Costco to bring back in-store food sampling

Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi, Alexis Christoforous, and Heidi Chung break down the market action for Costco.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Let's take a look at one of the companies we're watching on yahoofinance.com and on our app. Costco is in the spotlight after the company announced it's bringing back its beloved in-store samples. Yahoo Finance's Heidi Chung is here and I'm sure extremely excited about this news.

HEIDI CHUNG: Yeah, Brian, I don't know about you, but I sure miss those samples when you go into Costco. The company actually telling us when it plans to bring back those samples on the conference call last night. You can expect them to make a comeback in mid-June, but the company's saying that it will be a slow-rollout basis.

The system is going to look a lot different than we previously saw before, and that's, of course, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company is planning to implement some new sanitary measures when it comes to those samples.

The CFO saying on the call yesterday, quote, "I can't tell you any more, but it's, needless to say, not going to be, you know, to just pick up on open sample with your fingers."

So not too much detail given in terms of what the entire process is going to look like. But yes, we can start to see them come back into Costco stores on a rolling basis starting in mid-June, Brian.

BRIAN SOZZI: And, Heidi, what about the food courts?

HEIDI CHUNG: I don't know if you've been to a Costco lately, but the food courts have been running a limited menu. So a lot of that is still going to be in place for a while. But again, in a couple of weeks we can start to see Costco bring back a lot of those beloved items. My local Costco when I went last week, they only had dogs and pepperoni and cheese pizza. But, of course, I missed my chicken bakes. I missed my churros and a lot of those items as well. So a lot of that will hopefully [INAUDIBLE]. The condiments system will likely change, and a lot of the different systems that they had in place previously will be different.

If you recall on May 4, the company put out a list of COVID-19 updates in terms of what their businesses were doing to sort of deal with all of that. But the food courts were only doing takeout, and that is still the case now. But we can certainly start to see a lot of the other dining areas come back into place in the cities and states in which the economies are open again now.