Shop Talk
Retailers, consumers and prices
Check Out Line: The Swiss drinks fight
Check out the battle brewing between iced tea and hot cocoa.
ConAgra Foods filed a suit against Dean Foods over the common look of their “Swiss” drink packaging. ConAgra asserts that Dean’s Swiss Premium iced teas infringe its trademark for Swiss Miss hot cocoa products, Reuters’ Jonathan Stempel reports.
The beverages taste different, but they do seem to have some similar looks when it comes to their labels. Perhaps that confuses some shoppers into thinking that the Swiss Premium sugar-sweetened teas come from the same company as those packets of hot cocoa mix.
Take a look for yourself. Do these look like they come from the same manufacturer?
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Also in the basket:
Check Out Line: Dean Foods to milk global soy market
Check Out Dean Foods inking a deal with Vandemoortele N.V.
The largest U.S. dairy company agreed to buy Alpro, the soy products unit of the Belgian company for 325 million eurors, or roughly $450 million, as it tries to venture outside the United States in the soy products market.
Dean, which already has the Silk soymilk and Horizon organic milk brands, is expecting the deal to add modestly to its 2009 earnings. Through the deal, it will have control over Alpro’s two brands — a namesake one for retail and Provamel, for the specialized health category.
Check Out Line: Taxes up, cigarette shipments down
Check out the falling shipments of cigarettes with expectations of further declines in 2009.
Reynolds American posted a higher-than-expected quarterly profit as its Camel and Pall Mall cigarettes increased market share. But the company said it shipped 21.6 billion cigarettes in the fourth quarter — down 6.3 percent from a year earlier.
Check Out Line: The consumer products earnings parade
Check out consumer product powerhouses including Procter & Gamble, Kraft and Colgate, inundating Wall Street with quarterly reports on Wednesday.
The reports largely showed that the companies are finding successful ways to navigate the consumer spending slowdown and the commodity price surge that has raised their cost of doing business.
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