Forensic Analysis · Consumer Staples / Food & Beverage · as of Aug 11, 2026

Flowers Foods Inc (FLO)

A forensic read on Flowers Foods Inc built from its complete SEC filings — financial-health screens, earnings quality, red flags and a price-aware rating. Reproducible math, not opinion.

D · Weak — demands caution

Forensic grade

Grey Zone

Financial health

1.1

Distress distance

Clean

Earnings quality

Forensic signals

21.3

P / E (ttm)

6.4%

ROE

$1.5B

Market cap

6.91%

Dividend yield

3.0%

Revenue growth

This free snapshot doesn't read filing or proxy text, so the auditor-quality and governance checks that can lower a grade were not evaluated (red flags, auditor quality, say on pay, board independence). Those checks only ever lower a grade, so the full analysis can land below the grade above but never above it — treat it as the most favourable reading, not the settled one.

Flowers Foods Inc earns a D (Weak — demands caution) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads 1.1, placing it in the Grey zone. 3 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by accruals ratio (% of noa).

What the filings flag

+22.6%

FY2024→FY2026

Accruals ratio (% of NOA). Net operating assets grew +22.6% relative to their own average in FY2026 — scaled by NOA itself, not total assets (see the Forensic Screens card's differently-scaled Sloan Accrual Ratio for that read). Accruals are building sharply — a large slice of profit sits in operating assets, not cash; Richardson/Sloan link high accruals to weaker future returns as they reverse. The build is led by inventory up +17% on the year. The cash-flow cross-check is more mixed: reported earnings ran behind operating cash by 13% of net operating assets, diverging from the balance-sheet accrual read.

3.5%

FY2026

Return on invested capital. Return on invested capital is 3.5% in the latest fiscal year and slipping from 9% — well below its ~8% cost of capital, so reinvested dollars may be destroying value, not building it.

-0.1%/yr

FY2022–FY2026

Share count. Diluted share count changed -1% over the last 4 years to FY2026 (-0.1%/yr). Roughly flat — buybacks ($5M) are about offsetting stock comp ($32M), not shrinking the count. Per-share value isn't being meaningfully helped or hurt by the count.

Key fundamentals

Latest Revenue$5.26B

Revenue Growth YoY+3.0%

Revenue CAGR (3yr)+1.6%

Net Margin1.6%

Free Cash Flow$319.1M

Return on Equity6.4%

Debt / Equity1.35x

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Data from SEC EDGAR public filings · metrics as of Aug 11, 2026. Forensic signals flag probability, not certainty.