Sports bar chain Twin Peaks starts trading Thursday on the Nasdaq using the ticker \u201cTWNP,\u201d making it the first restaurant initial public offering of the new year and a potential litmus test for others looking to go public.<\/p>\n
The IPO market has been tepid for several years, particularly for consumer companies. Soaring inflation, higher interest rates, cautious consumers and the risk of lower valuations scared many companies away from going public. Market conditions meant that some companies chose to seek a sale rather than trying their luck with the public markets. Even\u00a0the rare success, like\u00a0Cava\u2019s\u00a0IPO, didn\u2019t convince others to follow its path.<\/p>\n
But many are\u00a0hopeful that the IPO market will thaw\u00a0this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year was a stronger year than 2023, and we\u2019re expecting 2025 to have more IPOs than 2024,\u201d said Nick Einhorn, vice president of research for Renaissance Capital, a provider of pre-IPO research and IPO-focused ETFs. \u201cThat could certainly include more consumer IPOs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Twin Peaks won\u2019t be the first consumer company to make the leap this year \u2014 and that debut may not inspire confidence.<\/p>\n
Pork producer\u00a0Smithfield Foods, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based WH Group, began trading on Tuesday. Shares fell 7% from its IPO price of $20 during its market debut. The company had already downsized its offering by 8.1 million shares and priced below its marketed range. Smithfield\u2019s challenges include its ties to China, U.S. trade tensions with Mexico and proposed immigration policies that would raise its labor costs.<\/p>\n
For its part, Twin Peaks, a Hooters rival known for its revealing uniform, is relatively small, with an estimated equity value of $1.04 billion to $1.28 billion and 115 restaurants, according to an investor presentation published by owner\u00a0Fat Brands. (Fat Brands and its chair Andy Wiederhorn\u00a0were criminally indicted\u00a0last year for an alleged $47 million bogus loan scheme; both have denied the charges.)<\/p>\n
Fat Brands is spinning off Twin Peaks and plans to use the cash to pay off the debt on its balance sheet.<\/p>\n
Here are three other restaurant companies that are watching the IPO market for their chance to go public:<\/p>\n
JAB Holding, the investment arm of the Reimann family, has been looking to offload Panera Brands, the parent company of Panera Bread and Einstein Bros. Bagels, from its portfolio for several years. JAB originally took Panera Bread private in 2017 for $7.5 billion.<\/p>\n
In 2021, Panera announced an investment from Danny Meyer\u2019s special purpose acquisition company that would help the company go public. But the two parties\u00a0called off the deal\u00a0by mid-2022, citing market conditions.<\/p>\n
A year and half later, in December 2023, Panera Brands\u00a0confidentially filed\u00a0to go public. Six months after the confidential filing, the company announced a CEO transition and tied the shakeup to \u201cpreparation for its eventual IPO.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, a public filing never followed. The restaurant industry began to see a pullback in spending, as many consumers opted to cook at home instead of dining out at eateries.<\/p>\n
Plus, Panera\u2019s Charged Lemonade went viral for all of the wrong reasons; the company removed the highly caffeinated drink from its menu after multiple wrongful death lawsuits tied to it.\u00a0Panera settled\u00a0with the first plaintiff in October.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Panera\u2019s\u00a0CEO resigned, and the company tapped its chief financial officer to step in as interim chief. With its leadership in flux, it looks unlikely that Panera will try to go public again this year.<\/p>\n
A year and\u00a0a\u00a0<\/strong>half ago, Bain Capital announced that it is buying Fogo de Chao, a fast-growing Brazilian steakhouse chain. Like\u00a0Krispy Kreme,\u00a0Sweetgreen\u00a0and\u00a0Dutch Bros., the chain had filed to go public in 2021 \u2014 but it missed the window.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fogo de Chao has over 100 locations globally and 76 in the U.S. alone. The company plans to open another 15 restaurants this year.<\/p>\n Whenever the IPO market is ready, so will Fogo de Chao.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the optionality is there, then we\u2019ll launch,\u201d Fogo de Chao CEO Barry McGowan told CNBC at the ICR Conference in Orlando earlier in January. \u201cMy hope is, this year, we\u2019ll see what happens to the consumer markets. I think it\u2019s going to get started this year or in the next year.\u201d<\/p>\n McGowan joked that Fogo de Chao\u2019s longtime CFO Tony Laday has filed more S-1 filings than any other chief financial officer; the company filed three the first time it went public, and seven before Bain bought it.<\/p>\n Thanks to Bain\u2019s investment, Fogo de Chao isn\u2019t in a rush to go public.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not in a hurry to go. We don\u2019t want to file seven more times. We want to be more certain before we file,\u201d McGowan said.<\/p>\n Roark Capital assembled Inspire Brands by cobbling together a slew of acquisitions into a restaurant conglomerate.<\/p>\n Inspire\u2019s portfolio includes Arby\u2019s, Jimmy John\u2019s, Sonic, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin\u2019 and Baskin Robbins. Across all of its brands, it has more than 32,600 restaurants globally and totals $30 billion in system sales.<\/p>\n Nearly a year ago, Bloomberg reported that Roark was in early-stage IPO discussions with potential advisers and seeking a valuation of $20 billion for Inspire. But it\u2019s been crickets since then.<\/p>\n Still, Pitchbook identified Inspire Brands as one of 50 private equity-backed names that could go public in 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously, private equity backers will want to exit their position eventually, and IPOs are often a way to do that,\u201d Einhorn said.<\/p>\n And unlike Panera, Inspire has a stable leadership team. CEO Paul Brown co-founded the company and has held his role since 2018. CFO Kate Jaspon joined Inspire in 2021 after it acquired her employer Dunkin\u2019. More than a decade ago, she was a vice president at Dunkin\u2019 during its own IPO.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Sports bar chain Twin Peaks starts trading Thursday on the Nasdaq using the ticker \u201cTWNP,\u201d making it the first restaurant initial public offering of the new year and a potential litmus test for others looking to go public. The IPO market has been tepid for several years, particularly for consumer companies. Soaring inflation, higher interest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14506,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}