Screen the sector built on brands households buy in good times and bad.
Consumer staples cover food, beverages, household products and discount retail — categories people keep buying regardless of the economic cycle. That stability makes staples a classic defensive holding, but slow growth means the real screen is whether a brand still commands pricing power, or is quietly losing share to private label.
Illustrative — not investment advice.
| Ticker | Company | Sub-industry | Quality Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMT | Walmart | Discount & grocery retail | 6.6/10 |
| PG | Procter & Gamble | Household & personal care products | 7.5/10 |
| COST | Costco Wholesale | Membership warehouse retail | 7.8/10 |
| KO | Coca-Cola | Beverages | 6.5/10 |
| PEP | PepsiCo | Beverages & snack foods | 6.6/10 |
| PM | Philip Morris International | Tobacco products | 6.8/10 |
| MO | Altria Group | Tobacco products | 6.9/10 |
| MDLZ | Mondelez International | Snack foods | 4.8/10 |
| CL | Colgate-Palmolive | Household & personal care products | 6.8/10 |
| KMB | Kimberly-Clark | Household paper products | 5.9/10 |
| TGT | Target | General merchandise & grocery retail | 5.3/10 |
| KDP | Keurig Dr Pepper | Beverages | 4.7/10 |
Brand strength shows up in the gross margin line; staples that can hold pricing without losing volume to private label carry a durable margin cushion.
Staples are the classic dividend-compounder sector; a long, uninterrupted growth streak is a proxy for cash-flow stability through every kind of economic cycle.
Low but steady growth only pays off if it converts to real free cash flow; FCF yield distinguishes genuine compounders from brands running to stand still.
Separating volume from price hikes shows whether a brand is actually selling more, or just raising prices while unit demand quietly erodes.
Retailer own-brands are taking share from national names as price-conscious shoppers trade down, pressuring volumes for staples brands without the strongest loyalty.
Widespread use of appetite-suppressing medications is starting to dent volumes for snack and soda makers, a structural question the sector is still working out.
After years of inflation-driven price hikes, staples companies are leaning back on volume growth and cost efficiency rather than further price increases to grow earnings.
Each one opens the screener with these filters already on the bar — change any of them, or save the screen under your own name.
Income first — a dividend-yield floor, with valuation and free-cash-flow filters to screen out yield traps.
Durable, capital-efficient businesses: high returns on capital and fat margins, still growing.
Smaller companies compounding revenue faster than the market has noticed, and paying for themselves in cash.
Every card above opens the screener with the sector filter and its own bounds already on the bar. Change any of them — nothing here is fixed.
Stack valuation, profitability, growth, dividend and financial-health filters. Each one is a range with presets, the table answers as you move a bound, and every filter says how many companies it excluded for want of a value.
Open any survivor for the four intrinsic-value models, then save it to a watchlist with a margin-of-safety target so each name carries an undervalued / fair / rich signal.
Screen for resilient gross margins, a long dividend growth streak, solid free-cash-flow yield and genuine organic volume growth. That favours brands with real pricing power over those growing earnings purely through price hikes.
Open the company’s Intrinsic Value tab: Lemma Analysis prices it four ways at once — Advanced DCF, Ben Graham, Simple DCF and the Dividend Discount Model — and draws all four on one axis against today’s price, with every assumption editable and a bear/base/bull case behind each one. There is deliberately no blended figure; which methods fit the company is stated instead, with the reason beside any that does not. Staples are the sector the dividend model was written for — decades of steady payout growth — so it is worth reading beside the cash-flow builds rather than after them. Intrinsic Value is free for 3 companies a day with no account needed, and unlimited on Ultimate, which every new account gets for seven days without a card.
There is no one answer for a sector, and a page that gave you one would be stating a figure it cannot keep true. What the Fair Value tab does instead is ask it per company: seven multiples — P/E, Yield, P/FCF, P/OCF, P/S, EV/EBITDA and P/B — each measured against that company’s own history, so today’s reading is a percentile of what the market has actually paid for it rather than a comparison with a sector average. Decades of unbroken payout growth make the dividend lens unusually informative here — and it is read the other way up, so a yield above its own history is the cheap end rather than the dear one. Fair Value is free for 3 companies a day with no account needed, and unlimited on Ultimate, which every new account gets for seven days without a card.
Yes — the screener is part of Ultimate. Every new account gets Ultimate for seven days with no credit card, which is enough to build a consumer staples screen, sort it and keep it; a screen you save stays on your account.
Demand for groceries, household products and everyday beverages barely changes with the economic cycle, so staples earnings and dividends tend to hold up better than cyclical sectors in a downturn — though slower growth is the trade-off.
The screener is part of Ultimate, and every new account gets it for seven days: create an account, confirm your email, and the trial starts without a card. What you have built stays yours either way — a screen is an address, so the link you saved keeps working the day you subscribe.