• by Sarah Mahoney , December 28, 2022

It’s not the kind of attention companies like to get at any time, let alone in the weeks leading into the winter holidays.

Blue Apron, Party City and Grove Collaborative have all received delisting notifications from the New York Stock Exchange. The notices warn the companies that their share price has been trading for less than $1 for at least 30 days.

Notifications typically give publicly traded companies a grace period of six months to shore up their value and appeal to investors, or else get permanently kicked off the New York Stock Exchange.

While the move has no immediate impact on trading, it does require the companies to attach a “.bc” suffix to their share name to warn investors that it is below compliance. This also further signals the company’s financial distress not just to investors but also employees, vendors and competitors.

Grove, based in San Francisco, is a certified B corporation. It made its debut on the public exchange just months ago, helped by the special-purpose-acquisition company Virgin Group Acquisition Corp. II. (Richard Branson’s Virgin Group backs that company.)

Actor Drew Barrymore is also an investor and its first brand ambassador. She appears in a digital ad campaign that launched in July.

Within a week of the delisting warning, Grove announced that it had secured a $72 million four-year loan, which it says will be used to refinance debt and fund ongoing business operations.

Blue Apron also got its notice just before Christmas, warning that its share price had fallen below $1 and that the meal-kit company’s total market capitalization value had sunk below $50 million.

It says it plans to notify the NYSE by Jan. 6 that it intends to submit a plan to cure both issues. Earlier this month, it issued a business update that includes a squabble with an investor group led by Joseph Sanberg. It also announced a layoff of 10% of its staff to trim expenses.