Tobin Smith's NBT Equities Research sent me a teaser pump mailing that I could barely swallow (pun intended). This one pumped Barfresh Food Group (BRFH), a penny stock that purports to market smoothie drink mix packages. Their profile blurb on Google Finance says they used to be called Moving Box Inc. Feel free to bore yourself with their 8-K from January 2012, where they seem to be unsure about whether they were a shell company prior to changing their identity.
The relevant lesson from their financial statements is that they have generated no revenue for three years and seem to be making little progress toward generating any business. I can see their biggest operational problem right now. They appear to ship ice with their drink mix packages. That adds the cost of refrigeration and additional storage space to what should be a bulk dry goods movement pipeline. That is really dumb. It's even dumber to have a wholly-owned subsidiary called Smoothie Inc. just to market these things. There is no purpose to such a confusing corporate structure for a company this small.
Their management team is drawn mostly from corporate finance work, with the exception of their sales advisor. The CEO has been working on this Barfresh smoothie concept since at least 2005. The article at that last link is worth some attention. I have no idea whether they succeeded in their attempt to penetrate the Indian market in 2007, but there are other telling details we can measure. You can see from their financial statements that they've had zero revenue for years, so the claims of adding 10 customers a day and topping 2000 clients by the end of 2007 are unsupported by their published financial results.
This stock leaves a bad taste in my mouth. There are more efficient ways to make and distribute commercial smoothie packages.
Full disclosure: No position in BRFH, ever.
The relevant lesson from their financial statements is that they have generated no revenue for three years and seem to be making little progress toward generating any business. I can see their biggest operational problem right now. They appear to ship ice with their drink mix packages. That adds the cost of refrigeration and additional storage space to what should be a bulk dry goods movement pipeline. That is really dumb. It's even dumber to have a wholly-owned subsidiary called Smoothie Inc. just to market these things. There is no purpose to such a confusing corporate structure for a company this small.
Their management team is drawn mostly from corporate finance work, with the exception of their sales advisor. The CEO has been working on this Barfresh smoothie concept since at least 2005. The article at that last link is worth some attention. I have no idea whether they succeeded in their attempt to penetrate the Indian market in 2007, but there are other telling details we can measure. You can see from their financial statements that they've had zero revenue for years, so the claims of adding 10 customers a day and topping 2000 clients by the end of 2007 are unsupported by their published financial results.
This stock leaves a bad taste in my mouth. There are more efficient ways to make and distribute commercial smoothie packages.
Full disclosure: No position in BRFH, ever.
