Keeping things spicy
Got hot sauce in my bag, swag
Good morning, coriander cravers. This is your Stock Market Rundown for October 16th, 2023. Thanks for joining me for another week of financial foolishness. Let’s dig in:
TODAY’S TOP STORY: BEYOND SALT & PEPPER 🌶️
Many a Silicon Valley startup was founded in a basement. But when 25-year-old Willoughby McCormick launched his startup in the cellar of his Baltimore home, he wasn’t building an app… he was mixing up root beer.
130 years later, the business he founded—McCormick—is is the world’s biggest vendor of spices. Chances are you’ve purchased their red-capped containers in your grocery store the last time you needed cinnamon for a pie or curry for a soup.
Willoughby got his start hawking flavoring extracts door-to-door. (Since this was the 19th century, he also sold something called “Uncle Sam’s Nerve and Bone Liniment”... alas, now discontinued.)
Acquisitions put some pepper on the business, as bland Baltimore got introduced to exotic flavors. By the 1950s, the company was expanding into a global spice behemoth.
McCormick, now a public company, has gobbled up a smorgasbord of seasoning celebrities, from the nostalgic Old Bay to the foot stompin’ Stubb’s Bar-B-Q sauce. As makers of the #1 hot sauce (Frank’s Red Hot) and the #1 mustard (French’s), they’re the undisputed GOAT of the spice biz.
And business is booming: McCormick recently raised their annual profit forecast. So what’s McCormick’s secret sauce? Simple: their massive, diverse network of suppliers, which lets them reliably procure thousands of agricultural products from 85 countries, and ship them to their factories around the world.
Thanks to this logistics prowess, McCormick’s profit margins stay as fiery as ghost-pepper hot sauce.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
Ferrari is now accepting crypto as payment for its cars, so if there are any crypto millionaires left who haven’t been rugged by scams or rekt by hackers, head to your local dealership to test-drive a Daytona.
If big bankruptcies are the canary in the coal mine of the economy, Tweety Bird is keeling over: Chapter 11 filings by large firms tripled in the first half of 2023.
Pfizer slashed its full-year revenue forecast due to lower-than-expected COVID vaccinations. Big Pharma wants us to make booster shots part of our fall routine, like apple-picking and Pumpkin Spice Lattes. But population-wide immunity has fewer of us lining up for the annual jab.
BMW’s most recent quarter boasted battery-electric vehicle sales that were up 80%, as more consumers adopted the sexy i4 and i5 models (which get up to 300 miles on a charge). Now, if only we could get BMW drivers to use their turn signals when they cut us off in the passing lane.
That’s it for today, my friends; see you back here at the usual time tomorrow morning. Yours in capitalism, The Axe