Anheuser-Busch Doubles Down on Its ‘Total Beverage’ Bet on Southern Glazer’s as Reyes Carves up Rival RNDC
It wasn’t always the case that beer’s middle tier featured the best mergers-and-acquisitions action in the beverage-alcohol industry. Far from it. The world of wholesalers, cloistered by culture and statute, was for much of the 20th century a fairly stodgy one. While suppliers and retailers bludgeoned each other with big-dollar advertising campaigns, cutthroat price wars, and consolidation galore, the humble beer distributor was mostly content to stay above the fray and keep the cash flowing. Things didn’t change all at once, but they did change. Macrobrewers and mega-grocers eventually ran out of competition to buy, or into antitrust regulations that prevented them from buying. The provincial moguls of the middle tier started waking up to the synergistic glories of M&A, and the movers and shakers on Wall Street realized just how much money there was to be made on distributor-on-distributor deals. Contracts began to fly.
Like the distribution landscape itself, the M&A happening in today’s middle tier looks a hell of a lot different than it did in the ’90s, when independent brokers first started marrying mom-and-pop houses aligned with either Miller Brewing Co. or Coors Brewing Co. to form the basis of what trade insiders now know as the “blue-silver network.” For one thing, the private equity business, having caught a whiff of the rivers of cash that flow through wholesalers’ refrigerated warehouses, have gotten involved. For another, after a decade and a half of consolidation, there are some truly enormous heavyweights atop the sector.
Reyes Beverage Group (RBG), the country’s largest beer distributor and a subsidiary of its sixth-largest privately held company, fits this bill. In what has to be one of its biggest single acqui-spansions (?) since the eponymous brothers bought a Schlitz distributorship in upstate South Carolina in the ’70s, the Modelo mover officially confirmed last week that it would devour Republic National Distributing Co.’s (RNDC) operations in 11 markets to further its “total beverage” ambitions. Perhaps not to be outdone, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits (SGWS), the country’s largest wine and spirits distributor and its ninth-largest privately held company, has gone on a spring shopping spree of its own.
Last week, Beer Marketer’s Insights (BMI) broke the news that SGWS had acquired Clare Rose, a longtime independent Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) house in New York. “It distributes AB and other products in Nassau and Suffolk counties (Long Island) as well as on Staten Island,” wrote the trade outlet, putting the third-generation family-owned red house’s volume over 4 million cases annually. (Some 1 million of that is Heineken; BMI reported that Clare Rose has already arranged to sell that volume to Big Apple behemoth Manhattan Beer & Beverage Distributors. Best of luck to them!) Just a couple days later, SGWS struck again, with BMI again breaking the news of a totally different deal involving the mega-booze wholesaler and ABI business. “Eagle Rock, owned by the Economos family, is 13-mil-case nearly statewide AB distrib that also sells Sazerac portfolio and many other brands,” wrote the outlet, which favors unbylined dispatches and a quirky house style. Per the BMI dispatch last Friday, SGWS had secured an agreement for the whole shebang, setting it on a course to be “very big in AB system and in beer distribution generally.”
No kidding.
Recall, these are not the first inroads SGWS has made into ABI’s vaunted red network. As RBG has bought its way into wine and spirits distribution by scooping up No. 2 RNDC’s scrambling suppliers in California last summer, and acquiring almost a dozen of its territories outright this month, the No. 1 wine and spirits distributor has converged on the beverage-alcohol singularity from almost the opposite angle. It was just last May that ABI raised some industry eyebrows by shifting its Golden State business for Cutwater canned cocktails and NÜTRL vodka-seltzers (from RNDC and independent red houses, respectively) to SGWS. In August 2025, the macrobrewer — which has, through its own acquisitions, become a wine- and spirits-based ready-to-drink leader in its own right — triggered a seismic shift in the middle tier when it announced plans to sell SGWS its wholly owned distributorship (WOD) in New York.
“Talk about making a big splash in a major market,” a veteran middle-tier source told Hop Take at the time. “That [ABI] was willing to divest a significant asset to them really [suggests] that it must have a strong belief that Southern is going to be a partner for the future.”
That future came into sharper focus last week. “When Clare Rose and Eagle Rock close later this spring, SGWS will have bought roughly 22 million cases from three A-B distributors in under a year, giving it close to 35 million cases in beer total,” wrote Beer Business Daily (BBD) in an unusual (and also unbylined) Sunday dispatch. “And that’s on top of its position as the country’s biggest wine and spirits house, operating in 47 U.S. markets.” The publication, sort of the yang to BMI’s yin, added that it wasn’t kidding when it “said last week that ‘we bet Southern could be announcing more deals pretty quickly.’”
Given the state of things, I wouldn’t take the other side of that bet. For years, and especially since ABI bought Cutwater and BABE Wine in 2019, the company has been methodically pushing into wine- and spirits-based RTDs with purpose. In 2022, ABI brass, satisfied with NÜTRL’s performance in the Canadian market and select U.S. ones, hard-launched it with the American drinking public to compete with Gallo’s segment-leading High Noon Sun Sips. Late last year, it announced plans to acquire, for $490 million, a controlling interest in BeatBox, the 11.1 percent carbonation-free riot punch that wins placements in part thanks to the fact that it is technically wine.
The latter acquisition is too fresh to evaluate ABI’s performance; it only closed on BeatBox in late February. And not all the other moves have panned out. BABE was simply a flop. ABI discontinued it in 2023, having never really figured out why it bought The Fat Jewish’s canned wine brand in the first place. Cutwater’s full-bottle spirits business, to the extent that anybody cares about it, has struggled. But its canned cocktails are a runaway success: They trail only High Noon in the lucrative spirits-based RTD segment, and by a shrinking margin at that. After an awkward transitionary period when the red network was trying and failing to figure out why it was pushing both malt-based Bud Light Seltzer and vodka-based NÜTRL, things are looking up for that brand, too. NIQ off-premise scans through mid-March analyzed by Bump Williams Consulting and published in BBD make it the seventh-largest brand in dollar sales, up 17 percent over the past year.
In September of last year, just a month or so after the SGWS bombshell in New York, ABI issued a press release naming itself the fastest-growing spirits supplier in the country, and No. 10 overall, on the basis of off-premise scan data from market-research firm Circana. Not bad for a beer company that spent much of the previous decade willy-nilly dumping cash — in amounts reportedly reaching the high nine figures, no less — into nearly 20 craft brands, with very mixed results.
Can SGWS deliver results for ABI? The latter seems to think so. ABI, more so than any other supplier, treats its distributors like vassal states, covetously guarding its franchise with infamously strict contracts that it enforces through a mix of power soft (e.g., rigorous site visits) and hard (threats of termination for cause, which would override statutory franchise protections). While there have been a few high-profile cases of Bud distributorship owners successfully defying termination by the mothership — most notably the family of the late Roger Maris, which won an acrimonious lawsuit over termination in 2005 that cost pre-InBev A-B some $120 million — others are loathe to go through that ringer. Indeed, Eagle Rock’s owners, having just acquired the franchise half a decade ago from ABI (which used to operate it as a WOD) were one of the wholesalers that had been “crewed” last summer.
“Is it worth fighting?” my industry insider told me last year, framing up the considerations an independent red-network wholesaler might make if ABI made clear it wanted to hand the franchise to someone else. “Do I want to spend all the money in legal fees? Or do I just say, ‘OK, as long as I can get a reasonable value on the way out, maybe I take that?’”
The value, of course, comes from a buyer over which ABI has right of refusal. The company may not have unilateral say-so over when a distributor leaves its middle-tier cadre, but nobody gets in without a blessing from Bud brass. SGWS has clearly received that blessing.
Just like it’s wait-and-see on BeatBox under the ABI umbrella, though, it’s wait-and-see on the “total beverage” alliance the firm is forging with SGWS. And, for that matter, RBG’s push into wine and spirits via RNDC’s crumbling empire. Striking these deals is one thing; executing on them is quite another. Can SGWS reliably service the velocity ABI’s single-serve stuff requires in major markets like southern New York and the entire damn state of Colorado? Can RBG really win in the full-bottle wine business — and does it even want to be there? And while we’re asking open questions, what happens if the next presidential administration eschews Trump 2.0’s pay-to-play approach to corporate consolidation in favor of a more aggressive version of Biden’s antitrust approach, which had been sniffing at this very sector?
A relative backwater for decades, the middle tier is now changing faster than ever. I don’t know what will happen, but I know it won’t be boring.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Americans love “Shark Tank,” the long-running ABC show on which rank-and-file entrepreneurs pitch performatively personable billionaires on their goofy little gimmicks, life-changing inventions, and BeatBox. Though it’s not immune from the rapid onset decay of network television, it’s still a big deal (pun: intended) for press-hungry strivers thanks to its vaguely business-oriented brand and the sheer reach of linear television. So you can see why telegenic Instagram power user and Uncle Nearest co-founder Fawn Weaver would want to appear as a “guest shark.” But with her company struggling through the throes of an acrimonious federal receivership, its coffers cleared of cash, and her own financial discipline and executive decision-making under increasingly severe scrutiny in federal courtrooms, it made for pretty weird TV last week when she agreed to “invest” $125,000 for 20 percent of the brand Beer Girl. One assumes the episode was recorded long before #ThePeoplesCEO tried to enter her Tennessee liquor firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which happened on the same day as the episode aired. One also assumes that the court-appointed receiver will be uploading the footage in a future filing.
📈 Ups…
Molson Coors acquired Monaco maker Atomic Brands for an undisclosed sum… The founder of Bai is launching a new hard soda called Crooked Pop… Reyes Beverage Group and Republic National Distributing Co. made their 11-market deal official… Workers at another SGWS house in Florida voted to join the Teamsters…
📉 …and downs
Lawmakers in Virginia have sent a bill legalizing recreational marijuana to the governor’s desk… More middle-tier consolidation afoot as KEG 1 takes a “controlling equity” stake in New England’s Pine State Trading Co. … Carbliss, the fast-growing vodka-based RTD brand brave enough to ask “what if you could drink Canva?” announced plans for a malt-based tallboy… Michelob Ultra’s flag-themed World Cup pack just dropped, and it makes the faded-glory Budweiser AmeriCan look downright stately by comparison…
The article Anheuser-Busch Doubles Down on Its ‘Total Beverage’ Bet on Southern Glazer’s as Reyes Carves up Rival RNDC appeared first on VinePair.