Coronavirus and the Oracle of Wall Street

For business journalists (and a lot of others), the stock market is like the Oracle of Delphi: supernaturally inspired, but you can’t always tell what it means.

Conventional wisdom is that in times of crisis, consumers turn to center-store staples, especially comfort foods. Sales figures seem to be bearing that out for the coronavirus scare. Sales of items like Spam, Oreo cookies and canned tuna fish are all up; Mondelēz International and others are hiring workers. (I hope at least some of them are former restaurant workers and others who lost jobs because of the coronacrisis.)

On the other hand, some of those sales figures look a little, shall we say, context-challenged. For instance, sales of oat milk were up 347% year-over-year for the first week of March, which sounds impressive until you ask yourself: How many people were buying that stuff in the first place?

So I consulted the Oracle of Wall Street, looking at stock prices for the top half-dozen center-store processors on Food Processing’s Top 100 list. I tracked the price for March 2, the peak during the month, and the price as of this afternoon (March 25). What I found was, in every case but the first, a surge and then a fall:

 My guess is that the market reacted to the surge in grocery staple purchases by nervous consumers, but then the general downward pull of the market swamped those gains.

But, as they say, your guess is as good as mine.

Pan Demetrakakes is a Senior Editor for Food Processing and has been a business journalist since 1992, mostly covering various aspects of the food production and supply chain, including processing, packaging, distribution and retailing. Learn more about him or contact him