Lynsi L. Torres is
associated with several companies, including Flying
Dutchman Racing, Inc., In-N-Out
Burgers and In-N-Out
Burgers Foundation.
By Seth Lubove - Feb 4, 2013 12:00 AM ET
Lunchtime at the flagship In-N-Out Burger restaurant in Baldwin
Park, California, is a
study in efficiency. As the order line swells, smiling workers swoop in to
operate empty cash registers. Another staffer cleans tables, asking customers
if they’re enjoying their hamburger. Outside, a woman armed with a hand-held
ordering machine speeds up the drive-through line.
Such service has helped In-N-Out create a rabid fan base -- and
make Lynsi Torres, the chain’s 30-year-old owner and president, one of the
youngest female billionaires on Earth. New store
openings often resemble product releases from Apple Inc. (AAPL),
with customers lined up hours in advance. City officials plead with the Irvine, California-based
company to open restaurants in their municipalities.
“They have done a
fantastic job of building and maintaining a kind of cult following,” said Bob
Goldin, executive vice president of Chicago-based food industry research firm
Technomic Inc. “Someone would love to buy them.”
That someone includes billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who told a
group of visiting business students in 2005 that he’d like to own the chain,
according to an account of the meeting on the UCLA Anderson School of
Management website.
The thrice-married Torres has watched her family expand In-
N-Out from a single drive-through hamburger stand founded in 1948 in Baldwin
Park by her grandparents, Harry and Esther Snyder, into a fast-food empire
worth more than $1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Biblical Citations
Famous for its Double-Double cheeseburgers, fresh ingredients
and discreet biblical citations on its cups and food wrappers, In-N-Out has
almost 280 units in five states. The closely held company had sales of about
$625 million in 2012, after applying a five-year compound annual growth rate of
4.6 percent to industry trade magazine Nation’s Restaurant News’s 2011 sales
estimate of $596 million.
In-N-Out is valued at about $1.1 billion, according to the
Bloomberg ranking, based on the average price-to-earnings, enterprise
value-to-sales and enterprise value-to-earnings before interest, taxes,
depreciation and amortization multiples of five publicly traded peers: Yum! Brands Inc.
(YUM), Jack in the Box Inc., Wendy’s Co.
(WEN), Sonic Corp. (SONC) and McDonald’s Corp.
(MCD) Enterprise value is defined as market capitalization plus
total debt minus cash.
One private equity executive who invests in the food and
restaurant industry said the operation could be valued at more than $2 billion,
based on its productivity per unit, profitability and potential for expansion.
The person asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak
about his company’s potential investments.
Plane Crash
“In-N-Out Burger is a private company and this valuation of the
company is nothing more than speculation based on estimates from people with no
knowledge of In-N-Out’s financials, which are and always have been private,”
Carl Van Fleet, the company’s vice president of planning and development, said
in an e-mailed statement.
Torres, who has never appeared on an international wealth
ranking and declined to comment for this article, came to control In-N-Out
after several family deaths. When her grandfather Harry died in 1976, his
second son, Rich, took over as company president and expanded the chain to 93
restaurants from 18.
Torres’s father,
Harry Guy Snyder, became chief executive following Rich’s 1993 death in a plane
crash at age 41. The chain expanded to 140 locations under Guy, who inherited
his father’s passion for drag racing.
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