Thanksgiving is a holiday that most notably involves food — lots and lots of it. And that makes it a very important day for Campbell Soup (CPB -0.59%) because of the types of products the food maker sells.
However, there was a notable shift in the way customers bought their ingredients over the latest holiday weekend in 2023, and it could have some implications for 2024. Here’s why you should be a bit worried.
What it takes to make a meal
Campbell Soup, despite the use of “soup” in its name, has a fairly diverse product lineup. The food maker produces products under its own name, Prego, Swanson, V8, Kettle, Lance, Pace, Snider, and Pepperidge Farm, among others. So it offers soups to snacks and a lot in between. However, some of the company’s core products are vital ingredients for cooking larger meals.
Image source: Getty Images.
For example, soup broth, condensed soup bases (like cream of mushroom), and stuffing are all used when people prepare their Thanksgiving feasts in late November. Thus, the selling period around this holiday is an important one for the food maker. The good news is that the 2023 selling period was a solid one for Campbell. Notably, the company gained share in all of the above categories, with stuffing up 0.2 percentage points, condensed soups up 1.1 percentage points, and broth up 1.2 percentage points.
But there was an even more important takeaway. Customers didn’t buy in advance, as they normally would have. They waited until the last minute, perhaps hoping to catch items on sale. Management described Thanksgiving week sales as much bigger than those on the week prior.
Does one week really matter?
On the one hand, a one-week shift doesn’t really make a big difference to Campbell or the consumer staples company’s overall results. However, it shows a shift in consumer sentiment that shouldn’t be ignored. But there’s a second trend that highlights what is going on that makes the late buying around Thanksgiving even more important to consider.
As noted, Campbell has a large collection of brands, many of which would fall into the snack category. In this space, the company has brands that would be considered premium, like Late July, and brands that would be considered value, such as Lance. Then there are a bunch that fall somewhere in between those two extremes.
In the third quarter, Late July did well, with share up 2.2 percentage points. Lance did well, too, with share up 2.4 percentage points. The performance of brands in between was far less compelling, with most key brands roughly flat and Snyder losing three percentage points of share.
Essentially, there was a split. Premium was fine, but, at the same time, people were also trading down to cheaper alternatives. When you add this trend to the buying patterns around Thanksgiving, it paints a picture of increasing economic concern among many consumers. While wealthier customer segments may be fine, lower down the socioeconomic spectrum there appears to be clear concern and value-seeking behaviors.
For Campbell, the risk is that performance over the near term will face some headwinds, given that important brands like Pepperidge Farm, Cape Cod, and Snyder are stuck in that ugly middle space. Even if premium and value brands do well, it probably won’t be enough to offset the weakness in the middle.
And the delay in buying around Thanksgiving hints that Campbell may have to be more promotional than it would like to move its products off the shelf. That hints at a potentially tough year ahead. At the very least, Campbell may have to be more strategic with its selling approach.
There’s a bigger picture for the economy
So investors may not want to get too excited about Campbell Soup. But there’s more to the story here if you step back and think about the big picture. If the selling trends that Campbell Soup is facing are broadened out, people may be more concerned about the economy than Wall Street believes, given the strong rally into the new year. If you own Campbell Soup, be prepared for a rough patch — and even if you don’t, you might still want to prepare for a rough patch.
