Barrons,

" Back in the 1990s, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett helped popularize the leading staples stocks with his investments in Coca-Cola
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and Gillette. He referred to them in his 1996 annual shareholder letter as “inevitables” destined to “dominate their fields worldwide for an investment lifetime.”

Those comments probably top-ticked their dominance. Procter & Gamble bought Gillette in 2005 and subsequently took sizable write-downs on the deal. Coke stock, meanwhile, has badly trailed the market since Buffett’s letter, roughly doubling in price while the S&P 500 index
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is up sevenfold.

Conditions aren’t looking much better for them now, particularly food and beverage stocks. Growth has slowed, and investors worry about the impact of the GLP-1 diet drugs and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health initiatives. Industry leaders PepsiCo, Mondelez International, Hershey, and Kraft Heinz are down 15% to 20% over the past 12 months and trade with their lowest P/E multiples in years. Kraft now yields over 5%, and Pepsi nearly 4%.

TD Cowen analyst Robert Moskow remains unenthusiastic about many of the food stocks, citing weak trends in scanner data from stores. “For a variety of reasons, there could be an acceleration in the consumer desire for healthier foods,” he says.

The Mag 7 now represent almost 35% of the S&P 500, and they matter far more than staples stocks. Let’s hope their underperformance isn’t the start of a similar period of decline.""