National Beverage Corp. (FIZZ): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $32.24, National Beverage Corp. (FIZZ) is priced for -4.8% growth. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-26.

Generated: 2026-09-07 · Exported: 2026-09-09 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/FIZZ

Headline

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

The operating-margin figure is value-band context at year 12: derived from the framework's value band, a separate calculation — not part of the priced-in solve.

Solve inputs: computed at a 8.2% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage.

How unusual the bet is: within-range (limited comparison data)

Valuation X-Ray

The price is justified by relative-multiple; asset-based/earnings-power/growth-DCF land below the price.

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

Families that justify the price: Relative Families that call it expensive: Asset, Earnings, Growth

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 9.0%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=15)

Solvency

Interest expense is not separately reported in the latest filings, so interest coverage cannot be computed.

Bullet Takeaways

• National Beverage owns its brands and lets its retail customers do most of the hauling, a structure that turned $1,180.6 million of fiscal 2026 net sales into $230.1 million of operating income with nothing borrowed against it.
• Volume is the problem: cases sold fell 6.7% in fiscal 2026, and the profit line was defended almost entirely by charging more for each case that did sell.
• First-quarter fiscal 2027 results are scheduled for September 10, 2026, the first report after a special dividend of $3.25 a share declared on July 1.

Bull Case

Maturity is not an insult in the beverage business. It means the growth argument has already been settled and the interesting question becomes what share of each dollar the company keeps, and who has a claim on the rest. National Beverage answers the first half of that cleanly. Fiscal 2026 net sales of $1,180.6 million produced operating income of $230.1 million, within a few million dollars of the $235.5 million booked the year before on one extra selling week. For a company selling flavored water and regional soda into the most contested shelf space in American retail, that steadiness is most of the case.

The mechanic behind it is unusual and worth a minute. Most beverage companies own trucks, drivers and route density. This one largely does not. Product leaves the plants on the retailer's own logistics, and the 10-K puts the benefit on the customer's side of the ledger: "This method allows our retail partners to further maximize their assets by utilizing their ability to pick up product at our warehouses". The marketing budget follows the same instinct. The company states plainly that "innovative marketing, packaging and consumer engagement is more effective in today's marketplace than traditional higher-cost national advertising". LaCroix was built on can design and word of mouth rather than national television inventory, and the saving shows up where you would expect it to: selling, general and administrative expense of $207.2 million in fiscal 2026, or 17.5% of net sales.

Pricing is where durability shows. The 10-K reports that "Average selling price per case increased by 5.2%" during fiscal 2026, while the average cost of sales per case rose 5.0%. Input inflation went through to the shelf and a sliver stayed behind. Gross profit came to $437.3 million against $443.9 million the prior year, a decline of roughly one and a half percent in a year that carried one fewer selling week than the one before it. That is a brand doing the job brands exist to do.

The funding picture changes how the rest reads. Interest paid across the whole of fiscal 2026 came to $278 thousand, a rounding item, while interest income ran $10.6 million against $9.3 million the year before, because the money sits on the company's side of the ledger and earns a return there. Working capital rose $191.4 million to $457.8 million. Capital spending was $25.1 million, down from $36.3 million, against a plant base the company describes as having adequate capacity. A business with that shape does not need anyone's permission to keep operating through a soft patch.

Set against its own cohort, the profitability holds up better than the size would suggest. KDP converts 20.8% of revenue into operating profit and MNST 29.3%, while COKE manages 13.3%, COCO 14.7%, and CELH, the fastest grower in the group, only 7.7% as it buys shelf position. National Beverage keeps close to twenty cents on the dollar, which puts it in the upper half of that set without owning a distribution fleet or paying for the advertising that usually comes with a national brand. Being small has not cost this company margin.

Bear Case

What the market is asking of this business is modest, and that is precisely what makes it fragile. It does not require growth. It requires the profit line to hold roughly where it is, or to fade gently. Fiscal 2026 shows how the holding was done: cases sold fell 6.7%, and the earnings were defended by charging more for each of the cases that still moved. Run that trade another year or two and the question stops being about input costs and becomes whether the shopper is walking.

The 10-K attributes the volume decline to outside forces, listing "government shutdowns, funding changes, inflation and cautious consumer spending". Some of that is real and none of it is controllable. But the same filing notes the decline hit the Power+ Brands, where LaCroix lives, and the carbonated soft drink brands at the same time. When a health-forward growth portfolio and a set of century-old regional sodas soften together, category mix is not the tidiest explanation available. The shelf tag is.

The competitive set is not standing still either. The filing concedes that rivals "have greater financial resources" and lists the ground the fight happens on: "price and promotional activity, advertising and marketing programs, point-of-sale merchandising, retail space management, customer service, product differentiation, packaging innovations and distribution methods". Most of those are line items a bigger balance sheet can simply outspend. Over the trailing year CELH grew revenue 123% and MNST 18%, while National Beverage's went the other way. Retail shelf space is finite and it gets allocated to whatever is turning.

Then there is the fee. The company is managed under an agreement with "Corporate Management Advisors, Inc. (CMA), a corporation owned by its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer", and the arrangement provides for "an annual base fee equal to one percent of the consolidated net sales of the Company". That came to $11.8 million in fiscal 2026 and $12.0 million the year before. Note what the fee is indexed to. Sales, not profit. So in a year when volume fell and management defended earnings by lifting the shelf tag, the fee tracked the top line, and it did so without anyone having to negotiate for it. Shareholder buybacks over the same period were a rounding error: 20,000 shares retired across fiscal 2026 for a total outlay of 0.7 million dollars, against an authorization with roughly 1.9 million shares still open.

And the apparent cheapness rests on a single lens. Peer multiples are the one family of method that reaches today's price; the asset-value, earnings-power and cash-flow approaches all land underneath it, by margins that are not small. A sector multiple applied to a company whose sales are shrinking while the sector's are growing is a comparison that flatters. Should operating profit slip from the $230.1 million it earned in fiscal 2026, the multiple that looks undemanding gets applied to a smaller number, and the holder discovers that cheap had been doing the work of a thesis.

Valuation

Strip out the money the company holds and the operating business is valued at about 11 times operating income. Run that backwards, at an 8.2% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a five-year stage, and the arithmetic hits a floor: what the market pays sits below what even a 5% annual decline in operating profit would warrant. That is a bound rather than a solved point, and it is worth stating plainly what it means. The market is not asking this company to grow. It is not asking it to hold flat either.

The methods used to triangulate a business like this do not agree, and the shape of the disagreement is the useful part. Peer multiples are the one lens that reaches the price and reaches comfortably past it: measured on what the beverage sector fetches per dollar of sales and of earnings, the shares look unremarkable. The other three land underneath. The price sits about 45% above where the asset-value lens comes out, about 48% above the earnings-power lens, and about 50% above the cash-flow lens.

The reason for that split is not mysterious. The methods landing below all capitalize what the company earns today and credit nothing beyond it. One takes normalized operating profit averaged over five years, taxes it, and divides by the cost of capital. Another does the same with what the business throws off after capital spending, at a 9.3% required return. Neither carries a dollar of future growth, and against revenue that has drifted sideways for three years that is a defensible starting point rather than a gloomy one. The peer lens asks a different question entirely: what do other beverage companies fetch, and what would this one fetch on the same terms. Both readings are honest. The shares trade between them.

Against the cohort the multiple genuinely is low, in the lower half of the peer range. Growth is why. COCO grew revenue 23% over the trailing year and COKE 8.8%, while National Beverage's revenue fell, and the market pays for the direction of travel as much as for the level of profitability. What it is not paying for here is leverage risk, because there is none to speak of: "At May 2, 2026, we had no outstanding borrowings" is the whole of the fiscal-year-end funding discussion, and interest paid across the year came to $278 thousand.

The share count has not moved in four years, so there is no dilution for a buyer to absorb and no quiet retirement happening either. What the company does with the money instead is accumulate it and then release it in lumps. $304.1 million went out as a special dividend in July 2024, and the board declared another $3.25 a share on July 1, 2026, payable by the end of that month. The timing of the return is therefore the board's decision rather than the calendar's.

Catalysts

The dominant near-term event has already been declared. On July 1, 2026 the board announced a special dividend of $3.25 a share, to holders of record on July 13 and payable on or before July 30. The shares went ex on July 13, 2026. It is the second such payment in three years: the July 2024 distribution was $304.1 million, at the identical rate per share. The practical effect is that the balance-sheet build of fiscal 2026 leaves the company this month rather than sitting there.

The same date carried the fiscal 2026 results. Net sales came in at $1,180.6 million against $1,201.4 million the prior year, on a 52-week year versus 53 weeks, and net income was $183.6 million against $186.8 million. Case volume fell 6.7% and the average selling price per case rose 5.2%, which is the whole story of the year in two numbers. Capital spending was cut to $25.1 million from $36.3 million, so management is not currently building capacity into the volume decline.

The next scheduled information event is the first quarter of fiscal 2027, due September 10, 2026. Two things in that print matter more than the earnings figure. The first is whether the volume decline moderates now that the comparison base is lower. The second is whether the average selling price per case is still climbing, because that has been the entire defense of the profit line, and the quarter after a large distribution is also the first look at how quickly the company rebuilds its position.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Core business (reported)

• COCO (The Vita Coco Company, Inc.)
• FY2025 10-K: …greater financial resources than ours. We also compete with a number of natural, organic, and functional food and beverage producers. We and these competing brands and products compete for limited retail, and foodservice customers and consumers. In our market, competition is based on, among other things, brand equity…
• FY2025 10-K: …retailers due to their extensive brand portfolios than we do. These factors may allow our competitors to derive greater net sales and profits from their existing customer base, acquire customers at lower costs or respond more quickly than we can to new or emerging technologies and changes in consumer preferences or…
• COKE (COCA-COLA CONSOLIDATED, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …competition may result in lower than expected net pricing of the Company's products. The Company's ability to gain or maintain the Company's share of sales or gross margins may be limited by the actions of the Company's competitors, which may have advantages in setting prices due to lower raw material costs.…
• FY2025 10-K: …of the fiscal year, as sales of our products are typically correlated with warmer weather. We believe that we and other manufacturers from whom we purchase finished products have adequate production capacity to meet sales demand for sparkling and still beverages during these peak periods. See "Item 2. Properties" for…
• MNST (Monster Beverage Corp)
• FY2025 10-K: …Bull GmbH, KDP, Molson Coors, Constellation Brands, AB InBev, The Boston Beer Company and The Mark Anthony Group. We also compete with companies that are smaller or primarily national or local in operations, such as CELSIUS, PRIME, C4, Alani Nu, GHOST, ZOA, GORGIE, and others as well as local craft breweries in our…
• FY2025 10-K: …Strategic Brands segment primarily generates net operating revenues by selling "concentrates" and/or "beverage bases" to authorized bottling and canning operations. Such bottlers generally combine the concentrates and/or beverage bases with sweeteners, water and other ingredients to produce ready-to-drink packaged…
• CELH (CELSIUS HOLDINGS, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …our future revenues and profitability. 18 The increasing number of competitive products and limited availability of shelf and cooler space in retail outlets may limit our ability to maintain or expand our market presence. Competitors may engage in aggressive marketing, offer price discounts or pursue false or…
• FY2025 10-K: …Our products compete with all liquid refreshments and with products of certain competitors that are much larger, some of which have significantly greater financial resources, such as Monster Beverage Corporation, Red Bull GmbH, The Coca-Cola Company, Pepsi, Keurig Dr Pepper Inc., Nestlé S.A., BlueTriton Brands,…
• KDP (Keurig Dr Pepper Inc.)
• FY2025 10-K: Financial Statements for additional information on the JDE Peet's Acquisition and related transactions. On August 25, 2025, we announced our intention to separate our beverage and coffee portfolios into two independent, publicly traded companies, which will allow for more tailored growth strategies, operating models,…
• FY2025 10-K: …their route-to-market, reducing prices, or increasing promotional activities. We also compete with various smaller or regional companies and private label manufacturers, which may be more innovative, better able to bring new products to market, and better able to quickly serve niche markets. Additionally, we compete…
• BF-A (Brown-Forman Corporation)
• (no filing in the citation store)
• BF-B (Brown-Forman Corporation)
• FY2025 10-K: …competing products. If the buying power of these large retail customers continues to increase, it could negatively affect our financial results. Further, while we believe we have sufficient scale to succeed relative to our major competitors, we nevertheless face a risk that continuing consolidation of large beverage…
• FY2025 10-K: …to distribute our brands, generally under fixed-term distribution contracts. In Canada, we sell our products to provincial governments. We believe that our customer relationships are good and that our exposure to concentrations of credit risk is limited due to the diverse geographic areas covered by our operations…
• SAM (THE BOSTON BEER COMPANY, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …significantly greater resources than the Company. This competitive environment may affect the Company's overall performance within the Beyond beer and Traditional beer categories. As the market continues to consolidate, the Company believes that companies that are well-positioned in terms of brand equity, marketing…
• FY2025 10-K: Company anticipates competition will remain strong as existing beverage companies continue adding more SKUs and styles. The potential for growth in the sales of flavored malt beverages, hard seltzers, domestic beers, imported beers and spirits RTDs is expected to increase the competition in the market for Beyond beer…

Methodology Note

• Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
• Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
• Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
• Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.