Good news for those who frequent supermarket chain Metro (TSE:MRU) in Canada; you will have access to a new kind of hydration beverage from Cizzle Brands, Cwench Hydration. This is big news for Cizzle, and a nice new addition to the product line for Metro. Investors were nonplussed, however, and sent Metro shares down fractionally in Thursday morning’s trading.
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The new beverage will be available in powdered packets, reports noted, and 47 different Metro locations will have them available before January 2025 comes to an end. They will be found, perhaps a bit incongruously, in the pharmacy section. This marks the first time that Cizzle Brands has landed a product in a major supermarket chain, the reports noted, although it has been available in several other stores for some time now.
Those interested can currently find the beverage mix packets, available in 10-count packets, at Sport Chek, Source for Sports, and Canadian Tire (CDNAF) locations. With the Metro launch, the total number of points that Cwench Hydration will be available in numbers over 1,300 total. Cwench, for its part, hopes that the rising availability of its drinks will bring them into the mainstream fairly soon.
Facing Down New Favorites
The news comes at a good time for Metro; a recent study discovered that Canada’s favorite grocery store is certainly not Metro. It also is not Sobey’s, or even Loblaw (LBLCF). In fact, Canada’s favorite grocery store is not even really Canadian at all. That honor goes to, amazingly, Costco (COST).
The word from Narcity revealed that Costco proved a serious winner in the grocery store stakes thanks to its “…unbeatable value and customer loyalty.” With over 6,000 Canadian grocery shoppers surveyed to figure out who took the top marks home, the study asked said shoppers to rate the various stores by digital experience, consistency of operations, quality, speed and convenience, and of course, price, along with promotions and rewards. Costco proved the only Canadian retailer to score “above average” in both quality and price.
Is Metro Stock a Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on TSE:MRU stock based on one Buy and four Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After an 34.64% rally in its share price over the past year, the average TSE:MRU price target of C$93.80 per share implies 3.55% upside potential.
