Forensic Analysis · Consumer Staples / Food & Beverage · as of Sep 24, 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
Distress
Financial health
1.0
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
3
Forensic signals
22.8
P / E (ttm)
6.4%
ROE
$1.2B
Market cap
4.30%
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, going concern, valuation). 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 1.0, placing it in the Distress zone. 3 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by accruals ratio (% of noa).
What the filings flag
+22.6%
FY2024→FY2025
Accruals ratio (% of NOA).Net operating assets grew +22.6% relative to their own average in FY2025 — scaled by NOA itself, not by total assets, which is what the Forensic Screens card's own accrual row divides by. Accruals are building sharply — a large slice of profit sits in operating assets, not cash. An accrual is a claim that still has to be collected or written down, so the gap resolves in a later period whichever way it goes. The build is led by inventory up +17% against +3% in revenue. A cash-flow measure on the same base disagrees: reported earnings ran behind operating cash by 13% of net operating assets, against an accruals ratio of 22.6%. The two are computed differently: the accruals ratio is the change in net operating assets over average net operating assets, while the cash-flow figure is net income less operating cash flow over that same average. Read them as two results, not one.
3.5%
FY2025
Return on invested capital.Return on invested capital is 3.5% in the latest fiscal year, against 5% in FY2023, having run between 3.5% and 9.2% across FY2023–FY2025 with no direction held. The capital base behind it cannot be compared across FY2023–FY2025: short-term debt is tagged in one of those two fiscal years and not the other, and an untagged line enters this calculation as zero, so any change in the base would be a change in what the filer tagged.
-0.3%/yr
FY2023–FY2025
Share count.Diluted share count changed -1% over the last 2 years to FY2025 (-0.3%/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 (2yr)+1.6%
Net Margin1.6%
Free Cash Flow$319.1M
Return on Equity6.4%
Debt / Equity1.35x
The forensic grade and screens above are free — no account needed. Want the AI investment read on top — the 0–100 rating, thesis, bull-vs-bear, red flags and the 12-month scenario, written from Flowers Foods Inc's actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?