practice. Not the ownership of the budget, so the bigger my budget, more of an owner I am, but the productivity and the returns of this money. The questions an owner asks before investing each and every dollar. The best practices and the long-term planning that we can do, so we build the right breweries for 10 years, not for next year only.
If I know that I will need three breweries in the next 10 years, I can then negotiate harder with the suppliers because I'll buy everything, the three at the same time, not one by one. The way that I coordinate my supply chain with a long-term perspective, so I don't need to build the same thing two or three times. All of that allowed us to find $2 billion. My speech to my team, that's the easiest one because it's the money that we already earned. It's already in our pocket. It's just hold this money. If you need to earn this money again, selling more beer, raising prices, getting more consumers, this is way tougher. But by doing that, we were able to go and get the Olympics. We're able to go and invest in Champions League.
We're able to get this money, the same money, to work harder for us because now it's working in the benefit of our brands. In making the lives of our consumers one in which they can enjoy more things. The ability to save in one hand and invest in the other hand is one that makes you feel good about the efforts you make each and every day. Thinking long- term, principle number nine. This is another example that I love, and I often give this example. Why it's so important to do a plan like our plan, the 10-year plan? Because you can see the trends for consumers, you can project implications of these trends, you can foresee the creation of markets that yesterday were not part of your business.
You look at that when we start talking first time, 2017, about this idea of Beyond Beer. This is something that we created. People can call RTDs, mixed beverage, whatever. We called Beyond Beer. We saw a trend with consumers. Consumers that were not bitter, consumers that were more sweeter consumers. That they were interacting with several products, trying to find a brand for them to call their brand. A product to be their product of choice. Not once, not twice, people said that this was not a strategy, that this was dilutive, that these products would not work. Nevertheless, we built a business of $2 billion and growing in less than 10 years. Today, we have a global portfolio of Beyond Beer brands that have been deployed and scaled across different countries. Every time we do, the feedback is the same.
More consumers, more occasions, incremental volumes. But you never do that if your horizon was just next quarter or next year. You had to think long- term and where this portfolio can take you through. As Brendan was sharing yesterday, fastest growing spirits brand in the U.S., bear the case that we have only three brands. Just Cutwater, NÜTRL, and BeatBox. Top 10 spirits brand in the U.S., selling three brands only, investing in three brands only, using the capabilities that we have, as you saw yesterday, from the same brewery, from the same wholesaler, in mostly same retailers 37% growth on a year- to- date. The last principle as we close here, never take shortcuts. This is very important for us, because there is always an easier way to go. There's always the temptation of doing something that solves for tomorrow.
Very few people have the courage to say no, to stick to the long-t erm with their own ideas, to do something that is harder and takes longer, but will get you to a better place than you were if you would take the shorter and the easy decisions. In this case, the example that I want to give you here, I think we are in the U.S., is worth sharing that. Go back to 2017 and think about how many times one had to explain what rebalance the portfolio was, and why we should build the brands of tomorrow instead of trying to close the gaps in decline of the brands of yesterday. Why invest in RTDs when a lot of people think that this was not a strategy? Why to dedicate time to a value brand like Busch when Bud Light was not doing well?
When you look at this business today and the business that we had five years ago or 10 years ago, as Brendan said yesterday, it is a very different business. This portfolio today, simpler, growing, more relevant to consumers, opening up spaces and occasions that we have never had before. Yes, unfortunately, we are never able to solve in one quarter the U.S. problem. We had to commit for 10 years of consistency, of hard work, and of believing in what we were doing, because the temptations, the incentives to take shortcuts, even the excuses, they were always there. Again, people, most will never remember that it took us 10 years before we were able to get half of our portfolio as we have today in growing areas of the industry.
With this growth, market shares comes, the engagement of the team comes, the engagement of the wholesalers and retailers comes, and then you can go back to be the company that Anheuser-Busch has always been in the U.S. Okay, so, it was a quick conversation. I know that you might have questions later. We thought that would be important to spend some time talking about our culture because as I say, you have been working extremely hard to build competitive advantage and best-in-class capabilities. But underneath, behind all these capabilities, there is this culture, a culture of learning, listening, work hard, and deliver superior results. This is a durable culture. It needs to be nurtured, and that is why I spend so much time traveling the world and talking to our teams about that.
It is one work that is worth, because this makes the company durable together with its culture and together with the talent that we have in the company that keeps on growing and developing with us. Okay, thank you. I will hand over back now to the team. I think that we have Simon, if I am not mistaken, coming and explaining the market visit. Simon. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Simon Wuestenberg.
All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Simon Wuestenberg. I joined AB InBev 20 years ago, and for the last five years, I have had the tremendous pleasure of leading sales for the United States business. With my team, I also have the pleasure of taking you all on a market visit today. Before we do that, I thought it would be a good idea to give you all an update of our route to market in the United States, how we approach sales, and some of the capabilities that we have built to help us win. It's clear, I think you've seen that yesterday, that the United States has unique aspects to it. As Brendan shared, our volume goes through wholesalers that are independently owned businesses, meaning that they make their own decisions.
We have alcohol beverage laws that prohibit us from making payments to our retailers or incentivizing them for behavior. That's true whether they're large chains like a Walmart or a 7-Eleven, or whether that's your local convenience store or the corner bar. All this brings complexity into what we know is a highly competitive market. However, we have built a sales strategy, a sales structure, and capabilities that allow us to win within this reality, and I think that the results show that this is working. We're now consistently growing market share, not just within beer, but in total alcohol beverage, and we are leading growth in the industry. Before we head out on our market visit, I wanted to touch on three main points. Let me start with our wholesalers.
Our wholesalers are the very important second tier in a three-tier system. We work with just under 400 independently owned wholesalers for whom our brands typically represent the large majority of their business. These are local businesses with exclusive territories, and they have the warehouses, the trucks, the sales teams. Our relationship with them is not transactional. This is a long-term partnership that is focused on mutual growth. Together, our wholesalers deploy around 10,000 sales reps, and they call on about half a million accounts. On average, we call on each of these accounts just more than one time every week. We then partner with our wholesalers to apply this sales outreach in the most optimal way to grow our joint business. Our wholesalers have exceptionally strong relationships in the markets that they serve, and we then equip them with the tools to out-execute their competitors locally.
That ranges from toolkits to activate our mega platforms, to an advanced and a fully integrated sales tech ecosystem. We developed that technology working closely together with Nick Caton and the global BEES team, and it allows us to blend proven global solutions with a deep understanding of the unique three-tier system. The power of that digitization really comes to life in the 350,000 independent accounts that we call on. These are accounts where decisions get made store by store, bar by bar. These decisions are made by the owner or by the manager. In the last few years, we've transformed how we prioritize our efforts in these accounts. What are the most important accounts to focus on?
When we're in these accounts, what is the next most important thing that will impact our performance, and how can we help the sales rep get things done more efficiently? Our technology today is fully adopted by our wholesaler system, and it helps answer those very questions. I'll give you an example. Today, just about all the execution priorities that those 10,000 sales reps focus on are defined through an advanced AI model. This model digests the tens of thousands of data points that we have for each account, industry, sales, census, survey data. It basically reasons like someone who knows a market really, really well and can do that at scale with incredible granularity. It then recommends the highest impact actions in each of these accounts, and these objectives consistently outperform human target setting. That matters out in the market.
Yesterday, Kyle showed you the gap between high and low share markets for Michelob ULTRA and Busch Light. This market share gap is equally reflected in execution as well, and our technology now helps us close those gaps by deliberately prioritizing the highest opportunity accounts. These capabilities are also helping us rapidly expand Cutwater space and distribution. We all know Cutwater is a brand where we are still in the early stages. Also here, our tools help our wholesalers focus on the biggest opportunities for expansion in their respective territories. These are just two examples of how our tech capabilities now allow us to identify and localize opportunities to accelerate our performance across the whole portfolio. We also deploy BEES, and even if adoption is still building, what we've seen is very strong growth over the last years.
BEES connects flawlessly with the other tech tools that I just mentioned. It also helps our wholesalers get things done in their market, resulting in superior performance. It speaks for itself that this partnership and these capabilities are easily flexed to win within beer and malt-based beverages, but they now do more than that. They help us lead growth with our spirits, wine, and now energy drinks. Our wholesaler partnership has proven to be ideally suited to not just compete, but to win. We are very connected to our wholesalers, and together we get it done. Over the last few years, we have significantly improved our sales outreach, and that has translated into a step change in the execution of our brands. We enjoy working together as well. Brendan mentioned it.
Our wholesalers have given us the highest marks ever in our latest Voice of the Wholesaler survey. We feel good about how we're working together, and I can tell you, we enjoy winning together. The second point I'd like to touch on is chain retailers or key accounts. Think of national chains like a Walmart or local chains like you'll see in our market visit today, like Schnucks. Chains are becoming an increasingly important part of the market as more volume shifts into larger and more consolidated retail groups. Winning here matters for a few reasons. They consistently outperform the rest of the market, they premiumize faster, and importantly, they set the standards for the full market. Decisions here are made centrally, meaning that if we get a sale, it comes to life across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of stores. These customers are sophisticated.
They have high expectations from us as we engage with them. What makes the U.S. special is that the chain universe is still highly fragmented. That means that we call on hundreds of chain buying teams. So winning with key accounts in the United States is not just about hyper-care on a handful of accounts. That is why we have built an expert key account and category team that is designed to operate at scale, and it has been pretty successful in doing that. That matters because we play a very special role for our customers. Beer and Beyond Beer are the second largest category in food and beverage. Obviously, we lead that category, not just in size, but with a rebalanced portfolio anchored in today's growth segments, positioning us as the key supplier to maximize for growth.
We help double down on that growth with the robust customer capabilities that we've built across category management, revenue management, and trade marketing. These capabilities all have one thing in common, and it is that they are insight-led, deep insight in the consumer, in the shopper, and how they engage with our category. Again, whereas these capabilities were very beer-forward at first, we now bring the same level of expertise across total alcohol beverage. The biggest transformation for us probably has been around category management, where since 2018, we have overhauled how we help our retailers find category growth. Last night, you obviously visited the pinnacle of that effort at the Vault. The real hero of our category work is not a building.
It is our ability today to bring objective, strategic views on the beer and Beyond Beer categories to all of our chain customers, together with clear, tailor-made recommendations on how to win within this critical category, across the shelf, across the store floor, across their digital channels. This is working. You heard it yesterday. As we strengthened our capabilities, we went from being the category captain for 50% of the industry stores and dollars to now over 70%. More important than that 70% number, where we are the captain, the industry consistently, quarter after quarter, outperforms compared to where we are not. I think that's a great example of how our transformed customer capabilities help drive results at scale. The third thing I would like to touch on today is how we are able to now activate our mega brands and platforms locally and at scale.
A great recent example is the FIFA World Cup and how it helped us accelerate Michelob ULTRA by combining a robust media plan with a massive activation on the ground. Of course, we activated the 11 host cities from stadiums to key neighborhoods with fan fests and watch parties across hotels and stores and bars. Of course, we worked with our chain customers to roll out customized FIFA World Cup plans, fully integrated from their store floors to their digital channels, getting us a record share of ads, a 20% increase in display activity, and dedicated brand pages on their loyalty apps and websites. But where the new power of our system now really shines is in the on-premise. Michelob ULTRA was already by far the number one brand in the on-premise. But with the FIFA World Cup, we increased our distribution by 13%.
And we didn't stop there. Together with our wholesalers, we executed almost 40,000 Michelob ULTRA soccer activations, where we had teams engage one-on-one with more than 2 million consumers, giving them the opportunity to win tickets to games, to win Michelob ULTRA swag, and where we put beers in hands. So in this example, for us, the FIFA World Cup was not just about the stadiums or even the host cities. With our wholesalers and our retailer partners, we were able to bring this mega platform to consumers across all 50 states and meet them where they are, whether that was in a downtown Boston, as Scottish fans threw a big party, in a Hispanic grocery store in California, a watch party in Des Moines, Iowa, or folks watching a game in a cowboy bar in Wyoming.
We showed up, resulting in Michelob ULTRA accelerating, not just in its strongholds, but posting strong growth nationwide. So far, we've been using this muscle on ULTRA, on Stella, on Bud Light, and in 2027, we're going to be bringing this to all of our mega brands because this is what our system can now do, taking the biggest platforms and making them local, relevant, and scalable. You can see that right now, by the way, with our football season that just got off to a hot start, America's number one passion point, where we'll be doing almost 30,000 activations. If you step back, the U.S. sales story is about how we connect the dots across the three-tier system so that the right things happen in stores and bars.
Over the last eight years, we have rebuilt a sales strategy, the structure, and the capabilities that allow us to put numbers on the board, in beer, in spirits, and now also in energy. We do that by partnering closely with our wholesalers, by ensuring that they have the tools to win in their markets, and by championing the category that we lead with our retailers. We are now bringing our mega platforms to life as we build our mega brands at an unprecedented scale, store by store, bar by bar, meeting our consumers where they are. I am incredibly excited to show you what that looks like in the market today in our hometown. So here is the plan. If we can keep the pace, together, we're going to be visiting two grocery stores, a convenience store, and a bar.
That'll give you the opportunity to touch and feel every channel. As you probably noticed traveling in, there are not a lot of stores here in the downtown area, so the ride to the first store will take around 20, 25 minutes. During that time, you'll see a short video from me with more context on the St. Louis market and what to watch for as you're out in the trade. From here, we'll break into eight groups, each led by a member of my team. Very practically, you all have the number of your group on your badge. The ask is that we all get up, we go downstairs to the ground floor. There are eight buses waiting. In front of each bus, someone's holding up the number of that bus, and you just go into the bus that's on your badge. Have fun