What ever happened to Menu Foods?

Menu Foods was a company that ran into a huge amount of trouble for distributing pet food that contained Melamine, which caused kidney problems in pets, sometimes leading to death. The first precautionary recall was in March 2007 and then it took another month for them to isolate what exactly was causing the problem. It was through a supplier, ChemNutra Inc., who used wheat gluten that was imported from Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. in Wangdien, China. The whole history of the case is documented on the company’s website here.

These series of events took the company’s units from seven dollars a share to about one dollar less than a year after the news broke. Financially, the company is not on solid ground – although it was somewhat profitable before this incident (making about $24 million in distributable cash in calendar 2006), its balance sheet was quite leveraged, with a net debt of about $100 million.

Fast forward a few years, it still has the debt – some $105 million. The only difference is that $75 million matures in October 2010. The company breached its covenants in 2007 (primarily due to the aforementioned recall) and as a result had to cut its distributions to zero and pay its creditors a rate of LIBOR plus 5.8%.

Lately, however, the company seems to have recovered from its near-death experience: they have settled the lawsuit, and they are now generating cash again – about $11.1 million in free cash in the first 9 months of 2009. Their units, in response, have gone up from about 80 cents at the beginning of the year to $2.50 currently; at 29.3 million units outstanding, that is approximately a market value of $73 million.

The primary hurdle for Menu Foods at this point seems to be the renegotiation of their $75 million debt. If they can achieve this, then unitholders will be sitting pretty and perhaps distributions could continue after they have continued to deleverage their balance sheet. It is interesting to note that a company that was originally on its deathbed is now positioned to survive, in no part due to investors’ risk preferences being expanded in the zero interest rate environment.