Tyler Crowe

To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes.

Thanks for producer Dan Boyd and the rest of the Motley Fool team.

For Matt, John, and myself, thanks for listening, and we'll chat again soon.

It is merger mania this week.

This is Motley Fool Money.

Welcome to Motley Fool Money.

I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors Matt Frankel and Lou Whiteman, with three of us being part of the Hidden Gems team here at Motley Fool.

As we said, there has been a lot of movement in the merger and acquisition field in the past couple of days, and we're going to try to break down as many of those deals as we can.

Also, we're going to get to some listener questions.

To start, let's go with a lot of the deals that's going on in the food industry.

We had two doozies.

There must have been a lot of lawyers and investment bankers putting in extra hours this past weekend.

First, we got news on Monday that Cisco, the food distributor, not the networking hardware company,

was acquiring private retailer Restaurant Depot for $26 billion.

We'll get into the details in a second here.

But I think that was going to be the headline deal we're going to talk about.

Then this morning, we had an even bigger deal where McCormick basically said, hold my beer, because they decided to merge with Unilever's food division in a $44 billion deal.

What makes that striking is that McCormick itself is a $14 billion company, and Cisco

doing a $26 billion deal was a $30 billion company.

These are massive transformative changes in pretty sleepy consumer brand food distribution businesses.