Campbell Soup's hot stock

I'm not a fan of soup; never had the stuff in my life. But I notice that Wall Street is liking Campbell Soup's (NYSE: CPB) stock today; at the time of this writing, the shares are up a little over 6%. Guess there's money to be made in that soup stuff, no matter what I may think.

For the second quarter, Campbell saw a 7% rise in net sales. Earnings from continuing operations were $0.67 per diluted share for the quarter compared to $0.65 per diluted share for the year-ago period. Gee, that doesn't sound like such hot growth. But as some articles have observed, Campbell's stock has been sold off in recent months, so this is sort of a buy-on-the-news scenario. Plus, total soup sales increased 4% in Q2, and the baking/snacking segment increased its top line by 8% -- those iconic Goldfish crackers will not be stopped, let me tell you. And you know what else is doing well? Those V8 V-Fusion beverages. I've been drinking a ton of that stuff lately; those drinks really are superb. Gross margin was down, though. I don't like that, but I do enjoy the fact that operational cash flow increased for the first half of the year: that metric came in at $442 million...in the previous comparable period, Campbell booked $328 million. Campbell recently decided to dump its Godiva brand.

I didn't find this earnings report so exciting, but Campbell Soup is like Kraft (NYSE: KFT), Kellogg (NYSE: K), General Mills (NYSE: GIS), and Hershey (NYSE: HSY) -- it has a valuable portfolio of foodstuffs that people buy every day, and it pays a dividend that should go up over time. It's not my favorite dividend-reinvesting name right now, but it'll be around for the long term. And even though I am not helping out investors by shunning soup, I do have to reiterate my love for those V8 Fusion drinks -- believe me, I'm aiding the company significantly on that front.