£0 → £1.3B
Reckitt's buybacks, ramped in two years.
2021–2025 · The ranking
Shareholders first, marketing second, factories last.
Prices went up to cover real costs — then stayed up after costs stopped rising. The gap between what things cost and what shoppers paid is the windfall. Here's where the extra dollar went, ranked:
1
Shareholders
Dividends almost never cut; buybacks the growth line. The constant and the ramp.
2
Marketing
Up wherever it's reported — e.l.f. 9×'d its ad budget; Reckitt took brand spending to 14.6% of revenue.
3
Factories
Most spent more in actual dollars — but payouts grew faster almost everywhere. The marginal dollar went to owners.
4
Research
Mostly up slightly, from tiny bases. Altria's R&D was half a percent of what its owners received.
The windfall funded payouts and selling existing brands harder — not new capacity or new products. The rest of this page walks the ranking, top to bottom.
2021–2025 · Rank #1
Shareholders first.
Dividends were the constant — almost nobody cut, many raised. AB InBev's 2025 dividend jumped to $4.5B; Mexico's Grupo Herdez doubled its. Buybacks were the growth line: ramping, restarting, pausing with the cycle.
$2.6B
AB InBev restarting buybacks in 2025.
$0
Altria's 2025 buybacks — paused. Kellanova's went to zero.
45.8× paid out vs invested
Altria 2021–2025: paid shareholders $42.5B in dividends and buybacks while investing $928M in the business. The extreme endpoint of rank #1.
The dividend remains the primary return vehicle.
Sal Mancuso, CEO, Altria — Q2 2026 earnings call
The 12 biggest harvesters were all tobacco, monopoly-type businesses or emerging-market players — none were normal branded companies in developed markets.
2021–2025 · Rank #2
Marketing second.
Where companies report what they spend on advertising and marketing, the direction from 2021 to 2025 is up — often way up. The late-period move was rebuilding the brand budgets the inflation years squeezed. Extra profit became a marketing budget.
e.l.f. Beautyadvertising $30M → $282M
Oddity Techmarketing $64M → $246M
Freshpetmarketing $54M → $158M
Turning Pointmarketing $12M → $30M
BellRingmarketing +92%
Interparfumsmarketing $171M → $295M
BARKmarketing +40%
Reckittbrand spending £1.67B → £2.07B
Change in reported advertising and marketing spend, 2021→2025. Companies define it differently, so each bar is labeled with its own reported numbers.
12.6% → 14.6% of revenue
Reckitt 2021–2025: brand spending £1.67B → £2.07B — measured reinvestment, in the company's own ratio.
We're taking a significant portion of those savings and reinvesting that back behind marketing.
Finance chief, Reckitt — CAGNY conference, 2026
Kenvue: ads went from 8.7% to 12.1% of sales. Nestlé's finance chief called 6.9% "clearly a low level" and planned to raise it by more than a full point. The pattern isn't universal — but where the numbers exist, the arrow points one way.
2021–2025 · Rank #3
Factories: more spent. Owners got more-er.
Here's the honest version. Most big companies spent more on plants in 2025 than in 2021 — Lamb Weston more than quadrupled it. But almost everywhere, payouts grew faster than investment. At 10 of 14 big US names, owners received more than the company invested. The marginal dollar went to shareholders.
+334%
Lamb Weston's plant spending, $147M → $638M — while returns ran only 0.3× investment.
8×
What Imperial Brands' shareholders got vs its plant spending — even though capex more than doubled.
$5.97T
What S&P 500 companies paid owners, 2021–2024. The whole market did it.
10.4% → 6.2% of sales
AB InBev 2021–2025: plant spending fell $5.6B → $3.7B — while the 2025 dividend jumped to $4.5B and buybacks restarted at $2.6B.
Creates an opportunity for further margin expansion over time.
Finance chief, AB InBev — Q2 2026 earnings call
The down tail is real too: Conagra's plant spending fell 23% in dollars while its dividend rose 41%; Clorox cut both plants ($331M → $220M) and research ($149M → $121M). And the construction boom went mostly to chips and batteries — food plants got "much less," per the US Treasury. What plant spending survived tilted toward efficiency, not growth: Unilever put about 55% of its investment budget into projects that cut costs on 3–4-year paybacks. Nobody was building for a demand boom — because outside a few viral hits, there wasn't one.
2021–2025 · The exceptions
Some of them built anyway.
About a quarter of companies put the gains back in — real factories, real capacity. They're the exceptions that prove the ranking, and they cluster where demand was genuinely exploding or collapsing.
Mixedput it back in + paid out
Investorsput the gains back in
Harvesterspaid out the gains
Of 185 companies with enough data to judge, 2021–2025.
$0 paid out · $1.1B built
Freshpet 2021–2025: zero dividends, zero buybacks — $1,127M into plants while marketing nearly tripled to $158M.
Done it at higher prices, improving the pricing power of the brand.
Billy Cyr, CEO, Freshpet — Q4 2022 earnings call
Samyang poured the buldak boom into new factories in Korea and China. Tyson spent 2.1× more on plants than payouts while its margin fell from 12.5% to 5% — investing through the trough. Kellanova cut buybacks to zero and raised plant spending 29%.
2026 · The takeaway
The windfall is ending. The brand spending compounds.
As pricing power fades, the surplus stops refilling. The companies that sent it to shareholders have the payout. The ones that spent it on the brand have the next price increase — because brand strength is what lets you charge more next time.
When you grow brand equities, your brands have more pricing power.
Fernando Fernandez, CEO, Unilever — June 2026
The flywheel runs forward: strong brands can charge more, which funds more brand-building. Shoppers paid for the last cycle's windfall. The reinvestors are using it to charge them again.
Fine print: five emerging-market verdicts are still provisional, pending official filings. Companies define advertising differently, so the comparisons are directional — and the quote and the numbers never come from the same source.