Organic fast food chain Oliver’s Real Food has unloaded another pile of bad news onto investors, saying earnings are expected to drop 30 to 37 per cent this year.

Its share price plunged 56 per cent on the news to a record low of 10.7c.

It’s the second time in a year Oliver’s (ASX:OLI) has announced a profit downgrade.

In July — a month after a $15 million IPO priced at 20c — Oliver’s stunned with a warning it would miss its prospectus forecasts.

The shares lost half their value but had recovered to around 27c by this month.

Today the shares have lost all that ground and more.

Full year EBITDA earnings are now expected at $3 million to 3.3 million, as opposed to $4.8 million.

Sales revenue had been forecast to hit $41.9 million in the prospectus after Oliver’s listed in June last year.

It’s now expected to be in the range of $36 million to $37 million.

Olivers Real Food shares (ASX:OLI) over the past year.

Oliver’s (ASX:OLI) says it’s been hit by a series of factors, including weak trading over Easter and school holidays, poor performance at stores in Aratula, Ballarat and Horsham, and delays in opening new stores.

They closed the Horsham store on Tuesday.

Same store sales growth, which they define as stores operating during 2017, was up by 5.7 per cent but that wasn’t enough to offset weak performance at the other stores.

Costs including redundancies and recruitment “together with the underperformance in the Red Dragon business” are dragging on the full year results.

The company restated its original $4.8 million EBITDA guidance in March, after hiring a new CEO, Gregory Madigan.

Chairman Mark Richardson told Stockhead they first became aware of the performance problems a week ago, when they put the company into a trading halt.

He says store rollouts are on track for the remainder of calendar 2018.

During a conference call Mr Madigan said they are always reviewing stores like Horsham which are not performing, but did not say whether they have plans to close more in the near future.

The company’s strategy is to open “healthy food stores” at highway stops and towns with a lot of traffic to pose an alternative to fast food.

Mr Madigan’s plans to revive the company include hiring a chief operating officer and a manager for its Red Dragon business, speeding up the introduction of a self-ordering system in stores, and working on the menu to make sure it’s competitively priced.

The company was cashflow-positive at the end of March, with an operating balance of $463,000. It had $5.7 million in the bank, but expected to spend $10 million in the three months to June.

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