Which Top Consumer Food & Beverage Stock has the Strongest Earnings Trends: Heinz, Coke, Starbucks or General Mills?

February 14, 2013

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Earnings trends are extremely important when evaluating stocks. At Wall St. Cheat Sheet, we view increasing earnings quarter-over-quarter as a simple way to gauge whether costs and the business model are stable. Then we like to analyze whether the company is outperforming peers in the sector. This is what we call the “E-Squared” investment analysis (‘E = Earnings Are Increasing Quarter-Over-Quarter’ + ‘E = Excellent Relative Performance Versus Peers and Sector’).

Stocks with improving earnings metrics are worthy of your extra attention. Click here to discover our CHEAT SHEET stock picks now!

Here’s your Cheat Sheet to how 4 of the top food and beverage stocks rank via earnings trends:

The Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO): Current Price $37.36

Fiscal Year	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012
Revenue ($) in millions	31,940	30,990	35,120	46,540	48,020
Diluted EPS ($)	1.245	1.465	2.53	1.845	1.97

Revenue at Coke is up every year after 2009, but EPS has tapered off after 2010. Nevertheless, we see that it improved in the latest year.

Next, our CHEAT SHEET investing framework asks us to drill down to the recent quarterly data:

Quarter	Dec. 31, 2011	Mar. 31, 2012	Jun. 30, 2012	Sep. 30, 2012	Dec. 31, 2012
Revenue ($) in millions	11,040	11,140	13,080	12,340	11,460
Diluted EPS ($)	0.355	0.445	0.605	0.50	0.41

Revenue is falling off over the last two quarters and so has EPS. We’ll avoid Coke for this analysis…

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