Ryan Takes Over Reins of Anheuser-Busch Distributorship

Angela Ryan keeps Anheuser-Busch products flowing from the Oklahoma line to Norfork Lake. The general manager of McBride Distributing Co. of Fayetteville since 1996, she runs a 50-year-old family business with annual sales of $15 million.

Ryan says women like Maxine Miller, who has owned Maxine’s Tap Room in Fayetteville for the last 50 years, paved the way for women in the local bar and beer industry. Ryan is helping lead the next generation.

“[Ryan’s] tough,” says Bob McBride, company president and Ryan’s father. “Ultimately Anheuser-Busch is the one who has to approve her taking over the business after I retire, but she’s worked her way into a position where she’ll qualify.”

Ryan decided while attending Fayetteville High School that someday she wanted to work for the company her grandparents, Charles “Mac” and Ruth McBride, started in 1949. She began working part time for McBride in 1982 as a company representative to the University of Arkansas.

After graduating from the UA in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in communications, Ryan assumed a full-time position with McBride. She later became sales manager before taking over the company’s day-to-day operations three years ago.

Ryan now oversees McBride’s 37 employees and its annual sales of more than 1.5 million cases of Anheuser-Busch products. McBride operates nine full-time delivery routes in Fayetteville and the rest of its territory, which stretches as far north as Eureka Springs and as far east as Mountain Home.

Ryan, a member of the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Arkansas’ board of directors from 1992-1998, says being a woman has made her career challenging.

“Thankfully, though, there are more women in the industry now than there were in 1986,” Ryan says. “I think women bring a different perspective to business, and sometimes we can be more in tune to what the needs of different customers are.”

Ryan, who serves as vice president of the Washington Regional Medical Foundation Board of Directors, has helped McBride undergo two major changes. The first was the integration of single-brand routes into more efficient multi-brand ones, which allowed one truck to deliver all of the Anheuser-Busch products a business needed instead of multiple trucks making multiple stops.

She was also crucial in the May implementation of presales routes, where salesmen inventory a business’ stock and send in a computerized order the day before a delivery truck arrives.