Vital Farms has cut its full-year sales and profit forecasts, saying new listings reached shelves late and will add less to the US egg firm’s top line in the near term than expected.
The “pasture-raised” egg producer now expects annual net revenue of around $730m, down from the $775m to $800m the company outlined with its second-quarter results in August.
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Vital Farms is also forecasting a full-year adjusted EBITDA loss of around $15m, compared with its previous guidance of a gain of between $0 and $10m.
CFO Thilo Wrede said the revised outlook “reflects the later-than-anticipated timing of certain new distribution placements, a more conservative assumption for their near-term velocity contribution and no assumed seasonal uplift in demand or conventional egg pricing”.
The Nasdaq-listed company also withdrew its 2030 financial targets, saying it would “revisit long-term targets” once it had made “more progress” on expanding margins and improving profitability.
The warning came as Vital Farms reported third-quarter net revenue of $182.2m, down 8.4% from a year earlier. The company said a price and mix decline of $14.3m and lower volumes drove the year-on-year fall, excluding breaker and wholesale channel sales.
Vital Farms also reported a quarterly net loss of $6.5m, or $0.15 per diluted share, against net income of $16.4m a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA also fell to $1.5m in the third quarter ended 27 September, from $27.4m in the prior-year quarter.
Executive chairperson, president and CEO Russell Diez-Canseco said: “Q3 represented a meaningful sequential improvement from Q2, consistent with our previously communicated expectation that Q2 would represent the trough in our financial performance.
“Net revenue and adjusted EBITDA both improved sequentially, distribution expanded, we reached record dollar and volume share of the shell egg category, and we made progress reducing excess supply and lowering our cost structure.”
The company expects further “sequential improvement” in the fourth quarter, supported by “lower anticipated breaker and supply-management costs”, as well as by “the benefit of recent distribution gains and structural cost actions”.
