The Best One Yet - 🌶️ “Kim K & Hot Sauce” — Kardashian’s $3.2B Skims. McCormick’s hot sauce sorcery. Nord Stream’s war pipe.

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Just in time for the Olympics (starting this Friday!), Kim Kardashian’s Skims shapewear hit a $3.2B valuation (they’re all over these 2022 Beijing games). Hot sauce is growing so fast in America it’s making ketchup look silly, so spice king McCormick is eating up your go-to bottles. And the key to preventing war between Russia and Ukraine may come down to a pipe — 1 single pipe: The Nord Stream Pipeline.$MKC $EONGYGot a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @JackKramer @NickOfNewYorkWant a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:https://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9Got a SnackFact for the pod? We got a form for that too:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe64VKtvMNDPGSncHDRF07W34cPMDO3N8Y4DpmNP_kweC58tw/viewformLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is Snacks Daily. Welcome back. It is Monday. It is the last day of January, January 31st. Wow. Excited January is ending because it's been a brutal month for the stock market.

This has been absolutely awful. I don't know what we're doing with ourselves. Stocks did rebound last week, though. They ended up about two and a half percent higher. But they're still down about 10% from the record highs. Hey, at least it didn't get worse. And that's our standard for life. Hey, I'll take it.

Let's roll with it. How's this pod? Today's pod, though, Nick, the best one. This is actually the best pod we have ever put together for you. For our first story, the Olympics start on Friday. Shocker. And the most prepared person in the world might be Kim Kardashian-West. Kim Skim shapewear, her brand just hit a $3.2 billion dollar valuation.

And they're dressing the Olympic Games. For our second story, hot sauce is the economy's hottest condiment. Because everybody's got like two bottles that they swear you've never tried before that you need to try. Baltimore's McCormick, though, they are slurping up all the sauce from Franks Red Hawk to Chalula. For our third and final story, you've seen the war drama between Russia on the border of Ukraine, but it might all come down to a pipe. Yeah. One huge, long pipe.

That pipe is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and it may be the key bargaining chip, but it's Germany's bargaining chip to decide. But Snackers, before we hit that diverse mix of stories. This is just kind of a wild smorgasbord. We got to open the pages to Horters' Almanac, week 97. Week 97, things were running out of because of the pandemic. Jack and I have been keeping track for you. This week, it's chicken wings. It is.

The white meats. Other white meat. This is actually the first ever two-time hoarder's almanac listee, I believe, Jack, unprecedented. This is the Archie Griffin of hoarder's almanacs. Yeah, yeah. Just like last year around the Super Bowl, our strategic wing reserves, they are drying up people. Snackers, we're running low in wings. This is actually a case in poultry anatomy problems.

Here's what Jack and I found fascinating about this. The issue isn't just the wings. It's the whole bird. Because the chicken only has two wings. And each wing is just one drumette and one wingette. Those are the terms. So you need three chickens for a dozen wings. You do.

So here's the situation. Demand for chickens overall, that hasn't changed. But demand has shifted big time out to the extremities, out to the wings. Yeah, those wings are the perfect pandemic package. Jack, you get a dozen wings, six celery sticks. You call it a day. That's a date night. But here's the problem.

Nobody wants the other parts, the breast, the thighs, the drumstick, all that good stuff. it's considered the bad stuff. So chicken breast prices are only up 8% from last year. But get this, chicken wing prices have searched 48% from last year. And last year, they were up from the year before. So chicken wings are crazy expensive. Jack, I'm checking the counter over here. We are two weeks away from Super Bowl Sunday.

But we're light years from balance in the chicken universe. Snackers, let's dip our three stories in some blue cheese dressing and hit this. Let's grab at least half the stories on the plate, claim them as ours, and lick them so that no one claims them back. Jack, get me a moist towel less. You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way. The snacks about the hearing food is air candy. They don't reflect the views of the Robberhood family.

It's all informational just so. We're not recommending any securities. It's not a research report or investment advice. Not an offer or sale of a security. Snacks is digestible. Business news for you. Robahood Financial, LLC, member Fenra slash SIPC. For our first story, just in time for the Olympics, Kim Kardashian-West Skims brand has doubled its valuation to a whopping $3.2 billion.

Kim is making the Olympics about her without making them about her. By the way, the Olympics really do start on Friday. They really do. 2022 Beijing Games. There's no snow in Beijing. There's never snow in Beijing. But guess that's not a problem. It doesn't matter because, Jack, you know, what president she wants, she gets.

There will be snow. There will be snow in China. Snacker Skims, though. Skims is now Gen Z's Victoria's Secret. That's how Jack and I are seeing this. That's it. Victoria's Secret has fallen out of favor and Skims is filling that point. We're talking about a three-year-old shapewear company. They're not doing underwear, sleepwear, loungeware, shapewear. What Kim wants to do, Skims ends up manufacturing. Last year, Skims sales jumped by 90% to nearly $300 million. And they expanded to leisure and pajamas too. Check, have you seen the sheep vibe attire they have? They have something makes, I mean, you feel like

a sheep. I would wear this too. I wish I could wear this too. That sounds cozy. But Jack, can you tell us about the key fabric and all the skims shapewear? It's the style icon named as Kim, who has 283 million Instagram followers. And when you look at what Kim Kardashian has done with skims, it proves the power of conversion. We jumped on to the gram and saw the last picture she posted about skims got four million likes. That's four million potential buyers of that clothing. Just two months ago, when Kim Kardashian announced the partnership skims was doing, with luxury brand Fendi. Jack, how did the sales go pretty quickly? They sold like hotcakes.

$3 million of sales in 10 minutes. Now, Snackers, Jack and I've talked to before about, you know, celebrpreneurs, celebrity entrepreneurs. You got Kylie, you got Rihanna, you got Jessica Alba. They all founded unicorn companies. But we noticed we're now hitting a completely new level of celebrpreneur out there. Multi-billion dollar celebrity founded enterprise. Which leads us to this week's news.

A bunch of venture capitalists, they want in on skims. They think skim's growth is just the beginning. Venture capitalist just wrote a check of $240 million. They gave it to Kim so that skims can go international. And that happens to double the company's valuation to $3.2 billion. Not too shabby. As we said, Gen Z's Victoria's Secret is Kim Kardashian skims. We wish we could invest too.

Yeah. Unfortunately, it's a sumo. Yeah, we're straight up missing out, S-U-M-O. Oh, and by the way, this is actually Kim's second private $1 billion company. No big deal. KKW Beauty, also a unicorn. We're at a whole new level of celebrpreneur. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddy Kim and the whole Skim's brand? There are three places fashion brands can advertise, but Skims found a fourth.

Yeah, Snackers, you got cable TV, you got magazines, or you got Zuck. Those are the key places where a company can spend their advertising money. Drop a 30-second commercial. You can do a Vogue magazine shoot, or you can do targeted ads on Instagram and Google. Zuck's getting to cash. But the latest skims promotion is incredible. They are sponsoring the women athletes of Team USA in these Olympic games. It's the exclusive sleepwear and loungeware provider for Team USA's female athletes, specifically the female athletes.

Plus the Paralympic female athletes. So Skims is actually avoiding the insanely expensive TV commercials that are on NBC during the entire Olympics. But Skims is still getting all the attention on social media where Team USA fans go to learn about those athletes. But because this is specifically. for female athletes, the female athletes love it. They're posting their own picks on their own Instagram of Skims letting this stuff go viral. For a relatively small price, Kim Skims is getting

huge exposure during the next few weeks in the games. Because Kim, she found a fourth place for Skims. For our second story, Big Sauce Snackers publicly traded McCormick Spice, they've quietly been scooping up all the hot sauce brands. Because McCormick does the dirty work of distribution. Let's go back to 1889. Willoughby McCormick starts a spice business in his basement of a Baltimore home selling classics. What a name. Willoughby McCormick.

He sold his flavors and extracts like salt and pepper door to door. He can't make this up. Today, it's a $25 billion pure play spice stock, McCormick Spice. McCormick is known for the red cap on the cinnamon spice that's probably in your pantry somewhere. You'd also recognize the little tin ground pepper. When you go over to Nana's, She's definitely got some of their paprika. They also owned Stubbs Marinate and Maryland's famous Old Bay, which is great on French fries.

But when Jack and I jumped into the story, Snacks style, we noticed that McCormick stock jumped 6% last week. It's up 25% in the last three months. While the rest of the market is down. Yeah. This is the company. It's some $6 billion in sales last year, a record high. That's a lot of salt. That's a lot of pepper.

Well, that sales surge started at the beginning of the pandemic, thanks to your pandemic pantry popping, which apparently hasn't stopped. You're still loading up on saffron and nutmeg. for Graham's beef stroganoff recipe. Jack, are you revealing your dad's secret recipe on the podcast right now? This conversation never happened. Okay, Big Ted, we won't tell anyone. But the big story here is what Bloomberg unveiled last week.

It's that there's a situation going on in aisle six of the grocery store. Guess what the number one condiment in America is? We were shocked by this. Honestly, we didn't expect this. It's mayonnaise. Mayanays. Manays. Great in a tiny smear on bread.

In large quantities, it's disgusting. Yeah, on its own, it's not ideal. No. But a little bit of it is kind of mad. You want a dollop. You don't want to smear. Or maybe it's the other way around. All right.

So mayo's number one. But hot sauce is closing in on the number two position. It's trying to steal ketchup's number two spots. In fact, hot sauce is the hottest condiment category out there. Sales of hot sauce are up 54% of the last five years. At its core, hot sauce is peppers. And peppers is a vegetable. So it's like a healthy-ish way to add some flavor to whatever you're eating.

If so facto, Jack and I are trying to say, This is a judgment-free pod snackers. Now, McCormick Spice, they're seeing this and they're thinking, you know what? Where there is fragmentation, there is delicious opportunity. Heinz is the number one brand of ketchup. We all know that. It dominates. At restaurants, Nick, they take those glass bottles of Heinz and they refill them with other ketchup,

maybe off-brand ketchup. That's how much Heinz owns. Hot sauce, though. Hot sauce, that is a hot mess. Every urban neighborhood has like six different artists in brands, manufactured down the street. Because there's a thousand ways to skin a pepper. Yeah, well, Tabasco they're like number two. Then you got Haui Fong, saracha. You got Tapatio, you know, a bunch of chili oils, that Momomofuku oil. That was good. Well, instead of building one brand to try to dominate

hot sauce, McCormick has quietly bought up a whole drawer full. Yeah, get this, Snackers. McCormick, they acquired Frank's Red Hot Hot Hot sauce in 2017. And now that is the number one hot sauce in the entire country. That wasn't enough. No. Last year, they acquired the number three hot sauce in the country, Chalula, the one with the wooden top and the beautiful woman on the label there. Do you like that scarf she has? I do. It's a good scarf. I'm a scarf guy now. I know you are now. Well, Chalula, it has a wider appeal apparently because it's a milder hot sauce. Chalula's not going to make you cry at the table. Do not order something with Habanero unless you know what you're doing. So now McCormick has snagged the number one and the number three hot sauce and now has

one third of the growing U.S. hot sauce market. And that success comes down to one thing. And that thing is our takeaway. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies making spices and hot sauce over at McCormick? Distribution is the dirty work, but it's the unsexy super skill. Snackers, last week McCormick announced earnings. And Jack and I noticed that McCormick mentioned the brand Cholula 40 times. That's because McCormick wants credit for their incredible distribution of Cholula hot sauce. Yeah, because Chalula's driving sales of McCormick, but McCormick is the one distributing Cholula. Here's one quote from the earnings report. Our hot sauce surge is thanks to strength of our distributor relationships. Because McCormick got Cholula's bottles into eye-level shelves over at Walmart.

That is huge. And McCormick's recipe inspiration unit. It's a real thing. I know. Has been pitching chefs and restaurants across the country to include Cholula in the recipes. And last quarter, Cholula's menu participation, a real stat, jumped from burrito chains to Mom and Pop Cafes nationwide. Even your avocado toast place might be using Chalula now.

McCormick even designed the first ever Cholula packets, which led to a delivery deal to stick them in DoorDash orders. Pro tip, opened two packets with one tear. McCormick is number one in hot sauce because its distribution dirty work got it into everywhere. For our third and final story to kick off the week, as Russia is creeping up on Ukraine's border, one single gas pipe could be the critical key. Nord Stream 2. Here's what it is and why it's so important. Okay, first of all, not so quiet on the eastern front right now. You got 100,000 Russian troops that are surrounding Ukraine as we're recording this here podcast. Ukraine was under Moscow's control back when Russia was the Soviet Union.

But experts are now fearing that it could come under Russian control again soon. Because Vladimir Putin is intimidating Ukraine. The United States has threatened Russia with sanctions if it does invade Ukraine's borders. But here's the thing. We've already put Russia in the economic penalty box before. like just a few years ago when they invaded Crimea. We did. And that did nothing to stop Putin's aggression.

So why would economic sanctions work this time? And that is why Jack and I noticed that all eyes are turning to one thing, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Snackers, Russia does chess, hockey, ballet, classical music, Tolstoy. They have a space program that's pretty darn good. Sergei Federov, Anna Karina. I actually like that book in high school. But what Russia doesn't have many of is leading interstate.

international corporations like the U.S. does. No, they don't. There is one thing they do, though, in international corporations. Yeah. It is oil and it is gas. Oil and gas. And thanks to its massive and prosperous oil and gas industry, Russia owns a bunch of world-class European soccer clubs.

Get this, Snackers. 60% of Russia's exports and 30% of Russia's entire economy are oil and gas, cash, money. 30%. Oil is to Russia, what maple syrup is to Vermont. And a huge news. sales channel for that grade A Amber Russian oil jack is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline will double the amount of oil and gas that Russia sells to Europe. And it connects directly from Russia to Germany.

But here is the key snackers. That pipeline, it flows along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, literally under the sea. So it bypasses and weakens Ukraine. Right. Russia and Germany do not share a border. But they kind of do with this pipeline now, which is thousands of miles long. So if the United States could convince Germany to suspend this Nord Stream 2 pipeline, then that would hit Putin where it hurts. Oil and gas. But that's a huge risk because Russia could then cut off the rest of the gas that's already giving to Germany,

like right in the middle of winter. I studied abroad in Berlin. It was the summer, but I could imagine it'd be cold without heat. It feels like it would be cold there. Now, the U.S. did say last week that if Russia does invade Ukraine, then the pipeline won't open. But shutting down the pipeline would be German. Germany's call, not the United States.

So, Jack, what is the takeaway for our buddies over at this one single oil pipeline? Germany's economy is huge, but it's neither west nor east. Yeah, with the West versus East divide, Germany is like literally and figuratively in the middle. Germany is still in some ways straddling the Berlin Wall. Germany's got a deep respect for Russian power dating all the way back to World War II. But Germany is also a strong democracy and they ally politically with the United States and the European Union. Of all, Germany's number one job is as a trade partner to a whole bunch of countries. Germany values their relationship with China because China buys a whole bunch of German cars and German-made machines.

And Germany appreciates its relationship with Russia because Russian gas heats 26 million German homes. In this Ukraine crisis, Germany's values are being pulled in one direction, but their gas valves in the opposite direction. So the West's big leverage against Vladimir Putin is a pipe. The Nord Stream pipeline, but that's not. Germany's decision to make. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us to kick off the week? Kim is taking celebrpreneurship to a new level with $3.2 billion skims. Yeah, and now skims, they found a fourth place to advertise.

Team USA's female athletes. Lillaby McCormick, ironically, didn't like spicy food, Nick. But now his namesay company is the hottest sauce because it does that distribution dirty work. For our third and final story, the Nord Stream pipeline could hit Russia where it hurts, oil and gas. Yeah, that's leverage that only Germany can use. And we hope for a peaceful outcome in Ukraine.

We do. But in the meantime, we got a snack fact of the day sent in by our 12th man, Luke, Brian's over in College Station, Texas. Luke, take it from here. Did you know there used to be

27 letters in the English alphabet? In the early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the and symbol. It would have been confusing to say X, Y, Z, and. So the students said,

and per se, and per se, say meaning by itself, so students essentially were saying X, Y, Z, and by itself, and, over time, and per se, and was slurred together into the word we used today, ampersand. Thanks. That is wild. Are you kidding me? I feel like we need to like bring Pluto back as a planet and Amper Sam back as a letter. Today it's Shift 7 Amper Sam, but it used to be its own thing in the children's song. It's a total demotion. It's really a shame. X Y, ampers Sam, 27th letters.

It rolls off the tongue. Snackers, you look fantastic today. If you haven't yet, you can help us grow by just telling a buddy, hey, H, Y, HY, HY, S day. Have you had your snacks day? That's how we grow the pod, if you know, you know. Nick and I, I'll see you tomorrow. Can't wait. And before we go, happy birthday to win some Toritich, who just turned 30 over in Sin City, Cincinnati.

And happy birthday, submit Bassack in Chittaghan. And Colin Rosenblum and his Gap hoodie, enjoy the birthday down in Venice Beach, California. Happy birthday to Maddie Sheff in Chicago. And Hammett's chief cheerleading officer, Tony Drocton, just had a birthday in Hermosa Beach, California. Happy 10th work anniversary to Michael Henry at Techstar Chiropractice. And to anyone else celebrating something today, make it a t-boy. Celebrate the wins. Robin Hood Snacks, newsletters, and podcasts reflect the opinions of only the authors who are associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and do not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets, Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates.

They are meant for informational purposes only and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, cryptocurrency, or investment strategy in any account. This is not an offer or sale of a security, not a research report, and is not intended to serve as the basis for any investment decision. Any third-party information provided therein does not reflect the views of Robintoe Markets Inc, Robinto Financial LLC, or any of their subsidiaries or affiliates. All investments involve risk, including loss of principle and past performance does not guarantee future results. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member FINRA, SIPC. You want a doll up.

You don't want to smear.