Whole Foods Market, Inc. (WFM): The Fresh Market Inc (TFM) Goes Stale

There was a time when a man couldn’t even find a $10 bag of kale chips, let alone a $6 bag — thank goodness for our modern age. I now have a range of stores to fill my dried kale needs, and investors have a wide selection of businesses to invest in that play on that weird consumer desire. Sadly, The Fresh Market Inc (NASDAQ:TFM) is having a hard time moving its high-end goods. Well, it’s actually doing fairly well, but not as good as the market would like.

In its second quarter earnings statement released yesterday, The Fresh Market Inc (NASDAQ:TFM) dropped its expectations for earnings per share over fiscal 2013 and said that it anticipated current sales and economic trends to continue. Overall, the business looked pretty good for the quarter, but its outlook was less than stellar.

Fresh Market’s second-quarter numbers
The best news was the increase in year-over-year comparable-store sales that The Fresh Market Inc (NASDAQ:TFM) managed last quarter. The company had hit a speed bump back in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012, but this time around it managed a respectable 3.4% increase. That was a small increase in the pace that the company had set in the first quarter, and it was solidly in line with internal expectations for the start of the year.

Revenue increased at 13.3% and some excellent cost management helped bump earnings per share up by 17%. Gross margin increased due to some relief in occupancy costs, but was tempered by an increase in production costs. The Fresh Market Inc (NASDAQ:TFM) said that it expects those cost issues to continue through the year.

Those costs and the additional store opening costs are pushing the company’s 2013 earnings expectations down. Part of that is good news. The business is going to increase its store opening rate beyond its previous expectations. In the first quarter, it looked like 2013 would end with between 19 to 22 new locations. The bottom of that range was pushed up to 21 in yesterday’s release.

The future of Fresh Market
The company still has a long way to push into new territories like Texas and California. Those two states have been strongholds for Whole Foods Market, Inc. (NASDAQ:WFM) in the past, and The Fresh Market Inc (NASDAQ:TFM) is hoping for good revenue growth from them. For all its chasing, Fresh Market is still well behind Whole Foods in the sales growth race. Comparable year-over-year sales grew 7.5% at Whole Foods last quarter, and it is forecasting annual growth of no less than 7.2%.