Do These Food Companies Pass Buffett's Test?

We'd all like to invest like the legendary Warren Buffett, watching our initial thousands of dollars multiply into millions or more. Buffett analyzes companies by calculating return on invested capital in order to help determine whether a company can earn more from its money than it cost to make that money in the first place.

ROIC may be value investing's most important metric. By determining a company's ROIC, you can see how well it's using the cash you entrust to it, and whether it's actually creating value for you. Simply put, ROIC divides a company's operating profit by how much investment it took to get that profit:

ROIC = Net operating profit after taxes / Invested capital

If you need it, here's a more detailed explanation. This one-size-fits-all calculation eliminates excessive debt and many of the other legal accounting tricks that managers use to boost earnings numbers, and provides you with an apples-to-apples way to evaluate businesses, even across industries. The higher the ROIC, the more efficiently the company uses capital.

Ultimately, we're looking for companies that can invest their money at rates exceeding their cost of capital, which for most businesses lands between 8% and 12%. Ideally, we want to see ROIC above 12%, at a minimum. We also seek a history of increasing, or at least steady, returns, which indicate some durability to the company's economic moat.

Let's take a look at Mead Johnson Nutrition (NYSE: MJN) and three of its industry peers, to see how efficiently they use cash. Here are the ROIC figures for each company over a few periods.

Source: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's. *Reflects period before spinoff

Mead Johnson has maintained an enviable ROIC well above our threshold for attractiveness, suggesting its competitive position is secure. And you can see that in its stock price since its recent spinoff. Smucker has seen steadily, if slowly, climbing ROIC, suggesting that its position is improving. Herbalife has also shown remarkable ROIC, which has doubled in the last half-decade. Like Smucker, ConAgra has also shown steadily increasing returns.

Businesses with consistently high ROIC prove that they're efficiently using capital. They also have the ability to treat shareholders well, because they can use their extra cash to pay dividends, buy back shares, or further invest in their franchises. And anyone who knows Warren Buffett knows he loves healthy and growing dividends.

To find more successful investments, dig deeper than the earnings headlines, and unearth the company's ROIC. If you'd like to add these companies to your watchlist, or set up a new one, just click here .