2010 Top 100: Beverage

Despite macroeconomic challenges across much of the world, PepsiCo demonstrated its agility in 2009 by balancing innovation and value to maintain consumer momentum while driving margin expansion. Now, Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi (pictured) is shifting the company from a traditional food and drinks provider to a supplier of products with health and wellness benefits. Specifically, the company plans to increase good-for-you revenues to $30 billion in the next decade, up from $10 billion today. "We are refreshing and growing our company to adapt to a changing environment and to evolving consumer needs," said Nooyi. "We are stepping up our science-based innovation to serve increasingly health-conscious consumers and develop products tailored to key cohort groups, like women and boomers."

 

 

Despite its No. 1 position in the brewing industry, Anheuser-Busch InBev has been on a selling spree to focus on its core brewing business and payoff debt incurred from its Anheuser-Busch buyout in 2008. For example, Busch Entertainment Corporation (now SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment) was sold to Blackstone Capital Partners for $2.7 billion. The company also sold several brewing operations: Labatt USA went to KPS Capital Partners LP; Chinese brewer Tsingtao was partly purchased by Asahi Breweries; and its Oriental Brewery sold to an investment firm for $1.8 billion, to name a few.

 

 

Through a series of acquisitions, Foster's Group has operations on five continents and sells products in more than 100 countries. But growth also caused it to have a mix of ERP systems and methods for defining and processing business data. Foster's tapped applications from Informatica to help attain a single, accurate view of global operations. "The target state for our enterprise architecture program is to have a single source of truth for critical business data worldwide," said Michael Davis, senior enterprise architect, Foster's Group. "The Informatica solution will eventually touch almost every aspect of the business through the improved quality of information, streamlined processes and visibility into global operations it helps to power."