Tattooed Chef, Inc. (TTCF)

I'll give you a little ACTUAL financial education.

It's a technique I studied in college called "rhetorical analysis," and it deals with how people use language to obfuscate facts they don't want you to know.

In this case, what TTCF doesn't want you to know is that branded revenue is basically flat year over year ($33.1 in Q2 2021 vs $33.6 in Q2 2022).

What they did to obfuscate that fact is they mentioned the percent of total revenue rather than comparing this year's branded revenue numbers with the numbers from last year.

Here's the language they used last year vs what they said this year. See if you can spot their trick:

Q2 2021: "Tattooed Chef branded product revenue was $33.1 million, an increase of 62.3% compared to $20.4 million in the prior year period."

Q2 2022: "Tattooed Chef branded product net revenue increased to $33.9 million, or 58.4% of total net revenue."

See what they did? They know that poorly educated investors anchor on words like "increase" and ignore the rest of the sentence. They compared the branded revenue with total revenue, a meaningless comparison, just to get a number that increased so they could use the anchor word "increase" in there somewhere.

What you really want to know is what the number is compared with last year's number. Apples to apples. But they compared apples to doughnuts. They just want you to see "increased" and not look into it any further.

This earnings report is full of shenanigans like this. You'll never know just how bad this company is of you just listen to the earnings call or their or read their bulleted highlights or, worse, listen to paid spokesman Jeremy.

"Cost of goods sold increased 36.7% to $57.4 million in the second quarter...driven by higher sales volume..."
If you don't know what this means, it means that the more they sell, the more money they lose. This is a red flag, smoking gun, nail in the coffin...whatever metaphor you want to use. It means there is something seriously and fundamentally wrong with how they're conducting business. It's not just a matter of time before they're profitable, this number indicates that they need to completely change the way they're conducting business. Whether it's the taste of the product, the way they source and produce it, the scale or market or... whatever...could be any or all of these things. Something's not right. Jeremy said this was the next Tesla but Tesla had a great product from the start, a clear path to profitability, a scalable production strategy, a ready market, etc, such that it was clear or at least probable that they would succeed in time. TTCF has exactly ZERO indicators that they will be profitable. None. And, in fact, are showing all the hallmarks of a company that will go bankrupt within a year.
Let's be real, you own this because Jeremy said it was good. It's not. In all likelihood he is being paid to pump TTCF, just like he was paid to pump the now-defunct Voyager and VGFC. I can't tell you what to do with your money but I'm asking you to stop listening to Jeremy, just look at the numbers, learn about what they mean, and think really hard about what it is you're doing holding this stock.