Pepsi, Poppi, and the Creosote Bush

Motley Fool Money

The Motley Fool

Business, Investing

4.4 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

To stay on top, the consumer giants need a player in every potential market. (00:21) David Meier and Dylan Lewis discuss: - February retail numbers showing continued consumer struggles, and why this upcoming retail earnings season will be a key read on the economy. - Pepsi’s $2B acquisition of alt-soda Poppi, the venture capital-style of trend investing for consumer brands, and how Coke and Pepsi need to keep absorbing the next potential big thing. (13:55) It’s no secret that a lot of investors have high hopes about the future of artificial intelligence. But how do genuine experts, people who have been studying AI and machine learning long before it entered the mainstream, feel about the future of the field? Motley Fool analysts Andy Cross and Asit Sharma talk with Oren Etzioni, an AI Expert and Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, about the current and future states of artificial intelligence. Check out Fool24 on TMF’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@MotleyFool And Motley Fool members can get the replay here: https://www.fool.com/premium/4056/coverage/2025/03/06/ai-expert-dr-oren-etzioni-interview-3625-3pm Companies discussed: DG, WMT, PEP, KO. Host: Dylan Lewis Guests: David Meier, Andy Cross, Asit Sharma, Oren Etzioni Producer: Mary Long Engineers: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Does that sound like future growth?
0:08.3	Motleckful money starts now.
0:20.7	I'm Dylan Lewis, and I'm joined over the airwaves by a motherful analyst, David Meyer.
0:24.2	David, thanks for joining me today.
0:25.7	You're very welcome. It's great to be here.
0:28.1	We have a fun one this Monday.
0:29.6	We've got some retail numbers, not so much fun.
0:32.0	But then we also have a Monday morning jolt of natural caffeine, courtesy of Pepsi and some M&A activity. That'll be fun to
0:39.1	dive into. We're going to kick off with the update on the big picture, though. Fresh retail
0:43.5	numbers out for February. U.S. Census Bureau reporting that retail sales up 0.2% last month over January.
0:50.6	And, David, a lot of the coverage here continuing to flag. Tight consumer spending situation.
0:55.5	Yeah, so you're exactly right, 0.2% growth.
0:58.9	Expectation was 0.6%, though.
1:02.5	So they were expecting after January's decline,
1:06.4	economists were expecting a pick back up in February. It did happen, just not to the extent that
1:13.2	they wanted. And it's kind of the extension of the theme that's been going on. Earlier in the
1:20.9	month, we saw the Confidence Board. Their Consumer Index fell a little bit. We recently got some
1:27.3	data from the University of Michigan
1:28.9	Consumer Survey that their confidence is down a bit. According to both surveys, consumers
1:35.6	are starting to worry about inflation popping up in the rest of 2025. We're seeing lots
1:42.4	of numbers that basically are saying the low-end consumers are really feeling the pinch.
1:48.5	There were two, basically two of the same quotes, one from the CEO of Dollar General, one from the CEO of Walmart, who said their low-end consumers are extended.
	...

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