This Ridiculously Cheap Growth Stock Could Make You a Millionaire

1 hour ago 3

Micah Zimmerman, The Motley Fool

Tue, May 12, 2026 astatine 8:07 AM CDT 4 min read

Hormel Foods (NYSE: HRL) is not a sanction that generates excitement astatine meal parties oregon successful concern portfolios. That is, successful a existent sense, my full thesis for wherefore this banal could marque you a millionaire implicit time. The banal trades adjacent $20 a share, down astir 47% implicit 5 years. The valuation hasn't been this debased since the aboriginal 2010s.

The brands this seasoned institution manages see Spam, Skippy, Planters, Jennie-O, Applegate, Justin's, and Hormel Black Label, a portfolio of proteins and snacks that inhabit immoderate of the stickiest positions successful the American market aisle. These are habitual brands. The user who reaches for Skippy peanut food does not comparison-shop. Neither does the 1 buying Spam for a look they person made for 30 years.

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The carnivore lawsuit connected Hormel is existent and worthy naming first: Retail conception volumes person been soft, earthy worldly costs ran blistery done 2024 and 2025, and the institution spent 3 years navigating commodity ostentation that deed its protein-heavy outgo operation harder than astir packaged nutrient peers.

A idiosyncratic buying astatine a market store.

Hormel's bull lawsuit

But the bull lawsuit is gathering from the bottommost up, 4th by quarter. Q1 fiscal 2026 marked the 5th consecutive 4th of integrated nett income growth, a streak that the institution did not person 2 years ago. Foodservice and International some delivered precocious single-digit integrated growth, with Spam starring branded export maturation successful China and crossed planetary markets. The Foodservice transmission -- wherever Hormel sells to edifice operators, hospitals, universities, and hotels -- carries structurally higher margins than retail, and its betterment is simply a awesome that the measurement problems are concentrated successful 1 channel, not the full enterprise.

The portfolio is besides getting leaner. In February 2026, Hormel announced the merchantability of its whole-bird turkey concern to Life-Science Innovations. This was a deliberate exit from a commodity macromolecule conception with volatile margins, and it antecedently exited non-core private-label snack seed items for the aforesaid reason. Each divestiture narrows the concern toward branded, value-added products wherever pricing powerfulness exists and private-label contention is weaker.

Interim CEO Jeff Ettinger framed it precisely astatine the CAGNY 2026 conference: "Hormel is simply a planetary branded nutrient company, centered connected protein, built astir a heavy knowing of the consumer." That is not a holding signifier statement. It is simply a portfolio thesis.

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