Snack Brands Suffer from Poor Health.

Snack Brands Suffer from Poor Health.
Why are Coke & Pepsi Lagging on Wall Street?
Snacks Companies Have High Debt and Slow Growth and are Being Sued for Plastic Pollution by Cities and Others.
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The S&P500 had a Perfect Week on July 25, 2025, setting 5 new highs, one each day from Monday through Friday. However, many of the legacy drink companies have share prices that are lagging the index in gains, with National Beverage Co.* (LaCroix) down -38%, Celsius Holdings plunging -51%*, and Chagee Tea, which had its IPO on April 17, 2025, off -44%. Coca-Cola is one of the 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average Index components that has been named a Dog of the Dow. What’s going on?
*from its 5-year high
 
When you look at the Drinks Stock Report Card, some themes emerge in the legacy brands:
 
·      Very slow growth or losing revenue year over year,
·      Very high debt, with some companies (Keurig Dr. Pepper and Starbucks) at very low credit quality – the lowest run of investment grade,
·      High price-earnings ratio (expensive share prices).
 
We’ve seen some exciting newcomers to the field, including Poppi, which was purchased by Pepsico for $1.65 billion in March 2025. So, why are drinks and snacks gathering dust on the Wall Street shelf, and should you take a closer look at your own wealth plan to be sure that you’re not losing money on these investments (often in the name of earning a very low income)?
 
Email [email protected] if you’d like to receive an Updated Coffee, Tea and Soda Stock Report Card.
 
Here are the topics we’ll cover in this blog.
 
Chagee Tea: The Starbucks of Tea
Health-Conscious Consumers
Schools and Cities Banning Single-Use Plastic
Less than 9% of Plastic Gets Recycled
Plastic is an Oil Product: Dirty from Cradle to Neverending Life
Multiple Lawsuits Against the Worst Plastic Polluters in the World
Value Substitution Funds
 
And here is more information on each development.
 
Chagee Tea: The Starbucks of Tea
The first thing I noticed about Chagee Tea was that it was the only place at the Century City (California) Mall where I saw a very long line – especially for a brand that I had never heard of. Chagee Tea is the only publicly-traded beverage café or brand with double-digit year-over-year sales growth – of 35.35% on the Drinks Stock Report Card. Chagee Tea is a Chinese-based tea café with 6000+ locations in Asia (and perhaps only one in the U.S.?) that purports to be the Starbucks of tea.
 
The Chagee IPO hit Wall Street in April 2025 with a bang, soaring from $32/share to $42/share and making the company’s 30-year old founder and CEO a billionaire (per Bloomberg). Chagee wasn’t investors’ cup of tea after that meteoric IPO rise. It is currently trading at $23.53/share. Rapid expansion can explain the increase in sales. (More stores = more revenue.) Are the long lines auspicious for the company to become the next hundred-billion-dollar café brand, ala Starbucks? Or is this more of a Krispy Kreme flash in the pan?
 
Patricia Kelly Yeo, the food and drink editor of Timeout L.A., wasn’t very impressed. She pointed out local places with better tasting tea and complained about the single-use containers. Yeo wrote in her review, “Of course, all of the [drink] options are slightly tainted by the fact that these mostly iced drinks are served out of paper or plastic cups. Even the casual afternoon tea aficionado understands that proper ceramicware and the ability to sit down and relax elevates the tea drinking experience.”
 
Not only do hot drinks taste better in ceramic mugs, but reusable containers are also better for our health and for the planet. You might have heard that most of us have microplastic in our bodies, causing considerable, undesirable side effects. Some drink companies are being sued for their single-use plastic pollution. I‘ll discuss this more below.
 
Health-Conscious Consumers
PepsiCo now owns Poppi, a prebiotic, low-sugar soda that has exploded in popularity. Between 2023 and 2024, Poppi’s sales increased fivefold, from $100,000,000 to $500,000,000.
 
LaCroix is a no-calorie carbonated water choice that is owned by National Beverage. Celsius drinks are designed to optimize physical and cognitive performance and burn calories. National Beverage had very tepid sales growth of 5.49% in the most recent quarter, while Celsius Holdings saw revenue drop -7.43%.
 
Will Poppi be the saving grace for Pepsico? Poppi is still a very small brand within an empire that boasts of $92 billion in sales each year. In their most recent quarterly earnings report and forward outlook, Pepsico is forecasting a 1.5% decline in EPS with a low single-digit increase in revenue.
 
Schools and Cities Banning Single-Use Plastic
Consumers are also getting planet conscious. Over a decade ago, many schools took out their vending machines due to an obesity crisis in children in the United States. According to the CDC, one in five children and adolescents have obesity. Sugary drinks contribute to that problem.
 
​More schools are providing metal reusable containers and water refill stations, instead of plastic bottled water. In Poundbury, England, the 5 to 9-year-olds at Damers First School went beyond getting plastic out of their school and asked the local businesses to do the same. That inspired one store to offer organic produce that was not covered in plastic packaging.

Eco Kids at Damers First School in Poundbury, England.

​Wisdom is a powerful thing. However, the plastics and beverage industries push back with misinformation campaigns and an aggressive defense in the courts. While many beverage companies are being sued for misleading their customers about recycling and the damage caused by plastic pollution, some have been successful in getting the lawsuits dismissed. In Coca-Cola’s most recent quarterly earnings report, the company disclosed that it was being sued by the City of Baltimore “concerning the environmental impacts of plastic packaging on the city’s lands and waterways. The Company believes it has strong defenses to the claims.” 
 
Less than 9% of Plastic Gets Recycled
There are six Rs of sustainability, and recycling is the least effective of all of them. Less than 5% gets recycled in the United States, and less than 9% around the world. Most single-use plastic is shipped to third world countries where it’s become a true crisis. (When I visited India in early 2018, there were streets and fields littered with plastic water bottles, where the pigs and cows would root around looking for food. Some people would try to burn them to stay warm, breathing toxic fumes in the process.)
 

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Should more recycling plants be built when plastic is toxic, is not being recycled and never dies? Or should companies be held accountable for the pollution and incentivized to offer their drinks in reusable containers? Would

Plastic is an Oil Product: Dirty from Cradle to Neverending Life
Plastic starts out as oil. Drilling, even when there isn’t an oil spill, is very damaging to the environment. Are you aware that many of the toxic chemicals that spilled in the train derailment of Feb. 2024 in Palestine, OH are used to make plastic? Plastic is a forever product that leeches into our water supply and pollutes air, oceans and humans. From drilling oil to their never-ending life, plastic (and polyester) are toxic products.

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Multiple Lawsuits Against the Worst Plastic Polluters in the World
As a result of the misinformation disseminated by the plastics industry, including the constant campaigns to convince people that if they just recycle plastic, all will be well, there are multiple lawsuits against plastic polluters, including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and other consumer goods companies. Chemical companies are also being held liable, with 3M (a Dow Jones Industrial Average component), Dow Inc. (a former DJIA component) and Dupont (a former DJIA component) all settling multi-billion-dollar fines for forever chemical pollution. These challenges make the current environment of slow growth and high debt and leverage more acute in these legacy brands.
 
Oil and plastic companies continue to obfuscate the truth about recycling, drilling and fossil fuel products (including polyester), and to purchase political power. It’s the same strategy that we’ve seen before in tobacco companies and other harmful industries that profit on our poor choices. And yet, we are still seeing grassroots efforts, particularly in parents and schools, to eliminate plastic and to create a cleaner, greener world. (Check out the Green Kids episode of our Earth Gratitude free docuseries.) Should legacy brands continue to spend their money defending a toxic packaging system or in developing one that is healthier for everyone and the planet upon which we all depend?
 
Value Substitution Funds
Whether you are concerned about your money or our planet, they are likely better ways to earn income without losing principal than to invest in a lot of these legacy brands, which are underperforming the S&P500 and continue to face headwinds in what many CEOs in the industry admit is a “challenging environment.” At our Financial Freedom Retreat, we encourage value fund substitutions that offer diversification outside of the United States. By doing that, we can invest in countries that have much lower debt and typically offer a much higher yield – sometimes even double the income.
 
Bottom Line
If you own a target date retirement fund or a mutual fund that tries to offer income, performance and safety, you might be limping along in gains (or losing), in a market that has been on fire for the past three years, while also suffering from losses on the safe side (where your money is supposed to remain intact). There are easy, time-proven solutions. Now is the time to know what you own and why and implement them – to be the boss of your money.
 
The world is always changing. We don’t use the typewriter or Blackberry phones anymore. As consumers become aware that plastic and single use are terrible for our personal health and the planet, it is possible, if not probable, that these drink companies will suffer even more than they already are. (The chemical companies that make plastic products face multi-billion-dollar lawsuits on a regular basis and have already engaged in many settlements.) Many legacy brands, including the beloved Coca-Cola and Pepsico, have a massive amount of debt, very slow revenue growth, and are overvalued, to boot, which should be enough to convince any investor to underweight large cap value funds in the U.S. and lean into healthier choices for our personal prosperity and our world.
 

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Receive the best price when you register by July 31, 2025. Visit NataliePace.com to learn more. Call 310-430-2397 or email [email protected] for pricing, additional information and to register.

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Natalie Wynne Pace is an Advocate for Sustainability, Financial Literacy & Women's Empowerment. Natalie is the bestselling author of The ABCs of Money (6th edition) and The Power of 8 Billion: It's Up to Us, and is the co-creator of the Earth Gratitude Project. She has been ranked as a No. 1 stock picker, above over 835 A-list pundits, by an independent tracking agency (TipsTraders). Her book The ABCs of Money remained at or near the #1 Investing Basics e-book on Amazon for over 3 years (in its vertical), with over 120,000 downloads and a mean 5-star ranking. The 6th edition of The ABCs of Money and the 2nd edition of Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is (2nd edition) are the most recent releases of these books. Follow her on Instagram. 
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Natalie Pace's easy as a pie chart nest egg strategies earned gains in the last two recessions and have outperformed the bull markets in between. That is why her Investor Educational Retreats, books and private coaching are enthusiastically recommended by Nobel Prize winning economist Gary S. Becker, TD AMERITRADE chairman Joe Moglia, Kay Koplovitz and many Main Street investors who have transformed their lives using her Thrive Budget and investing strategies. Click to view a video testimonial from Nilo Bolden.​​

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Important Disclaimers
Please note: Natalie Pace does not act or operate like a broker. She reports on financial news, and is one of the most trusted sources of financial literacy, education and forensic analysis in the world. Natalie Pace educates and informs individual investors to give investors a competitive edge in their personal decision-making. Any publicly-traded companies, funds or projects mentioned by Natalie Pace are not intended to be buy or sell recommendations.

ALWAYS do your research and consult an experienced, reputable financial professional before buying or selling any security, and consider your long-term goals and strategies. Investors should NOT be all in on any asset class or individual stocks. Your retirement plan should reflect an age-appropriate, diversified wealth plan, which has been designed strategically, with the assistance of financial professionals who are familiar with your goals, risk tolerance, tax needs and more. The "trading" portion of your portfolio should be a very small part of your investment strategy, and the amount of money you invest into individual companies should never be greater than your experience, wisdom, knowledge, patience and diversified strategy.  
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Information has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. However, NataliePace.com does not warrant its completeness or accuracy. Opinions constitute our judgment as of the date of this publication and are subject to change without notice. This material is not intended as an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any financial instrument.