Let’s start with this week’s filings. Conagra filed an earnings release for its fiscal first-quarter 2025, which ended on Aug. 26. That release included the following:

• Net sales decreased by 3.8 percent; and organic net sales decreased 3.5 percent.

• Operating margin declined by 247 basis points to 14.4 percent. 

• EPS rose 44.8 percent to $0.97 (good), but adjusted EPS fell 19.7 percent to only $0.53 (bad). 

And as icing on the cake, Conagra forecast that organic net sales for fiscal 2025 would be flat to 1.5 percent compared to 2024. 

Then we noticed that Lamb Weston (“seeing possibilities in potatoes,” its motto says) also filed an earnings release for its fiscal first-quarter 2025, happening in the same period. Those disclosures weren’t any better:

• Net sales declined 1 percent, to $1,654 million.

• Income from operations declined 34 percent, to $212 million

• Adjusted EPS declined 55 percent to $0.73.

Lamb also announced a restructuring plan that called for closing a production facility in Washington state, temporarily curbing production and schedules in North America, and cutting the workforce (of more than 10,000 employees) by 4 percent. The restructuring plan is expected to result in a pretax charge of $200 million to $250 million.

We follow the food business here at Calcbench because it’s a good indicator of where consumers are financially. If they’re spending less on food, that suggests that either (a) prices are falling; or (b) consumers have less disposable cash to spend on food. Either way, that tells you something about the macro-economic environment.

So we had two food businesses posting distasteful numbers on the same day. Well, what have their peers been saying lately?

One can easily check that by visiting the Company-in-Detail page for whatever firm you’re analyzing; we list that firm’s closest peers in the upper-right corner of the page. Figure 1, below, shows (with a red arrow) the peers we list for Conagra as an example.

Then we cracked open the disclosures for one of those peers: $CPB, otherwise known as Campbell Soup Co. Clicking on the ticker brings you to Campbell’s Company-in-Detail display; from there we jumped to the Disclosure & Footnotes page to pull up Campbell’s most recent earnings release, filed on Aug. 29 to report on its fiscal 2024 year.

Again, underwhelming stuff! Campbell did see net sales jump 11 percent, but that was largely on the back of its $2.9 billion Sovos Brands acquisition, a deal dissected on the Calcbench blog earlier this year. Organic sales, which are a more useful, apples-to-apples comparison, actually decreased by 1 percent.

Further down the earnings release, we saw Campbell’s fiscal 2025 guidance. Net sales are predicted to be up 9 to 11 percent, but again, organic sales are only forecast to rise 0 to 2 percent.

We’re not food industry analysts, so we won’t predict what all this means; but clearly something is going on with large food businesses and anemic growth. You can check that yourself by… 

• Setting up email alerts to receive updates for when food companies you follow file something new;

• Use the Company-in-Detail page for a quick review of the income statement and to find peer firms;

• Use the Disclosure & Footnotes page to dig into the footnotes, where you’ll find disclosures about operating segments, organic growth, future earnings guidance, and more.

Food for thought as we wait for the next crop of earnings releases to arrive.