Hawaii’s largest macadamia nut grower reported Monday that a financial loss for the three months ended Sept. 30 was its smallest in five quarters as the company continues establishing itself as a producer of packaged food for retail sale.
| 3RD-QUARTER LOSS
$17,000
YEAR-EARLIER LOSS
$216,000
|
Royal Hawaiian Orchards LP said it lost $17,000 in the recent period compared with a $216,000 loss in the same quarter last year.
Hilo-based Royal Hawaiian increased revenue by 62 percent to $7.6 million in the recent quarter from $4.7 million a year ago.
The company said the revenue surge was largely from selling processed nuts in bulk, though there also was a smaller gain in sales of the company’s line of branded food products, which include seasoned nuts, chocolate-covered nuts, macadamia milk and macadamia butter.
In the third quarter the company said its packaged food revenue rose to $1.3 million from $1.1 million a year earlier while bulk processed nut sales more than doubled to $5.5 million from $2.5 million in the same period. Royal Hawaiian also had $727,000 in third-quarter revenue that compared with $1.1 million a year earlier in its orchard operations, which include bulk sales of unprocessed nuts.
Royal Hawaiian, which farms about 5,400 acres on Hawaii island, historically sold all of its crop wholesale in bulk. But a shift was made in 2012 to create a retail line of packaged food made from stockpiled Royal Hawaiian macadamia nuts as a way to enhance financial returns and avoid seasonal swings in bulk raw nut sales affected by commodity prices and the size of harvests.
To establish the retail line, however, Royal Hawaiian has had to invest in advertising and incentives for stores to carry the new brand. And that has kept net income mainly in the red since the shift.
Royal Hawaiian has a form of publicly traded stock called partnership shares that typically trade lightly on an over-the-counter stock exchange, though they are mainly held by Denver investor and former Quark Software Inc. CEO Farhad “Fred” Ebrahimi. Shares traded last on Nov. 8 and closed at $2.80, which compared with a high of $3.24 on Jan. 8 and a low of $2.71 on March 18 over the past 52 weeks.
