Cava’s largely upwards trajectory since its IPO last summer means the fast-casual giant is now worth roughly $33 million per store, Bloomberg reports.
Cava Group Inc. stock has risen more than 300% since its June 2023 IPO, with individual shares now priced at around $94. The chain dubbed as the “Mediterranean Chipotle” is currently valued north of $10 billion by market cap.
Cava’s per-restaurant valuation is “unprecedented” since each location only makes about $3 million a year, JPMorgan Chase’s John Ivankoe said in a June report, according to Bloomberg. Cava currently has 323 stores and wants to be operating 1,000 in the next ten years.
Cava CEO Brett Schulman told Quartz in February that the “IPO certainly shined a brighter light and brought increasing awareness to who we are and the category we are creating and defining in Mediterranean [cuisine].” Schulman credited some of his chain’s success to the fact that it only modestly hiked prices amid inflation and doesn’t plan to raise them again in 2024.
But not everyone is convinced it can be the “next” Chiptole. Lauren Balik, the CEO of research firm Upright Analytics, reportedly shorted Cava in January.
“Everyone makes the comparison to Chipotle. If you make that comparison, you have to compare Cava to early Chipotle, which was a similar story,” Balik told Bloomberg. “It opened a lot of new stores, it grew quickly, but the operations and execution in late 2015 didn’t work that well.”
In 2015, Chipotle suffered from a handful of quality-control issues, including a headline-making E. coli outbreak, that Balik said are representative of the difficulties of rapid expansion.