After being impressed with a newly opened nearby Odd Burger, I started looking into the company a lot more, as I’m always looking for vegan stocks to invest in.
This post will summarize how Odd Burger is doing in terms of profitability, scaling, and future prospects.
Note that I am in no way a financial advisor, I’m just going to lay out what I think is important, and then you can make your own decision about the stock.
I’ll try to update this page periodically, but if you’re thinking about investing in Odd Burger, do a news search for any recent developments that might affect your decision.
Table of Contents
About Odd Burger
Odd Burger was founded in 2014 by James McInnes and opened its first restaurant in London, Ontario in 2016.
Since then, the staff have been working on fine-tuning their in-house plant protein recipes and implementing systems like touchscreen ordering so that the restaurant chain could scale up.
Everything on the menu is vegan, which is great from the perspective of a vegan customer and also vegan investor.
Most of the products I’ve tried have been great (on par with non-vegan fast food places), although the bean burgers are not amazing in my opinion.
Odd Burger is Expanding Rapidly
Starting in 2020, Odd Burger began to plan to aggressively scale up.
First, it went public in early 2021, which provided the funding to open 6 new restaurants in Ontario in the same year (aiming to have 20 restaurants by the end of 2022).
Obviously that’s not much of a graph right now, but I’ll update it over time.
There’s also a plan to expand to the United States soon and launch a New York location.
For comparison note that McDonald’s has about 15,000 locations in North America. Not every local market will be appropriate for a vegan fast food place, but it illustrates that there’s a lot of room to grow.
Competition
There are no other strong competitors in terms of 100% vegan chains, which puts Odd Burger in a good position.
The main competition is the established fast food restaurants (e.g. McDonald’s, A&W) that offer some plant-based menu items.
For vegan customers, that’s not really a tough choice, Odd Burger is going to dominate that segment.
But I’ve seen many non-vegans express interest in going to Odd Burger, so it’ll be interesting to see if they will regularly choose it over a non-vegan place.
Odd Burger Trading Symbol and History
After going public on the TSXV (basically the Toronto Stock Exchange for small cap companies) under the symbol ODD in 2021, there was a minor surge in price, and it’s been slowly declining and flat for the most part since.
The expansion plans for the next year have been out for awhile, and the latest earnings report was mediocre, so this price activity isn’t that surprising.
A lot hinges on how this first wave of Odd Burger restaurants performs, and if it smoothly leads to further expansion.
Odd Burger Market Cap and Earnings
Odd Burger has about a $72 million market cap as I write this (McDonalds is at $170 billion), so it’s still quite small.
The earnings report released in mid 2021 showed a small loss per share in terms of revenue.
It’s not a huge loss and with the cost of rapid expansion that’s not too surprising. At the same time, it suggests that Odd Burger isn’t particularly undervalued at the moment to me.
Summary: Is Odd Burger a Good Investment?
From an ethical standpoint as a vegan, I think it’s great that we even have this opportunity. Not only does it normalize veganism further, but it can also have some impact on meat consumption if non-vegans will give it a try (or if it makes switching to a vegan diet easier).
From a financial point of view, there are a lot of unknowns. Some potential negatives of this stock to consider are:
- Profit is low
- Expansion isn’t always a smooth process
- There’s always outside threats (e.g. recession)
- Current price doesn’t appear particularly undervalued
But there are some good things as well in my opinion:
- Tons of room to grow in the market.
- Solid foundation – The products and service are high quality, which provides a good base to scale from.
- Demand – This seems like almost the perfect timing for a vegan fast food restaurant to flourish, and there are no other vegan fast food restaurants in this kind of position.
Obviously I can’t tell you how the stock is going to perform (please don’t take financial advice from random bloggers like me), but I do think this company has a bright future and I personally hope that we’ll be seeing dozens (or hundreds) of Odd Burger restaurants throughout North America in a few years.
