BRC Inc. (BRCC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

It's 9:00. Let's get going. I'm Mike Baker, one of the consumer analysts from D.A. Davidson. Very happy to introduce the management team of Black Rifle Coffee. We have the whole team here. We got the company Founder and Executive Chairman, Evan Hafer; President and CEO, Chris Mondzelewski; CFO, Matt Amigh; and Vice President of Investor Relations, Matt McGinley, all, of course, military veterans, which I think is always important, but particularly important as we get ready to celebrate our country's 250th birthday. We continue to see this as one of the most intriguing growth stories in consumer on the cusp of pulling all the levers to accelerate growth. So we think it's a great story to start to understand. And I'm going to turn it over to Matt, I think, for safe harbor.

Thanks, Mike. I have 2 quick housekeeping notes before we begin. First, a copy of the presentation and press release with guidance that we will reference today is available on our Investor Relations website and has been furnished with the SEC. Second, I'd like to remind you of the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. During today's presentation, management will make forward-looking statements, including, among other things, guidance and the underlying assumptions. These statements are based on expectations that involve risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ materially. For a further discussion of these risks, please refer to our previous filings with the SEC. Additionally, this presentation will include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website. And with that, I'll turn it over here to Evan.

Great. Can everybody hear me okay? So I'm Evan Hafer. I'm the Founder and Executive Chair of Black Rifle. I don't know if you guys have looked into the company enough to understand me, my background and the company's history and the genesis of it. But I started my journey in coffee, and we're not going to go all the way back. I'm going to give you like a quick snippet of this. In the late '90s, when I was going to the University of Washington, Seattle, in coffee. I translated my love for coffee as I like propelled myself into my next thing, which is to go become a Green Beret and then I went on to work for the CIA and I spent 20 years essentially leading teams in the most complex war torn and dangerous environments in the world with the intent to always start a coffee company from the late '90s all the way through until 2014. And the genesis of this actually started on the back tailgate of a truck in the middle of the desert. I've been roasting coffee for 20 years. I have an extreme amount of passion, dedication, and I'm extremely detail oriented when it comes to the product and the preservation of making the perfect product for the customer. But I don't want to pontificate about my history, but it's important from a context perspective because as we look at Black Rifle, we've looked at the stock over the last 3 years. What I really need you to take away from this is failure is not an option. Failure is not an option for Black Rifle. Failure is not an option for this team. And as we've taken our lumps and we've seen them, right, to not acknowledge them would be a little bit ridiculous. What I can tell you as we've got the internal team drive passion and an unfair advantage in the marketplace right now to win over the next 3 years. So I'll flip you back to Mosul, Iraq in 2008. I was driving from the north side of the city to the south side of that city. And it's the most dangerous city in the most war-torn environment in Iraq, and it's the size of Los Angeles. So I was in a rolling ambush that started in the north side of the city that lasted all the way through in a little car as I'm working my way through essentially a city of multimillions of people in one of the most war torn and complex environments in the world. What I learned through time and repetition and 43 deployments, countless leadership and complex problems that galvanized through events like that in Mosul, as I'm using a map sheet to navigate my way through a city as people are quite literally trying to kill me. Is that -- solving complex problems, navigating your way through complexity, not being overexposed psychologically from a negative perspective is that you've got to work the problem. You've got to understand with not only the wisdom and intellect that you've collected throughout the years, but how to drive people to the end result to not only survive, but increase your thrive or lethality perspective in the military. What you're seeing in Black Rifle is I kind of translate that back and why do I say failure is not an option. I've been doing this for 30 years in the context of leading teams through complex problems, establishing technical and tactical high ground and executing on being able to win with a team and understanding the true strategic advantage. And I'm here today, the first time at ICR because I think you need to see and/or hear the reassurance that the next 2 years is about being able to deliver, and if we flip back to a plan to deliver brand momentum, capitalize on the greatest opportunities for Black Rifle and continue to maintain that consistent cohesion of delivery to establish trust. And that's why we're here, obviously, and that's why I'm here. Why do we think that we can do it? Well, I started this company in my garage with literally zero background in the complexities of scaling and growing a company with a $1,500 roaster. I didn't have an investment partner. I didn't have capital. I doubled the company every year for a decade up to what were we at when we took it public, $250 million top line. Out of my garage with no partner, no financial background in the context of I know how to drive brand momentum, we have an unfair advantage and a strategic advantage in the context of we are the only mission-driven authentic story associated with a huge percentage of veterans in this nation and not only that, but 70-plus percent of the people want to support a veteran-backed benefits corp like Black Rifle. We're the only one on shelf. We're continuing to not only build brand momentum and then drive back into the core competency of the company, which is social media, viral and community, which is the #1 thing that we do. But we'll continue to not only invest in that community, but drive brand momentum more than any other of our competitors and more importantly, tell the story, galvanize the community and execute against passion through the greatest opportunities that we, as Black Rifle can see, and you'll see as we walk through the numbers. So I'll leave you with this, which is failure is not an option for the team. We're here over the next 2 years to build credibility and consistency back. And as you start to see where the opportunities truly lie is that our strategic advantage is that we're authentic, mission-driven company that's continuing to win on shelf with this great Coffee business that I established 12 years ago. So I'll transition it over.

All right. So thanks, Evan. I appreciate it. We're going to jump through some of these slides pretty quickly. I think as far as what sets us apart, clearly, Evan just covered all of that. So I'm not going to spend any time on this. Focusing on what wins, again, content, coffee, customers. I have some slides here as we get into the deck that in the interest of time, I'm going to show this from a numbers standpoint that I want to get to. Do you want to cover this real quick, Evan?

We've talked about this in the unconventional brand, deep loyalty. But here is the way that this actually plays out in the data. We want you guys to just leave here understanding that what we've been able to create in a decade is beating institutions that have been around for 100 years. So why should we believe? It's because we have the real momentum on shelf and ultimately, the data proves that out. We're with the most powerful influential people in the world with the most strategic partners and ultimately, some of the largest, biggest megaphones, and those partners are authentic, passion-driven. They're committed to the brand, they're committed to the mission.

And one of the things I would point out on this slide as well, Evan, as he goes out and establish these partnerships, and again, it's a great advantage. We still have all 3 founders involved in this business. And as they're out there establishing these partnerships, these are some big names, right? The guy in the middle is arguably one of the biggest names in the world when it comes to media, the largest podcast in the world, I believe, Evan.

It's #1 in 53 countries...

The guy next to that, you may not know, Riley Green is the most up-and-coming name in country music right now. They're not here because we pay them money. Money changes hands. They're here with us because they believe in the brand, the same way that Evan just talked about, right? That's a strategic advantage we have, is that when your brand actually matters and stands for something, you have celebrities who are willing to step into it with you and consumers can tell the difference. They really can when it's a financial arrangement versus when it's something that these guys really, really care about. This is just ultimately how it comes to life. It is ultimately the same way that any CPG business is going to win when you look at the different areas that we invest marketing into. But again, the ability to have these personalities and the ability to be able to have the social component, right, the pass-on component of it, that's the real strategic advantage for us. We have a quick video here that just kind of brings that to life for you, I believe. [Presentation]

So the reason we chose that. And again, I should point out, we have JT, one of our founders over here. I believe some of your kids are in that ad. When we put these things together, we do it very organically. That video, we spent almost nothing on. We're using all of our internal founders and employees to do it, and it got millions and millions of views, right? Because it's got pass on content. Anybody who's had any association with the military, male, female found that [ cue, ] they passed it on to their friends. And we're able to generate brand awareness that way. So that is the best articulation, I think, of how our creative model works. Beyond the creative model, this is fundamentally how we then transition that into revenue, right? Brand, product, Evan talked about, innovation. We're always looking for what is that next area that our fans are going to that is adjacent. I'll talk about energy here in a minute. And then strategic partnerships. We have a really clear model that we use with our strategic partners. And again, I'll show it to you on an upcoming page here. This just really gets at what the core components of our current revenue mix are. The majority of the business is in the first bucket, and that is the core of our business. We're a coffee company through and through, right? Pods, bags, this is where we generate the vast majority of our cash profitability. And as you're going to see on the next slide, this business is winning, big time, right? So we have to make sure we never pull investment off of that to drive innovation. The Ready-to-Drink Coffee business, this was innovation 2 years ago, which has now become scale, #3 in America. And it's a fantastic way for us to be able to get folks into the business that aren't into buying hot coffee. And then energy, I think those of you who have been following us, you're familiar with this. This is innovation for us, right? We're going to take our time with this. We're going to make sure we build it the right way. We're going to make sure it does not steal investment away from those first 2 buckets, which are at scale for us. Here are the results of it. Again, this is pulled straight out of consumption data. And you can see that. Not only are we winning, we're winning in both aspects of how you create revenue, right? Everybody on here is generating some level of price growth in the market. Obviously, costs are up in coffee. You all know that. Everybody is pricing behind that. What we are really proud of is that we are #1 in America in driving the unit growth, right? We're still driving 22% unit growth on top of the pricing we're doing. Our pricing looks a lot lighter. I will tell you, we've already priced in the high teens that will be flowing through. So you'll see a bit more of that. Maybe the unit growth will come down a little bit, but we are confident that our model is going to allow us to do both. In this slide here, like this is what we do. This is the best snapshot of how our model is working, right? And those of you who have listened to our investor calls, I talk about our Land & Expand strategy on a consistent basis. And what that means here in numbers is if you look at the bottom left quadrant, right, in that quadrant, you're seeing this slow build of ACV. And for those of you who aren't familiar with ACV, ACV is a measure of breadth. How many stores are you in across the country? So we're now in 55% of the stores across the country in grocery and mass, the measurable stores in AC Nielsen. And as that slowly goes up, the goal is you're coming -- you have new customers coming in and you have to increase your velocity as you come on shelf. When we initially come on shelf, it may be 2 items, it may be 4 items. It's usually not a big set, right, because we're a new brand coming in. And what that means is your velocity starts a bit lower. And you can see back in '23, we were at a lower velocity number versus the category. Fast forward to '25, we're now equal to the category, which remember, the category is made up of a lot of value players as well, right? So for us being a super-premium brand, equal in velocity, that puts us in a strong position. And also remember, this is an average, right? So you still have new accounts coming on, which are at that [ 2, 4 range, ] and you got accounts that are up [ 6, 8, ] and those are the ones that are driving well over 100% on that velocity number. The key chart on here, however, is the bottom right. If you look at the bottom right, this is it all coming together for us, which is when you get first on shelf and you drive that velocity and the retailer feels like they have a healthy margin, they're going to put more items on shelf. Any buyer would make that decision. And you can see it happening in our numbers, right? So third quarter '23, we are averaging about 2, like I said, when you go into a new account, you don't get much at first. We're now averaging in the last quarter, close to 6. And again, it's an average, right? So you still have new accounts coming on that are at 2 and you have accounts like our strategic partners, Kroger, Meyer et cetera, who are well over 10, right, on their way to 20, even north of that, which we know is possible because that's what we have in the largest customer in America, Walmart. Our RTD Coffee business, again, this is a scale business for us now, right? Innovation 2 years ago, it's now #3 in America. This category has been a tough one, though, right? The category has declined in the last couple of years. Why is that? Well, it has not kept up with consumer demands. We believe that this category has not done the things that other Ready-to-Drink categories need to do to be relevant to consumers. So this year, now that we have scale going into '26, we're going to start taking that on. We're not just about a share game anymore. We're going to start pushing the category as well. As a #3 player, that is our responsibility to do that. We have a major innovation coming out right now, which is Cold Brew. It's already doing great, high acceptance with our retailers. That will be on shelf in January and building up from there. And we have one other major innovation, which I'm not ready to announce yet because we have not fully presented it to our retail partners. That will be coming a few months later. But with these 2 major innovations, we are confident that we can start to change, not only continue our share trajectory upward, but to change that trajectory of what the category looks like in RTD coffee as well. And then finally, I talked about energy. Look, it is what it is. When I sat here last year, I gave you a bigger number than what we're calling right now in energy. And the reason is because our strategy was different, right? We are a nimble company. If there's one thing I've learned from this guy and his 2 founder partners, it's you damn well better stay nimble. You heard the story that he told about where the culture of our company comes from. We carry that culture into everything we do from a corporate standpoint as well. So as we've looked at our Energy business, you know what, it's tough man. It is a tough category. We have had some real success points in cities we've gone into and invested properly. And in areas where we've not invested properly, we did not have success. So as we go into '26, we're not going to make the same mistake again. What we're going to do is we're going to shore it up. We work with KDP on this, right, our retail -- our distribution partners, Keurig Dr Pepper. And we're going to make sure we're distributing into geographies where we can fully support in the way that we knew we were able to drive success in '25. That won't be the whole country. That will be a portion of the country, and that will allow us to continue to smartly build this optionality for ourselves while we still have the majority of our money going back against that Coffee business, which is really kicking for us right now. Let me kick it right now to Matt to quickly go through our P&L.

Thanks, Mondz. So what we're going to talk about now is how we diversified the customer base over the last 6 years. It's a pretty remarkable story. You can see in 2019, the business was 90% direct-to-consumer, 90%. If you progress over to the right, 2022, we got our first entrance way into meaningful distribution in food, drug and mass through the addition of Walmart. Fast forward to '23, '24, '25, that's the Land & Expand strategy that Mondz walked us through. That's Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons coming online. If you look at 2025, our projected numbers of $395 million in net revenue, 65% of that revenue will come from wholesale. That's important. That was a deliberate diversification designed to establish the wholesale business as a primary growth engine for the company. That's important for 2 reasons. Number one, we're meeting consumers where they shop. We're not trying to pull more people into the website. We're meeting them where they're buying coffee today. And that's very, very important if you think about most of the coffee in the U.S. is sold through retail channels and wholesale channels. Number two, it's much more profitable. The margins are inherently stronger on the wholesale business, they are in D2C. And that's fundamentally because it's much more economical to ship a case, a full pallet or a full truckload to a retail partner versus sending an individual bag of coffee to an end consumer. Now look, you may look at this and say, these guys, they're flat for the last 3 years. Keep in mind, if you listen to the earnings call, we talk about nonrepeatable revenue. In '23 and '24, we had about $24 million and $30 million, respectively, in those 2 years of non-repeatable revenue related to some liquidation sales of long inventory. Look, those things are behind us. If you would adjust for that, we'd be talking about roughly a 7% to 8% growth rate from [indiscernible]. So think upper single digits. So what does this mean? So in the end, what this gives you is a more predictable, a more diversified and a more resilient revenue model. And that's going to pay off in dividends with earning visibility over time. Operating margins. Obviously, a tough year for gross margins. Now look, we have a pathway that still gets us to 40% over time, and we'll talk about that pathway in a moment. But let me spend a few seconds here talking about '25 cost inflation. Green coffee prices obviously hit us hard and the whole category hard. If you look at the pricing we see in the marketplace today, it's at the historic highs, right, close to $3 to $4 a pound. If you look over the last 2 years, coffee prices have simply doubled. Look, it's due to the adverse weather conditions that happened through Central America, particularly Brazil, the tariffs added more inflation on top of that. We have a plan to take care of it. There's things that we can control, and there's things we can't control. We can't control whether tariffs are levied. We can't control the weather in Brazil. But what we can do is we can control our own execution. So getting back to what Evan said in the onset, it's about what we do now, right? So we have 3 levers that we're going to aggressively pursue. One is pricing and promotional disciplines. So we've taken 2 pricing actions -- actually 3 pricing actions in 2025 that have begun to pay off in the back half of '25 and will into 2026. We'll continue to monitor the external marketplace, what our competition is doing and where elasticities are to see if further pricing actions are warranted. Number two, productivity and efficiencies. We're looking across the supply chain. Look, we're a 35% gross margin business, just do the backward math. We've got like $250 million in our COGS basket to go after, and that's what we're doing. Supply chain efficiencies, manufacturing efficiencies, RFP and sourcing out a lot of our raw material and packaging buys, we're aggressively going after all of those. The one that I think really speaks to the health of the business and the transformation that we're doing would be mix. There's 2 types of mix accretion that we're going to see. Number one, as we mix our business more to wholesale, as I mentioned, it's much more economical to ship that. We'll see a margin bump because of that. Number two, the more we disproportionately grow our Packaged Coffee business, which has higher average margins than the company, the more we're going to improve our product mix. So we believe the combination of these 3 levers will get us back to 40% over time. Now it's going to take some time. With the commodity prices the way they are today, we are seeing inflation going into 2026 still on coffee. If those coffee prices normalize, we could see restoration of the 40% gross margin sooner. If they don't, we're going to steadily progress down the path of those 3 key levers and sequentially improve margins over time. Operating expenses. The team has spent years on restructuring the business to get an operating structure that's prepared for a scaling business that we have today. So we spent deliberate actions, restructuring actions against simplifying the organization, consolidating headcount to reestablish the operating cost base. If you look at the headcount chart on the Northeast quadrant there, you can see that we reduced headcount by nearly 50% from the highs in 2022. In addition to that, we worked on simplifying the organization by removing layers, redundancy and overall simplification of the business to reset that operating cost base. What we're left with is a relatively fixed cost operating base with the exception of marketing, which will grow in line with the growth rate of sales. So in the end, what we're going to have is we're going to have an overhead structure that allows most of the gross margin benefit from the higher volume to fall straight through to the bottom line and really utilize our operating leverage. I'm just going to wrap it up right now with our long-term financial targets. We still see -- now think about these long-term targets is not tied to any specific year, just the longer-term algorithm of growth for the business. We see 10% to 15% on revenue, gross margins getting back eventually to 40% and adjusted gross margin outpacing the rate of sales based upon the operating leverage.

All right. That's it.

That's it.

Thank you all.

Thank you all.

Hopefully, we'll get a chance to see you later.