Jim Cramer’s Take on 24 Stocks: Cisco, Eli Lilly, and Ford

7. General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS)

General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) was one of the stocks on which Jim Cramer shared his take, explaining that dot-com analogies do not hold up in this market. Cramer called it one of the most “reliable stocks,” as he remarked:

…Anything food, forget about it. Hormel, General Mills, McCormick, they all hit lows today. General Mills, one of the most reliable stocks here in the entire market, now sports a 7.2% yield. That seems pretty high for a quality company like this. Market hasn’t yet caught on to the benefits of that McCormick buying Hellmann’s from Unilever. Hormel’s just plain unfathomable, and the dividend yield of 5.8% seems mighty high, not as high as Campbell’s at 7.56%… You don’t get those kinds of deals unless people are worried that the dividend will need to be cut. That’s what it’s saying.

General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) provides branded foods, including cereals, snacks, meals, baking products, frozen items, ice cream, and pet food. A caller inquired about the stock during the April 20 episode, and Cramer responded:

Okay, Mills doesn’t want to hear this, Jeff Harmening doesn’t want to hear this, but they gotta combine. A lot of these companies just have to combine, and maybe with this administration, they could because they have to start playing offense, and they can’t right now because there’s too many negatives in the food group. Unless it’s just going to be a group that goes down for years and years and years, they have to do some combinations, and they gotta do them now.