CENTACentral Garden & Pet Company
Is it safe?
Nothing alarming, nothing pristine: comfortable debt (A) and typical volatility.
Investment-grade balance sheet. A rule of thumb on leverage, not a credit rating.
Moderate price swings, typical volatility. Worst drawdown -50% · now 4% below its 52-week high.
Where this answer is blind. Altman sits structurally low for utilities and pipelines; Beneish runs high for fast growers, since sales growth alone lifts it; banks and REITs are excluded.
Can CENTA take a bad year?
Central Garden & Pet Company carries $196M of net debt at 0.59× EBITDA: a load its earnings can carry.
Net debt · as at Q3 2026 · under two and a half years of EBITDA, comfortable
- Net debt / EBITDA
- 0.59×
Net debt / EBITDA · 1.54× a year ago · the load is coming down
- Interest cover
- 4.37×
Interest cover · operating profit covers the interest bill, with room to spare
- Annualised volatility
- 30%
Annualised volatility · S&P 500 16% · roughly twice as jumpy as the market
Details›
- Total debtQ3 2026
- $1.19B
- Cash and short-term investments
- $997M
- Net debt
- $196M
- EBITDA, trailing twelve months
- $332M
- Operating profit, trailing twelve months
- $250M
- Debt / equity
- 0.68×
- Total debt / EBITDA
- 3.60×
- Annualised volatilitytwo years of daily moves
- 30%
- Worst drawdown on file
- −50%
- Below its 52-week high
- 3.9%
Balance sheet from SEC filings; drawdown and volatility from end-of-day closes; Altman Z from the filed statements.
The balance sheet
What it owes against what it owns, and how close that comes to trouble.
How far can it fall?
How much the price moves, how deep and how long its falls have run, and what each unit of risk has paid.