Casual restaurant chain Noodles & Company (NASDAQ:NDLS) will be reporting results tomorrow after market hours. Here’s what to expect.

Noodles missed analysts’ revenue expectations by 2.5% last quarter, reporting revenues of $122.8 million, down 4% year on year. It was a disappointing quarter for the company, with a significant miss of analysts’ EBITDA and EPS estimates.

Is Noodles a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.

This quarter, analysts are expecting Noodles’s revenue to be flat year on year at $123.4 million, improving from the 8.9% decrease it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted loss is expected to come in at -$0.12 per share.

Analysts covering the company have generally reconfirmed their estimates over the last 30 days, suggesting they anticipate the business to stay the course heading into earnings. Noodles has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates six times over the last two years.

Looking at Noodles’s peers in the modern fast food segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. CAVA delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 28.3%, beating analysts’ expectations by 2.2%, and Shake Shack reported revenues up 14.8%, in line with consensus estimates. CAVA’s stock price was unchanged after the results, while Shake Shack was down 2.2%.

Read our full analysis of CAVA’s results here and Shake Shack’s results here.

Stocks, especially growth stocks where cash flows further in the future are more important to the story, had a good 2024. An economic soft landing (so far), the start of the Fed's rate cutting campaign, and the election of Donald Trump were positives for the market, and while some of the modern fast food stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underperformed, with share prices down 10.1% on average over the last month. Noodles is down 23.3% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $3 (compared to the current share price of $1.27).

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