Earnings To Watch: Hormel Foods (HRL) Reports Q3 Results Tomorrow

Packaged foods company Hormel (NYSE:HRL) will be announcing earnings results this Thursday morning. Here’s what to look for.

Hormel Foods beat analysts’ revenue expectations by 1.7% last quarter, reporting revenues of $3.03 billion, up 4.6% year on year. It was a disappointing quarter for the company, with a significant miss of analysts’ adjusted operating income estimates and a significant miss of analysts’ EBITDA estimates.

Is Hormel Foods a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free for active Edge members.

This quarter, analysts are expecting Hormel Foods’s revenue to grow 3.6% year on year to $3.25 billion, a reversal from the 1.9% decrease it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.31 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. Hormel Foods has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates four times over the last two years.

Looking at Hormel Foods’s peers in the shelf-stable food segment, some have already reported their Q3 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. J&J Snack Foods’s revenues decreased 3.9% year on year, meeting analysts’ expectations, and SunOpta reported revenues up 16.6%, topping estimates by 5.2%. J&J Snack Foods traded up 7.8% following the results while SunOpta was down 28.3%.

Read our full analysis of J&J Snack Foods’s results here and SunOpta’s results here.

Investors in the shelf-stable food segment have had steady hands going into earnings, with share prices flat over the last month. Hormel Foods is up 7.9% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $26.69 (compared to the current share price of $23.19).

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