It felt a little like the 1990s on Tuesday, as Coca-Cola took center stage in the stock market after the soft-drink leader reported strong second-quarter earnings.

Coke stock rallied 5% to $88.27 after touching a record $90 earlier in the session.

Other consumer stocks gained, including PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, and Procter & Gamble, as investors continued to rotate out of technology, with the State Street Technology Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund losing 1.8%.

Coke has reasserted itself as the staples industry leader. It now has a higher price/earnings ratio based on projected 2026 profits than all but two of the Magnificent Seven stocks.

Coke now trades for around 27 times projected 2026 earnings. Only Apple and Tesla have higher P/Es among the Mag Seven. Nvidia Amazon.com, and Microsoft trade for about 22 times, while Meta Platforms fetches just 15 times estimated 2026 earnings per share.

Coke shares are up 26% this year, topping all of the Mag Seven stocks and crushing its arch-rival PepsiCo, which is about flat. Pepsi trades for a 10 multiple-point discount to Coke after commanding a premium to Coke just several years ago. That’s one of the widest gaps in 30 years.

The soft-drink leader now has a market value of $380 billion—larger than Oracle —but less than a tenth the size of market giants Nvidia and Apple, at more than $4 trillion each.

Coke was a stock market leader in the 1990s when it rose sevenfold in the decade. Its shares peaked at more than $40 in 1998, when it commanded over 40 times earnings—profits that were inflated by one-time sales of bottling businesses.

Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett shrewdly accumulated a stake of 400 million shares of Coke in the late 1980s at an average price of about $3 a share and basked in Coke’s surge in the ensuing decade. The Coke score helped cement Buffett’s stock-picking reputation.

In a bit of hubris, however, Buffett wrote in 1997 that Coke was one of a few investment “inevitables” —the other being Gillette—that “will dominate their fields worldwide for an investment lifetime.”

Coke indeed has continued to dominate the soda business, but its stock has lagged behind the market and the tech sector over the past 30 years amid uneven growth.

Berkshire remains Coke’s largest shareholder, at around 9%, and has benefited from the stock’s gains this year. Coke is the third-largest holding in Berkshire’s $360 billion equity behind Apple and American Express. Berkshire’s Class B stock popped 3% Tuesday to $512, its largest percentage gain in more than a year.

Coke deserves credit for its focus and execution on the soft-drink business when many observers viewed it as challenged several years ago due to health concerns about sugary sodas in the U.S. and overseas, where the company generates over 60% of its profits.

Critics like billionaire investor Bill Ackman in 2023 attacked Coke and Pepsi for contributing to the global obesity and diabetes epidemic by selling high-sugar soft drinks. Ackman tweeted then that they “have caused more harm to global health than likely any other company.”

Undaunted, Coke doubled down on beverages while rival PepsiCo has focused more on its snack-food business. The two companies’ fortunes have diverged. PepsiCo is seeking to boost margins and overall profits amid pressure from activist investor Elliott Management, while Coke is operating in the clear.

Coke has scored with diet sodas led by Coke Zero, which saw another strong quarter, with unit case volume rising 16% in the June period. Coke’s adjusted earnings per share rose 11% in the second quarter while net revenue rose 7%.

The company guided to 9% to 10% growth in 2026 earnings per share, boosted by about three percentage points of benefits from currency gains, with the overall guidance a percentage point better than the prior guidance.

That’s far from growth in the teens and even higher that many tech giants have produced, but Coke has a capital-light model that contrasts with the increasingly capital-intensive model of many tech leaders. Investors like Coke’s ample free cash flow, projected about $12 billion this year. It pays a 2.5% dividend.

Some investors would say that Coke’s valuation is excessive given its relatively modest earnings growth, health issues, and the threat of GLP-1 diet drugs, but many are comfortable with the resilience of its business model. For now, things do go better with Coke.