Hey Snackers,
Happy Friday to you and to this loyal dog, who spent two days waiting outside a Turkish hospital for her owner to be discharged. Smiling but crying.
The tech-filled Nasdaq closed at a record high yesterday ahead of Big Tech earnings season.
Chobani gets ready-to-drink coffee: the hottest, coldest beverage trend
Not the Go-Gurt type... When a Kurdish businessman from Turkey took over a shuttered Kraft yogurt plant in New York, Chobani was just a cool sound. 15 years later, it's the most famous Greek yogurt brand in America — with an estimated $1.5B+ in yearly sales.
- But yogurt peaked circa 2015, so Chobani got on the oat train, launching oat milks and creamers in late 2019. The logical next step...
- Chobani's launching coffee. The new line of ready-to-drink (RTD) coffees: sweet cream cold brew, cold brew with vanilla creamer, and oat milk cold brew (theme: cold brew).
Not the Star Wars robot... That's R2-D2. RTD coffee is one of the fastest growing segments of the non-alcoholic bev industry: sales surged 17% from October 2019 to October 2020. Basically, the hard seltzer of the caffeine world. You're not doing your typical morning Starbs run. Instead, you have a Starbucks RTD can in the fridge for your 8 am Zoom call — or if you're fancy, a Trader Joe's La Colombe. Chobani will face big competition with Starbucks and Stok, which own over 70% of the $4.6B RTD coffee market, combined.
It's "Branded House" vs. "House of Brands"... We’ve seen Big Food companies expand from their core product to entirely new brands — by acquiring or creating sub-brands. Kellogg started with corn flakes, but now owns brands from Cheez-Its, to Pringles — but you still associate it with cereal. Kraft is known for mac-n-cheese, but owns Planters peanuts, Jell-O, Capri Sun, and every other brand in your 3rd grade lunch (shoutout Lunchables). Chobani represents the opposite: a single branded house that’s putting its own powerful brand front-and-center to develop new product lines.
Less driving and "revenge visits" leads to A Tale of Two Insurance Profits
As sexy as frozen broccoli... Travelers is one of America's largest sellers of insurance to businesses and car owners — it offers everything from condo, to home, and renters' insurance (contain your excitement). While insurance may not get your heart racing, Traveler's latest quarterly earnings juuust might:
- Profit soared 50% last quarter to $1.3B, up from $873M a year earlier.
- But total sales were up just 4% for the quarter. What's with the massive profit jump?
Do less... Already did. We did way less driving, traveling, and general moving-around-ing in 2020. Travelers’ car and home insurance profits soared 40% from October to December last year while the third wave of US Covid cases hit. The forever-at-home life had us driving way less, which meant fewer accidents for Travelers to cover.
- Travelers was still collecting premiums while we were WFH'ing (but it spent significantly less on coverage).
- That means more profit — especially since Travelers didn't issue any refunds for the lower mileage, like some other insurers did.
Some companies are earnings benchmarks... With insurance earnings season kicking off, analysts watched Travelers to gauge how other car insurers might've performed. "Less mileage, more profit" could be true for others, too. Meanwhile, health care earnings might be less rosy, based on UnitedHealth's latest report: after posting its most profitable quarter ever in July, United saw quarterly earnings plunge as you finally returned to the doc's office. All those postponed "revenge" visits = more bills for UnitedHealth.
What else we’re Snackin’
- Gummy: Millennial-friendly digital health startup Hims & Hers goes public in a $1.6B SPAC merger.
- Landed: United Airlines lost a big $1.9B last quarter. Its CEO said a “critical mass” of people need to be vaccinated before there’s a recovery.
- Sweaty: President Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order rejoining the US into the Paris climate accord.
- Suite: TripActions, the company that lets you book trips paid for by your boss, raised $155M in late-stage funding.
- VR: Apple is reportedly working on a virtual reality headset that includes fabric design (and a huge price tag).
- Guac: Mission Produce — aka: the pure-play avocado stock — saw sales and profits drop last quarter on lower avo prices.
Friday
- Earnings expected from Ally Financial
ID: 1491095