Amelia Lucas
Amelia Lucas covers the business of restaurants and food companies for CNBC, focusing on how public chains, consumer brands and their investors make money and adapt to shifting demand. She is a restaurant reporter at CNBC and has been part of its newsroom since 2018, moving into a reporting role in 2021. Her work centers on the financial performance, deal activity and strategic decisions of restaurant operators, food-and-beverage manufacturers and related consumer companies. She brings finance-focused reporting to the consumer beat, using earnings results, bankruptcy filings and major transactions to explain the state of the industry.
Public restaurant chains and franchising
Lucas regularly reports on major restaurant chains such as Wendy’s and Starbucks, concentrating on how their corporate decisions affect franchisees, employees and customers. Her coverage of Yum Brands’ sale of Pizza Hut to private equity firm LongRange Capital and Yum China for $2.7 billion examines deal terms, ownership changes and implications for the company’s global footprint.
She reports on distress as well as growth, including a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by one of Wendy’s largest U.S. franchisees and what that means for the burger chain’s performance. She writes about Starbucks both at the quarterly-results level and through leadership decisions, covering earnings releases alongside stories on the CEO’s turnaround plan and cafe renovations.
Across these pieces she emphasizes financial metrics, franchise economics and how strategic moves show up in same-store sales and traffic.
Packaged food and beverage companies
Beyond restaurants, Lucas reports on large food-and-beverage companies such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, treating them as consumer businesses whose results reveal global demand and pricing power. Her earnings coverage follows revenue, volume and margin trends while tying them to specific campaigns or product categories, as in reporting on how a World Cup marketing push boosted Coca-Cola demand or how PepsiCo’s North American food business delivered volume growth. She connects brand strategy to the numbers, explaining how promotions, menu additions and portfolio shifts are intended to support growth in core snack and beverage lines.
She also tracks deals and partnerships that bring packaged-food brands into restaurant and grocery channels, reflecting an interest in how consumer packaged goods intersect with retail and foodservice distribution.
Consumer spending, pricing and health trends
Lucas uses company results as a window into consumer behavior, writing about how inflation, deflation and promotional pricing shape what shoppers buy and how retailers respond. In a joint piece on inflation versus deflation, she explores why some retailers fear falling prices even as consumers tire of rising costs, drawing on executives’ commentary and merchandising strategies. She covers how GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are changing Americans’ eating habits and forcing restaurants and food companies to rethink menus toward more protein, fiber and perceived healthfulness.
These broader trend stories still anchor in financial detail, linking shifts in diet, traffic and basket size to sales performance at restaurant chains and packaged-food companies. Taken together, her work blends financial reporting with close attention to consumer trends, giving a clear view of how restaurant and food companies navigate changing tastes, costs and competitive pressure.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.