BUDA
Buda Juice, Inc.
stock NYSEAMERICAN

Has anyone ever had BUDA JUICE? If so, is it any good?

i don't think they do white label. they used to have store locations but shutdown and went entirely wholesale.
but switch to who? 1-2 billion dollars is peanuts for any of the big companies... and too big for the small players. i think BUDA is in a comfortable position in the short to medium term... just long enough for them to execute their nationwide rollout.
H-E-B concentration seems natural. they started in texas.. and that's a major texas chain. and i don't see how that deal would sour. i'd imagine that H-E-B makes money and BUDA makes money.
in any case, BUDA is extremely overpriced if we consider just the texas operation. this is more of a speculative investment that hinges on a successful national rollout. they have a foot in the door at walmart and costco... and btw the ceo said costco contacted **them.** so i think H-E-B was where the business incubated... and currently they're piloting at walmart and costco.

the massive growth at H-E-B and the interest of costco.. leads me to believe that there is massive addressable demand in the contiguous states. their primary risk is logistics, execution, some sort of ecoli outbreak, and death. i think the ceo and chairman are in their 70s.
at this valuation and risk level i'm happy to own \~1% in my portfolio while rooting for the company and happily hope for volatility and price declines. so for me it's exciting but also low commitment. what do you think?

Juice just isn't that healthy. It's not ideal to be on the wrong side of The Glucose Revolution given that most premium shoppers are educated about this sort of thing.
HOWEVER, BUDA is < 0.2% of the market. So there's room for BUDA to take plenty of market share. \~20% SSS growth is phenomenal and definitely speaks to the product's appeal. So I'm still interested even though P/S is way higher than I usually go for. I don't yet know how much of the sales breakdown is Buda-branded vs. white-label, do you? If not I will need to ask HR. This is probably a critical data point b/c H-E-B is almost all of their sales (> 90%?) and if they have leverage to threaten to switch to another supplier (even if it would be suboptimal to actually switch) that is a substantial risk to the business model.

i mean... i don't see those fresh juice machines in costco, walmart, ralphs, wholefoods, sprouts... or pretty much any relevant american grocery store near me.
probably because american companies demand a massive return on equity. and if i had to guess, international and europe has a lower bar for ROIC.
idk i'm not sure about that.
but in BUDA's case in the states, no one will want to eat their lunch IMO. would someone like coca cola bend over to pick up 1-2 billion dollars? they could just borrow money and buyback stock for the same effect.
the opportunity is that american's are rich and too lazy to make their own fresh juice... usa ROE is too high for a well capitalized company to take this opportunity seriously, and it takes decades to develop a relationship with all the farmers to strike a deal for the best prices.
for context... to me it's a "neat" stock and i have less than a 1% weight. looking to buy more if the price gets lower.

Based on what you’ve written, BUDA potentially has an efficient operating model and could perform well. However, that’s nowhere close to demonstrating a moat / competitive advantage, which requires some form of barrier to entry - something competitors can’t simply replicate with sufficient investment. Juice is also a commodity-like product, which makes establishing such an advantage even harder.

“No one else has cracked it” is also demonstrably false. Automated fresh-juice machines in grocery stores are already well established internationally, including across Europe.