Why Cal-Maine Foods Stock Cracked Today
Key Points
Cal-Maine beat on earnings but missed on sales this morning.
Egg prices are crashing, erasing historically strong earnings at Cal-Maine.
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Cal-Maine Foods (NASDAQ: CALM) stock, the nation's biggest publicly traded producer of eggs, fell 4.1% through 11:45 a.m. ET after beating on earnings but missing badly on sales in its Q2 2026 earnings report Wednesday.
Heading into the report, analysts forecast Cal-Maine to earn $2.01 per share on sales of $826.4 million. Cal-Maine actually earned $2.13 per share, but its sales were only $769.5 million.
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Cal-Maine Q2 earnings
Cal-Maine's revenue declined more than 19% in Q2. Specialty egg sales (organic, free range, and similar) held up well year over year, but conventional egg sales crashed 41% year over year as egg prices plummeted.
CEO Sherman Miller highlighted the "strong prices and volumes" of the company's specialty egg business. Miller noted that "despite the impact of [conventional] eggs prices" falling after "supply demand imbalances and historic price levels" in 2025, the company turned in a "solid" performance in Q2 2026.
Is Cal-Maine stock a buy?
Cal-Maine earned nearly $25 a share last year, an historically strong performance that will not soon repeat. Analysts expect the company's earnings to drop to approximately $9.31 per share in 2026 -- and keep falling for the next two years.
Ordinarily, we start with a stock's earnings and then calculate whether growth is strong enough to justify the stock price, but this approach simply doesn't work when earnings are expected to fall, rather than rise. With Cal-Maine, therefore, the best approach may be to consider the worst-case scenario -- earnings falling to $6.67 per share by 2028, as analysts forecast -- and compare that to the stock price.
Valued this way, Cal-Maine stock costs about 11.5 times earnings two years out, a valuation similar to the stock's 11% dividend yield. To me, this seems a fair price to pay for Cal-Maine stock.
Should you buy stock in Cal-Maine Foods right now?
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Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Cal-Maine Foods. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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