Snack food company J&J Snack Foods (NASDAQ:JJSF) will be reporting earnings tomorrow afternoon. Here’s what investors should know.

J&J Snack Foods missed analysts’ revenue expectations by 1.2% last quarter, reporting revenues of $426.8 million, down 3.9% year on year. It was a disappointing quarter for the company, with a significant miss of analysts’ EBITDA and gross margin estimates.

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

This quarter, analysts are expecting J&J Snack Foods’s revenue to grow 3.8% year on year to $361.5 million, improving from its flat revenue in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.59 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. J&J Snack Foods has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates five times over the last two years.

Looking at J&J Snack Foods’s peers in the consumer staples segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Simply Good Foods delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 10.6%, missing analysts’ expectations by 1.9%, and McCormick reported revenues up 2.6%, topping estimates by 1.2%. Simply Good Foods traded down 6.5% following the results while McCormick was up 2.2%.

Read our full analysis of Simply Good Foods’s results here and McCormick’s results here.

Valuation multiples for many growth stocks have not yet reverted to their early 2021 highs, but the market has been optimistic as of late due to a soft landing. This is an economic situation where rate hikes successfully quelled inflation but did not send the economy into a recession. Furthermore, recent rate cuts and Donald Trump's triumph in the 2024 Presidential election have been tailwinds for the market, and while some of the consumer staples stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underpeformed, with share prices down 2.1% on average over the last month. J&J Snack Foods is down 7% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $187.25 (compared to the current share price of $137.23).

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