In a recent appearance on Schwab Network's Market on Close with Marley Kayden and Sam Vadas, Chris Wang provided expert insights on Starbucks, Visa, and Freshpet.
Starbucks (SBUX)
Starbucks is finishing the turnaround a lot of people doubted would work. Two years ago, Brian Niccol — the same operator who revived Chipotle and, before that, Taco Bell — took over a coffee chain that had just posted six straight quarters of declining sales. His ‘Back to Starbucks' plan was simple but unglamorous: shorten wait times, simplify the menu, rebuild the in-store experience, and staff up even though it hurt margins in the short term.
Two years in, And the numbers have come through — comparable sales grew 7.9% globally last quarter, the fourth consecutive quarter of growth after that long slump, and it came with margin expansion too, not just a sales bounce funded by discounting.
The next chapter is even bigger: Starbucks just announced a roughly $1 billion investment renovating thousands of cafes to make the physical stores feel like the community hub the brand built its reputation on decades ago. The store uplifts will include more seating, rugs, bookshelves, plants and softer furnishings. So this isn't a company declaring victory and coasting — it's a proven turnaround operator pivoting from ‘stop the bleeding' to ‘reinvest in growth,' which is usually the more profitable phase of a recovery story.
Visa (V)
Visa just crossed a historic threshold — payment volume topped $4 trillion in a single quarter for the first time ever. But the more interesting story for investors isn't the record, it's what Visa's building for what comes next: the payment rails for AI agents that shop and transact on your behalf. Meta Muse is giving consumers their first taste of an AI agent and it’s the most downloaded app recently.
For Visa, they creatted Visa Intelligent Commerce, and it's not just a concept — it's already live. A consumer links their Visa card to an AI agent, sets spending rules and limits, and the agent gets a special token instead of the actual card number, so it can complete purchases at any Visa-accepting merchant while Visa's fraud engines watch over every transaction in real time.
On the other side of the transaction, Visa allows lets merchants to accept payments from AI agents across all the major emerging protocols through a single integration, and makes their entire product catalog discoverable directly inside AI platforms.
This isn't theoretical. Visa says hundreds of real agent-initiated transactions have already gone through the system, with real merchant partners testing it live, and the company is projecting millions of consumers will use AI agents to complete purchases by this holiday season. Visa isn't waiting to see if agentic commerce becomes real — it's already built the infrastructure for when it does.
Freshpet (FRPT)
Freshpet is a pure bet on how people's relationship with their pets has fundamentally changed. Dogs and cats aren't just pets anymore in a lot of households — they're family members, and owners are increasingly unwilling to feed them the same shelf-stable kibble their grandparents did. Freshpet built its entire business around that shift, selling fresh, refrigerated pet food, and it's now capturing real market share because of it.
Last quarter was their strongest growth in over a year — net sales up 15.5%, and management said it came with their best gross margins since 2020, meaning this growth isn't costing them profitability to get. They raised full-year guidance for the second straight quarter, and the stock jumped nearly 13% the day they reported because Wall Street wasn't expecting acceleration in what's supposed to be a tougher consumer environment.
What makes this durable rather than a one-quarter story is the household penetration data — more families are buying Freshpet for the first time, and the ones who already do are buying more of it. That's the flywheel investors want to see: new customers coming in, existing customers spending more, in a category that's still a small fraction of the overall pet food market.
