In its 135-year history, McCormick has become the leading global manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of spices, herbs, extracts, seasonings, and other flavorings. Beyond consumers, McCormick's customer base includes top quick-service restaurants, retail grocery chains, and other packaged food and beverage manufacturers. And its reach is extensive, with nearly 40% of sales generated beyond its home turf to 150 other countries and territories. In addition to its namesake brand, the firm's portfolio includes Old Bay, Zatarain's, Thai Kitchen, Frank's RedHot, French's, and Cholula, among others.

McCormick & Company manufactures and markets spices, seasonings, mixes, and condiments for the consumer, industrial, and foodservice markets. In August 2017, the company purchased Reckitt Benckiser's RB Foods division for $4.2 billion, acquiring brands such as French's Mustard, Frank's RedHot hot sauce, and Cattlemen's BBQ Sauce. The company has a market cap of $21.5 billion.

Ranking the Magnificent Seven During the first phase of unbridled AI enthusiasm, all of the so called 'Magnificent Seven' stocks were loved as their opportunity appeared to be unlimited. The market is now more skeptical toward perceived AI winners, which has led to a natural tendency to rank the Mag 7 on their go-forward prospects. We see Amazon moving up in the ranks, while Nvidia continues to command the top spot. If we were to rank the Mag 7 on their intermediate-term prospects (which we are not doing officially), our list in descending order would be Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Tesla. All the Mag 7 names have something in common. They are all dominant in at least one core competency; and they have leveraged the immense cash flows thrown off by their core competencies to invest in and develop the generative AI opportunity. 'Ranking' the Mag 7 on their intermediate-term prospects, therefore, involves assessing each company's ability to defend and nurture its core business while using that strength to gain share within the AI ecosystem. We continue to put Nvidia at the top of the Mag 7 list. Unlike the other six names, Nvidia's core competency is artificial intelligence. The need for realistic rendering in GPU-based gaming, Nvidia's founding business, laid the groundwork for the applications acceleration and the massively parallel computing that are cornerstones of training large language models (LLMs) and enabling inference. We rank Nvidia number one based on the evidence in the company's own growth numbers, which are stellar. In its recent fiscal 4Q25, revenue of $39 billion grew 78% annually. At its GTC event in March 2025, Nvidia forecast that data-center revenue would exceed $1 trillion annually in the next few years, and that the entire global industrial infrastructure represented a $50 trillion opportunity for AI renewal. Nvidia also provides much more than its industry leading GPUs, including its CUDA software library, and is 'turbo-charging' agentic AI development with open-reasoning models, platforms, and partnerships. The best evidence of Nvidia's momentum is the growth of the enterprise infrastructure companies using Nvidia solutions to support the mainstreaming of AI. Micron's data-center revenue tripled year over year and now exceeds 50% of total company revenue. Micron increased the TAM for its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) opportunity to $35 billion as of March 2025, up from $20 billion approximately half a year ago. Among the leading U.S.-based GPU server providers, Dell Technologies posted $10 billion in AI sever revenue in FY25 and expects $15 billion in FY26. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise exited fiscal 1Q25 with $8.3 billion in cumulative AI systems and services orders. The leaders in data center interconnects (DCIs), Broadcom and Marvell, are both reporting explosive growth in these categories. We put Meta Platforms in second place because it has been among the most successful in leveraging its core competency (social media) into a leadership role in building LLMs, including multi-modal models. Snap has a limited opportunity, and X is stunted by self-inflicted wounds and perceived Musk contagion. Only Asia-based companies such as ByteDance (TikTok) represent a real threat. We see some risk to the core business from seemingly endless EU and U.S. congressional opposition; and Meta's social-media cornerstones (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) could be carved cleanly in three. We do not see that happening, however. Meta has successfully pivoted from the Zuckerberg's expensive obsession with the metaverse to the more-practical and fast-developing AI opportunity. Unlike AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, Meta is successfully enabling and advancing leading LLMs even though it is not a major provider of hybrid cloud services. We see Meta first and foremost deploying AI internally to improve operating efficiency and personal targeting so as to optimize the company's social media user base, which exceeds 3.3 billion. Facebook Reality Labs, which houses Meta's Gen AI business, posted revenue of $2.1 billion in 2024, just 1% of total Meta revenue. Currently, this is mainly a hardware-based business (Quest VR headsets, Ray-Ban AR glasses), but we see long-term growth opportunity as Meta's Llama LLMs go mainstream. Much as Apple capitalized on the vast iOS installed base and targeted the individual with iCloud, Meta could offer a personalized AI offering to its more-than three billion users. We put Amazon in third place on a variety of metrics. The company's online retail operations and particularly its Prime business are without a global peer. The combined retail operating margin (Americas and International) for 4Q24 was 6.1%, by far the highest in our model going back to company's inception. Prime's media is now rivaling Netflix in content quality and volume. AWS is the leading CSP globally, and its rising margins and cash flows are funding the company's Gen AI opportunity. Amazon was quick to replace the head of AWS in May 2024 when the board perceived that the company was lagging in Gen AI. AWS is at a $110 billion annual revenue run rate and margins are at or near record highs. Both internally and in partnership with Anthropic and others, AI has produced Bedrock Marketplace, where clients can choose from over 100 LLMs; Trainium and Trainium 2 accelerators; and Amazon Nova, an extensive family of foundational models. In fourth place is Apple, whose core competency is global leadership in technology devices and services. Apple has been somewhat disappointing in its early efforts in AI. The company is even going outside its usual reliance on internal capabilities to enlist support from companies such as OpenAI. But we have long regarded Apple as a product perfector, not a product pioneer; early iteration mobile phones such as DynaTAC and StarTAC amazed, but they are long gone while iPhone grows in dominance. Investors are also concerned about Apple's declining China sales. Yet in the most-recent fiscal 1Q25, Apple grew revenue in all other regions. The company's massive iOS installed base exceeds 2.2 billion, providing fertile ground for continued growth in services. In fifth place is Microsoft, which has leveraged is core competency in enterprise software into Azure, the number two CSP behind AWS. Like all of the companies mentioned above that are not named Nvidia, Microsoft is challenged in getting sufficient supply of advanced Blackwell products to build and run its most-advanced models. Microsoft's cloud business has never been as profitable as AWS, although that may partly be due to which assets are allocated to the cloud division. Microsoft has had a few missteps in rolling out its Gen AI models, and both CNBC and Invezz recently questioned whether Microsoft was becoming an AI laggard. We note, however, that Microsoft Copilot has seen meaningful share gains and represents the first real threat to our sixth-place company. Alphabet used to be named Google, and that name has been synonymous with internet search for decades. AI-assisted products such as Copilot and OpenAI's SearchGPT may be starting to cut into Google's search dominance. With many enterprises and consumers using Microsoft Edge as their browsers, Copilot 'conveniently' pops up atop many searches. Google is seen as a pioneer in AI, created technologies underpinning early LLMs, and was a leader in the space until OpenAI exploded on the scene. After the hasty and flubbed Bard launch, Google Cloud has done much better with Gemini. Alphabet, like Meta, has been a particular target of U.S. and EU regulators. In August 2024, Alphabet was named a monopolist in a case brought by the Justice Department and 37 states. Breaking up Alphabet, however, would cleave the one big profitable business of Google Search and perhaps YouTube from all the expensive and unprofitable growth areas in Other Bets, including Waymo, Google Cloud, and the AI initiative. At the tail end of the Mag 7 ranking is Tesla, whose core competency is electric vehicles. This space is becoming crowded, and China's BYD is much bigger and has developed fast-charging technology that is currently unmatched. The U.S. under President Biden sought to protect Tesla and U.S. EVs with massive tariffs on EV imports. Tesla CEO Elon Musk and President Trump are in sync, although the current president previously disparaged EVs in favor of internal combustion engines (ICE) vehicles. Tesla, like X (the former Twitter), is suffering some level of Musk contagion, although the number of users reselling their cars due to perceptions about Musk is not yet a major impediment. Instead, we see Tesla at risk from commoditization of EVs and competition from rivals, both domestic and foreign. While we did not incorporate valuation into our rankings, these companies are not hugely expensive due to the recent correction in growth sectors and the generally strong operating prospects for core businesses. We expect our rankings for the Mag 7 may be fluid, but do not foresee any movement in first place or last place.

In its 135-year history, McCormick has grown to become the leading global manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of spices, herbs, extracts, seasonings, and other flavorings. Beyond consumers, McCormick's customer base also includes top quick-service restaurants, retail grocery chains, and other packaged food and beverage manufacturers. And its reach is extensive, with nearly 40% of sales generated beyond its home turf to include 150 other countries and territories. In addition to its namesake brand, the firm's portfolio includes Old Bay, Zatarain's, Thai Kitchen, Frank's RedHot, French's, and Cholula, among others.