Sometimes you come across tidbits of news that are just too good to be true, and then you look into them a little bit and they get better. Welcome to Grilled Cheese Truck Inc., or as Barry Ritholtz terms it in his Thursday column for Bloomberg View, “Grilled Cheese and $100 Million of Irrational Exuberance.”
Grilled Cheese Truck is a gourmet grilled cheese company with outposts in Los Angeles, Orange County, Ventura/Santa Barbara, and Phoenix. Its offerings include mac and cheese, French onion soup, various sandwich melts, and, of course, all types of grilled cheese. Last week, the Grilled Cheese Truck started trading on the OTCQX exchange under the ticker “GRLD,” and at last count its roughly $6 share price gave it a market capitalization of about $107 million. For a little context, that’s about two-fifths of what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post.
Ritholtz has a good summary of the rest of the company’s financials:
… according to the company’s financial statements, it has about $1 million of assets and almost $3 million in liabilities. In the third quarter of 2014, it had sales of almost $1 million, on which it had a net loss of more than $900,000. The story is much the same for the first nine months of the year: $2.6 million in sales and a loss of $4.4 million.
But forget the losses for a moment, and make the generous assumption that it will have sales of $4 million this year. This means its shares trade for more than 25 times sales, a very rich valuation.
Going back to the initial point, though, about already delicious stories getting just a bit more delicious: Not only is the company valued at more than $100 million, but its website (and even its investor relations page!) is written in Comic Sans—the cheesiest of all fonts.
