General Mills Treads Water

These are not great days to be a packaged food company. The lousy economy seriously limits what you can do in terms of price increases (at least without resorting to sneaky tricks like shrinking the contents), but production prices keep creeping up. Retailers like Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) and Target (NYSE:TGT) are increasingly looking to reduce the number of brands in each category, so they can make the producers jump through all sorts of hoops. On top of all that, public health officials routinely harangue them about the nutritional value of their products and their role in worsening the health of consumers. 

With all that in mind, then, a "just muddling through" result from General Mills (NYSE:GIS) should not be all that bad really. The catch, though, is that some of the food stocks have been moving up lately and it does not seem like an okay result is going to satisfy investors.
 
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