Time to Buy Cava Group's (CAVA) Stock for More Upside After Q1 Earnings?

SBUX CMG CAVA

After posting impressive Q1 results last week, Cava Group CAVA has started to display the expansion that pushed other popular retail restaurant chains to notoriety among investors such as Chipotle Mexican Grill CMG and Starbucks SBUX.

To that point, since going public in June of 2023, the Mediterranean fast-casual food chain has seen its stock soar almost +100% which in this time frame has largely outperformed Starbucks -19% and the Zacks Retail-Restaurant Market’s -6% while impressively topping the broader indexes and even edging Chipotle’s +56%.

Considering Cava Group has been one the hottest IPOs in recent memory let’s see if it's still time to buy CAVA for more upside.

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Q1 Review

Posting Q1 sales of $259.01 million, Cava Group’s top line expanded 46% over the last three months with Q4 sales at $177.17 million. This also beat Q1 sales estimates of $246.65 million by 5%. More intriguing is that Cava Group is already profitable with Q1 EPS of $0.12 crushing expectations of $0.04 per share by 200% while skyrocketing from $0.02 a share in Q4.

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Growth Trajectory & Overview

Although Cava Group launched its IPO last year, the company was founded in 2006 and has locations across the United States. Fueling Cava Group’s expansion is a unique dining experience with its build-your-own bowl model being similar to Chipotle as customers can customize their choice of high-quality fresh ingredients.

Cava Group’s total sales are now expected to climb 24% in FY24 and are slated to jump another 20% in FY25 to just over $1 billion. Annual earnings are projected to soar 62% this year to $0.34 per share versus $0.21 a share in 2023. Plus, FY25 EPS is projected to expand another 33% to $0.46.

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More intriguing and suggestive that the rally in CAVA could continue is that earnings estimate revisions for FY24 and FY25 are nicely up in the last 30 days and have now soared over 40% in the last two months respectively.

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Bottom Line

Cava Group's stock currently sports a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) as it would be no surprise if CAVA continued to move higher considering the company’s attractive growth trajectory and the positive trend of earnings estimate revisions.

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