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Back of Napkin

Post Holdings, Inc. POST

Three-pass checkedFiled since 2026-08-06

Written 2026-05-19. The company has filed a quarterly or annual report since, on 2026-08-06, so figures here predate its latest disclosure.

Post Holdings is a serial acquirer of food brands across cereal (Honey Bunches of Oats, Pebbles, Weetabix), foodservice eggs and potatoes (the largest US foodservice egg supplier), refrigerated retail (Bob Evans), and pet food, run as a portfolio of operating businesses with the explicit playbook of shrinking the share count instead of growing the topline.

The setup is a flat-revenue staples conglomerate with a $600M fresh buyback authorization and a new CEO transition announced, priced at 13x forward earnings and an 11% FCF yield, where the entire investment case rests on per-share value created through share retirement rather than category growth.

Key data

Sector / industryConsumer Defensive / Packaged Foods (multi-segment conglomerate)
FYE / countrySeptember / US
Price / 52w range$100.33 / $94.13 to $117.28
Position vs MA7% above 52w low; 50d SMA $100.84, 200d SMA $103.58
Market cap / EV≈$4.5B / ≈$12.1B (high net-debt)
Revenue (TTM)≈$8.41B
EPS (TTM, GAAP)≈$5.75
Net income (TTM, GAAP)≈$0.34B
Beta0.36 (lowest in this peer set)

POST · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$75$87$100$112$124 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jun '25Jan '26Aug '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Post Holdings is a serial acquirer of food brands run as a portfolio of operating businesses, spanning cereal (Honey Bunches of Oats, Pebbles, Weetabix), foodservice eggs and potatoes (the largest US foodservice egg supplier), refrigerated retail (Bob Evans), and pet food. The explicit playbook is to shrink the share count rather than grow the topline, issuing debt cheaply, buying assets, generating cash, and retiring equity, a cycle that has run for 15 years.

Q2 FY26, reported May 7 for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, posted net sales of $2.043B, a revenue miss versus $2.113B consensus, with adjusted EPS of $1.94 beating $1.76, adjusted EBITDA of $395M up 14% year over year, and GAAP net earnings of $81.9M up 31%. Management reaffirmed FY26 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $1.55B to $1.58B and capex of $350M to $390M, announced a $600M new share repurchase authorization (13% of current market cap), and disclosed a CEO transition. Performance commentary emphasized strength in center-of-store and refrigerated aisles, with cereal weakness and lingering bird-flu cost pressure on the foodservice egg business as the two segment-level headwinds.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04The linchpins
  5. 05Closing
  6. 06Methodology

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