SodaStream Shares Soar After $3.2 Billion Pepsi Deal
*By Carlo Versano*
The sparkling water industry is a literal bubble market. But will it become a figurative one, too?
Pepsi execs just made a big bet that the thirst for healthier drinks will last: the company announced Monday it's buying Israel-based SodaStream for $3.2 billion in the latest efforts to guarantee continued relevance as younger customers [spurn](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/13/pepsico-earnings-q4-2017.html) soda and junk food. But the purchase is more than a nod to calorie-conscious drinkers, said Saabira Chaudhuri, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of the merger.
"This lets Pepsi get ahead of this potential backlash against single-service plastic," she said Monday in an interview on Cheddar.
Pepsi is hedging against its core product line and yielding to consumers' mounting concerns about plastic waste. It's a major issue in Western Europe, where SodaStream does the bulk of its sales, Chaudhuri said.
SodaStream has risen in popularity over the last several years but actually a long history that dates back to 1903. After a private-equity reorganization, the company went public in 2010, positioning itself as a DIY soda maker, but saw an opportunity in the sparkling water market and rebranded itself as health-conscious and eco-friendly alternative to soda ー a right place, right time approach that paid off.
An acquisition by one of the largest consumer brands in the world will allow SodaStream to expand globally and accelerate its research and development, Chaudhuri said.
"To have a company with the heft of Pepsi get behind you ー that's an expansion that they wouldn't be able to do on their own anytime soon."
Chaudhuri also said the deal reminds her of Unilever's [surprise purchase](http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/unilever-buys-dollar-shave-club-1-billion/305048/) of Dollar Shave Club in 2016 for $1 billion in cash. Both moves speak to a corporate realization that consumers' habits are changing. In the case of Unilever, the company bought into the subscription model trend. With Pepsi, it's about the shift to healthier, natural food and drink.
In both instances, it's about paying for, "small things that they know are working and then try to scale them," Chaudhuri said.
Pepsi already made a play for a piece of the sparkling water market earlier this year with the launch of its Bubly line [to tap into](https://www.businessinsider.com/pepsis-new-sparkling-water-line-aims-to-take-on-la-croix-fans-2018-2) rival La Croix's cult following. But SodaStream, with its counter top product, flavorings, and refillable CO2 cartridges, is something new.
"This is a completely different model for them," Chaudhuri said.
For full interview, [click here] (https://cheddar.com/videos/pepsi-adds-sodastream-to-healthy-drinks-lineup).
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
