Simply Good Foods (Quest bars, Atkins shakes, ~$1B market cap) has one brand winning and one getting buried by GLP-1s. Here's how we get it back to $1.4B+.

Note: As always, none of what follows is legal, tax, investing, financial, or any other sort of advice. And I was never here 😉.

Simply Good Foods (the SPAC that bought Atkins, then Quest, and OWYN) watched its oldest brand fall off a cliff in FY2026.

SMPL is now worth ~$1.05B. About what it paid for Quest alone in 2019.

The stock doesn't care about Quest their only winning brand because GLP-1s are steamrolling the diet aisle.

Link to Simply Good Foods' FY 2026 earnings (10-K, filed 10/27/26, SEC EDGAR)

*OPEX and Net Income include $331M of non-cash write-downs (OWYN $200M, Atkins $93M, goodwill $38M). FCF = operating cash flow minus capex.

(GAAP, most recent FY each, fiscal years not aligned)

(1) Includes $331M of write-downs. FY ends: SMPL Aug 29, 2026. BellRing Sep 30, 2025 (FY26 10-K not yet filed). Medifast Dec 31, 2025. P/E = Nov 6, 2026 price over FY GAAP EPS. Sources: SMPL FY2026 10-K, BellRing and Medifast FY2025 10-Ks, Yahoo Finance.

The gaps that matter: BellRing +16%. SMPL -7%. Medifast is the Atkins bear case, already played out.

The cash machine still works. Management just keeps feeding the cash to the wrong things. GLP-1s is the tsunami trend of this category. Simply Good Foods is still trying to row against the tide in a dingy.

Founded:

Aha Moment:

Growth:

Model:

Where We Are Now:

Here's how we turn SMPL back into a $1.4B biz and pay off the debt doing it.

Atkins is another victim of the GLP-1 economy. It's a cancer ridden appendage on this biz. They have to cut it off and cauterize the wound.

FY2022: $540M. 46% of SMPL's sales. FY2026: $333M. 25%.

And it's not for lack of trying. Oct 2023 they ran the full revamp.

Atkins still fell 37% from FY2023 to FY2026.

If you take the company's FY2027 guide (sales -13% to -17%) and keep Quest growing (Assumption not official guidance) Atkins lands around $100M in FY2028. -81% from the peak. ~9% of total portfolio sales. Smaller than OWYN is today.

It’s brutal to fire sale the crown jewel, but it’s either sell it while there is value left or fully write it off in 2 years.

My distressed price for this scale of biz: 0.3-0.5x FY2026 sales. That's $100-166M. We’re going to plow every $$$ into the $350M term loan.

Once we dump the dying biz we’re folding OWYN into Quest to make it Quest Plant.

OWYN did $124M in FY2026 (-10%). Plant protein is the right bet. But SMPL already wrote off $200M of the $223M brand. The OWYN name is worth about $23M on paper.

Put the plant shakes on Quest's shelf space under Quest's name. Quest + Quest Plant = ~$1B. 73% of the biz.

1 brand. 1 marketing budget. All of it behind Quest.

Ad spend fell another 19% to $62M in FY2026 (from $103M in FY2024). Same year Quest growth stalled at +0.7% (from +11%).

Quest is in 20% of US households. Premier Protein (BellRing) is at ~22%. Our DCF says +2 pts of Quest growth a year (FY28-31) adds $1.13 a share.

Takeaway: Cut off the dying brand. Feed the one that's winning.

Borrowing to buy your own stock on the way down sets cash on fire. For the love of all things holy we have to stop doing this as an industry. It is so spreadsheet smart, but so stupid.

In FY2026: SMPL bought 11.66M shares for $213.3M. About $18.29 a share. They’ve already lost -34% on that “investment”.

And they borrowed to keep going. Nov 2025 they added-on $150M to their term loan to buy more. They paid $21.4M in interest in FY2026 to get hosed and lose their shirt on their own stock.

This must have played so well in the board room during the pitch and now all of them have egg on their face.

Now their Free cashflow goes to buybacks and the term loan instead of investing in growth.

If we’re just going to give away money then pass it along as a dividend instead of share buybacks. Now the business doesn’t have the cash, is racked with debt and investors are watching their stock value collapse.

A snack biz w/ 282 employees and outsourced manufacturing shouldn't carry much debt at all. And whatever debt it does have should be going to growth.

Takeaway: Stop with the financial shenanigans. Grow the biz. Be more Valuable.

Every day consumers are Simply Foods “customers”, but really massive retail chains are their real customers.

Walmart (30%) + Amazon (20%) = 50% of SMPL's sales.

2 buyers control the shelf, the price and the promo calendar. Walmart already pulled Atkins items in FY2025 a death blow in the Atkins death spiral.

Quest is already listed at Costco, Target, CVS and Walgreens, but none are significant buyers.

That has to change. Simply Foods is 1 Algorithm or merchandising change away from losing a third of its sales.

Costco is the case study. Quest bars show up there on rotation. Costco sells its own Kirkland protein bar at $1.36 a bar.

BellRing made Costco a top-3 customer. Walmart + Costco + Amazon = 74% of its sales. This is the opportunity for Quest.

SMPL's own 10-K calls club and convenience white space (Walmart sales include Sam’s Club).

The move: build real rapport w/ the next 4 buyers. A dedicated key-account team for Costco, Target, CVS and Walgreens. A club-only Quest pack built for the warehouse, not a rotation slot.

Single bars and chip bags at the c-store register.

The math: one more retailer at 10% of sales = ~$136M of rev. More than all of OWYN.

Takeaway: Never let 2 buyers own your biz.

This is a great company doing all the wrong things in hard times.

I get why they held on to Atkins. A 50+ year old brand that invented a major American diet that became a cultural trend that was also the crown jewel of their 2 brand portfolio.

But this is classic late stage biz demise where the owners hold on too long to squeeze 1-2 more good years out of a biz that is facing an existential crisis.

But some tidal waves decimate a business. Even with 1 of the best GLP-1 rebrands possible, a carb based diet model was never going to survive the GLP-1 economy.

Acquiring OWYN was a smart move and a great new trend to bet on the future. They just missed the massive pea protein supplier issue in diligence. They really cut off their nose to save a buck there.

They haven't been nimble enough. When you crush a biz with $400m in term loans trying to stem the stock price collapse from a structural business change you force it into hospice.

This is savable. It will take courageous and hard moves that most boards aren’t willing to or incentivized to make.

But there is still a lot of value left for these brands. If they were managed properly.