Obviously the market has freaked out about the possible effects of a fall-off in resource investment, but the company has already started diversifying into food testing and other areas to help protect it from the shortfall. That's what I like about them – while the media only seem to have started talking about the increasing importance of food in the past few weeks, Campbells/ALS have been positioning themselves in that space for a couple of years. And if food production is important, reliable testing becomes even more so. Think melamine contamination, for example, where children died as a result of the introduction of a poisonous additive introduced into milk precisely because it exploited a gap in the testing regime. When that kind of thing is going on, better testing can only help increase consumer confidence, which is especially important when it's a matter of what we eat.
CPB Price at posting:
$8.87 Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Held