Mama's Creations, Inc. (MAMA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So welcome, everybody. It's 1:00. So I think we can get started. So thank you for some of you guys that braved the weather. I don't know, is there any -- so we've been doing this now 3 years, right? So this is my third year. Has anyone been here all 3 years? [indiscernible] is the man, 3 years. Now I'll tell you guys in the 3 years, how many times has there been a [indiscernible] crazy blizzard storm? 3 for 3. That's like in the high 80s percent, right? Like that's pretty good. So I was telling everyone before if you want a really good stock tip whatever that [indiscernible] system, [indiscernible] or whatever system is once I find -- once I tell you guys when Luke tells me when we'll do the Investor Day next year, I will let you know, you hop your house, and you put it all on there being a blizzard today of our Investor Day. Is that good? So cool. I really sincerely do appreciate you guys making some time to come here. This is one of my favorite times because while many of you unfortunately have to hear me all the time, you don't get to hear the full Mama's team and it is super cool to hear -- I'm going to try to speak as little as possible and have the team share updates. The other thing I'm going to ask you to do, you guys -- say you have your iPhones, your pieces of paper, there's going to be a whole lot we're going to share today. Again, hopefully, you enjoyed some food and everything is important. But I want you to write down 1, 2 and 3 on your notepads. And as the team goes through, I will highlight. If you just leave with only 3 things that I believe are significant, I think that's a win. So you write your 1, 2 and 3 on the paper or your iPad or in your [indiscernible] and kind of I'll stop the team just to make sure if you guys don't realize how big it is, I will reinforce one of those 3 big things. Cool? Okay. Chris, you hear me okay? I'm doing okay?

You're doing great, Adam.

Perfect. There you go. That's my boss, Chris. So first slide, obviously, the most creative are forward-looking statements. More of this information, obviously, you can find at our website. So like I said, today, I really want to be all about the team. I'll share a little bit about hopefully a bit of rating that I'm sure you do of me on how the years -- look, we've been together for 3 years, how it's going. But then as quickly as possible, move into having Chris start off, Chris is on the phone, unfortunately, because of the storm, we'll share some of our updates on all of our commercial activities, what's going on there. Obviously, Lauren is here today to share something she's already been sharing a lot of the marketing stuff with you guys and the brand building. It really is amazing what we've accomplished already in 3 years. Skip literally makes it all happen. You guys know went on a tour with him today, but as quickly as Chris could sell it, Skip's got to make it, right? So they have a great partnership going on. And then obviously, Anthony will tell us if we make any money at the end. That sounds like a good plan? Okay. So quick recap of something I'm so proud of. I told you guys, my son does data analytics. So I had to create for him an equation, obviously, that you guys see on top. But it all starts with our people. I will tell you, if the board, we have a board meeting on Thursday, if the Board tells me today this week is my last day. I will not be proud of the revenue. I will not be proud of the profit. I will be proud of the team that we have built, and we're continuing to build because that is everything. Culture is everything. I told you guys that there have been M&A deals that we've gotten pretty close on, and I pulled the plug because I didn't think the culture was the right fit. Culture is everything. The amazing work that Chris and Lauren have done, you see it. I mean we are growing literally 4x the category, right? Category has grown roughly [indiscernible] literally, the market share gains we're getting, the new customers we're getting, the new items we're getting in, the velocities that are accelerating, I am so proud of what the team has been able to do to build our brand in stores. Third, I mentioned to you all the work Skip's doing, literally foundational work, foundational work building the people, building the equipment, the CapEx, the strategy, has just been off the charts. You're seeing it in the new technology. You guys just went on the tour, whether it be the mapping process, which increases shelf life, the automation, stripping machine, all of those things. Obviously, that comes all together. I was just telling George just before that my biggest thing [indiscernible] you say about Adam is, he tells you what he's going to do, and he does what he does. And now hopefully, there's a 3-year track record of this company telling you exactly what we're going to do. And we do exactly what we said. And obviously, at the end of last year with the acquisition of the Cisco division with Crown 1, I hope that is just one more reinforcing mechanism that says [indiscernible] I'm not sure I'm happy with what he's going to tell me he is going to do, but whatever he does, he says he's going to do, he's going to do it. And the M&A stuff was great. The other thing I will tell you a bit of an unintended consequence is that to extent we get success, I would tell you, I get more inbound every day now because of the deals that we have done already, right, between creative salads and olive branch, [indiscernible] Crown 1. I don't have to make a lot of outbound phone calls. It's coming in here and that's great, and we're building that pipeline that I feel really good about. And I will tell you, I'm not just thinking about the next deal we're doing, I literally have a pipeline of not the deal next time, but the deal 2 times for now. That's how we're thinking about M&A. This is a multiyear process. And then all of that equals into what hopefully you guys see as a more profitable business. Gross margin is increasing. We're managing SG&A extraordinarily well, net income increase in EBITDA. So the top line is growing and the profit is growing. I don't need to share with you guys because you guys know better than I do. It is way better to ride a wave then create your own and the most wonderful thing is, this is a category you absolutely want to be. I've said this before, you absolutely decide if Adam and his leadership team is where you want to place your bets. It is absolutely your decision that says, maybe these guys are okay, but I just don't like their strategy. Those 2 are absolutely your decisions. The third one around is this the category you want to be in? I'm sorry, that is not your decision. It is happening month after month, Nielsen IRI spins, you pick any data you want to see that Deli is absolutely where you want to be. And it's crazy. You're seeing it now the data just came out last week for the next month. Literally, units are growing faster than dollars. [indiscernible] slower for you guys. Units are growing faster than dollars. That does not happen in the food space. And it's just a wonderful thing to see. We're just getting more and more penetration. Our retailers are adding more and more shelf space. This is where you want to be. And right or wrong, I think we're the only publicly traded Deli company in America. I think the last one for me. I hope you are bored. I hope this is boring for you because all he does is say the same thing over and over and over again. Our strategy does not change. Our strategy is only getting reinforced [indiscernible], cost, controls, [indiscernible] and catapult [indiscernible] Obviously, we're all running, but Skip is driving us. You're seeing higher and higher gross margin that allows us to keep reinvesting in more and more equipment. Again, you guys saw when you took your tours, the additional space, we pretty much just doubled our manufacturing footprint in New Jersey. We've got to build that out. That's the strategy that Skip has been putting together with his team. Doing that, obviously, the control is so important. I know you're supposed to love all your children equally, Controls is the largest level a little more equally because if you don't have controls in place, can care less what your costs are and even what your culture is, you're just out of control. So that is so important for me. One of the first things we told you when we made the Crown 1 acquisition, the biggest thing we had to do, it's great, they were already on an ERP system. That's a really good thing. [indiscernible] have that luxury with greater [indiscernible] but we had to move them on to NetSuite. And in the first half of the year, we will move that. It's going great. John is doing an amazing job in leading our information technology, and we're doing great things. But again, what gets measured, gets improved. And if I don't have the data, I can't measure it. The culture stuff's awesome, the work [indiscernible] is doing, super proud of particularly the Crown 1 acquisition and bringing them on -- we're one team. I really could ask Skip for more color, but I'm super proud of how the Crown team is not just coming in, but like they're eager, they are really excited and are really happy about being part of this team. And then all the work that Chris and Lauren are going to talk about catapults. I will tell you, there's lots of things I worry about at night. I haven't slept in 3.5 years. Top line is not one them for me. I know we're going to do great things in a very measured way. Chris, happy for you to take the lead here.

All right. Well, thank you, and thanks for handing over the reins. I'm really excited to talk to this group about our fiscal '27 strategic sales initiatives. It's really built on our success and the strategy we had in play in '26 has given us a great foundation for going forward. So really excited about what this year has to hold as well as when you think about 3 to 5 years ahead, which is where we're really trying to have our mentality as a sales team today is thinking even beyond the year that we're starting and getting into and getting further and further out in our thought process. But the slide you have in front of you should be fiscal '27 strategic sales initiatives. And there's 5 basic pillars on here. None of them should be a big surprise, but they are an evolution from where we were in '26. So the first one is strategic multi-item selling approach. How we sell is very, very important. And one thing that Adam and I spoke about over a year ago now when we first talked, was selling isn't about order taking, selling is about selling. And our approach to selling is evolving even more into portfolio packages versus single items, going to our customers in a strategic manner and being a great customer partner. And I'm going to talk about that on some of the ensuing slides about what we're doing related to becoming a strategic partner versus just a supplier which is very, very important to our future and our growth. Second one here is expand average items per existing customer. This is our KPI that we live by. For '27, we're looking for a net plus 2 SKUs or plus 2 items in each one of our top 10 accounts, leveraging both our Bayshore portfolio into -- excuse me, legacy accounts and vice versa. There's still a lot of products even within our legacy business to have opportunities across our legacy customers for us to grow our actual SKU count and combined with the product innovation and working with Lauren and the team there and all the great work they do at bringing new products into play for us. Third is drive our ACV growth into underpenetrated regions and I would also add underpenetrated channels of business. So it's expanding our distribution footprint across channels and geographies. When I look at fiscal '26, the white space that I see from a channel perspective, was really the mass channel. When you think about Walmart, Target and where the consumer spends a lot of their food dollar today that we were very, very underrepresented. So in some of the ensuing slides, I'll show you where we've had some success or built some foundation for launching in fiscal to improve in that channel, while also continuing to grow across the broad spectrum of channels from C-store to the grocery channel to each and every channel that we deal with today. Club channel incredibly important to us as well. Two big things should stand out on this slide. First of all, and framed really boldly here is No Antibiotics Ever chicken, NAE chicken. This is a strategy evolution and change as we continue down the path of being very committed and increasingly committed to GRANDMA-quality. What would grandma want to feed her grandkids. And certainly, NAE is the gold standard when it comes to chicken. It's incredibly important today in the increasing health-conscious consumers that we have, people who are concerned about antibiotic resistance, just concerned about being anything that we do additive versus natural in the food process. So this is -- seemed like a no-brainer type of decision to be able to go this direction and provide it even for our retailers that have existing business with us that haven't asked for NAE, but it's an opportunity for us to then explain another step another reason why our product is differentiated from any potential competition that might be in the market. We already have the best tasting. We already have the most authentic flame grilled product out there. We already beat everybody in cuttings and now we add on another layer of, honestly, protection and authenticity into being GRANDMA-quality. And the last one on this slide is major account wins and velocity growth. We have to continue to win accounts and grow our velocity we have built a tremendous base. When you think about the added shelf space that I'm going to cover in some slides coming up relative to Walmart, Target, already talked about the mass channel, but also Food Lion, a major grocery retailer in the Southeast, amongst others. So there's still accounts out there. They're getting fewer as we continue to latch into more and more, but there's still some big accounts out there that we deserve to be in and we are going to earn the right to be there in fiscal '27. Next slide, Slide #10.

Just one thing. Guys, remember, I said 3 things. That is one that you should be writing down on a piece of paper. Like Chris just mentioned, this is a moat. This creates a moat against other players that are not doing that today. So it makes the job easier for Chris as he's selling in differentiator sell. So this is a really big deal that, again, think about, we could talk more about, but that is a big differentiator for us. Sorry, Chris. Next slide.

No worries. I'm used to it, Adam. So next slide, we're executing our plan, and I put 2 big bold statements on here. Everybody is going to recognize these retailers. Two just incredible retailers, very different approaches to the business. But we've had some great success with. So Costco, #1, I'll go into some detail on the next slide, but amazing things are happening in Costco. And we've obtained our first everyday item status that's been secured in the Northeast for Costco, and it's really where all our business started with them to begin with. I'll walk you through that evolution and as well as why it's so important as we get to the next slide. But I also want to call out Walmart. Walmart is another just great example of our strategy in play. Eight new items launching in the largest retailer in America. I just want to put it in perspective real quick. It's 8 new items against an existing one. This is massive for us, and I'll go through how that came to be. One of the 8 has already launched this quarter, and then 7 additional items that will be launching are all branded. I'll go into some detail on that as well. And I probably should celebrate the branded part more, but I know I got a slide on it. So I'll talk to that in a moment. We can go ahead and go to the next slide, Adam, Slide 11. Customer success and channel diversification. And it's here that I can kind of explain the preceding slide a little bit more detail. I talked about diversification into different channels and covering a broader geography across the country. It's also very, very important to our strategy to diversify our products and as well as our channels. But first of all, our sales mix the sales mix needs to mirror the U.S. food budget, not too heavy in any one channel. And we want to be where the consumers are. So growing mass to a more appropriate side, while continuing our grocery retail remaining a very key portion of our mix. Our acquisition of Crown 1 had no club revenue, did have some grocery revenue and did have some specialty discounter type of revenue in there as well that helps us again broaden. I know I'm playing club down a little bit from a mix standpoint. That is not to say we're not growing the club business. We'll continue to grow it. We just want everything to be proportional. You've heard some of our Costco success. Sam's continues to be a major player for us as well as BJ's. So we're incredibly well positioned in the club channel. Our fiscal '27 strategic goal of 2 additional items in top 10 accounts, that is coming off of some major wins that we already have in place that it's already catapulting us and setting up our 2027. It starts with Walmart. 8 new SKUs launching in up to 2,000 stores. In complete transparency, some SKUs will be in close to 2,000, some are more than 2,000. It just has to do with the actual planograms in these individual stores. But 8 new SKUs, 7 of those are branded. Target, 2 SKUs that we'll be launching this year, the first one in the first 750 stores will be in this quarter. We'll be following in just a few months with the second one and the stores ramp up to, again, approximately 2,000 stores there. Food Lion, 5 SKUs we launched here in Q4 as we entered -- made the corner into fiscal '27, and we'll be expanding out to approximately 1,200 stores there in the Southeast, very excited with that. Costco, I have to dive into it at a little bit. We've got the little mission to accomplish things on there and here. But achieving everyday status was -- has been an evolution over time. And I think the Costco picture really explains our approach and our sales culture at Mama's and how we go forward, not just Costco but all of our major accounts. But if you look back in fiscal 2023, we were doing about $0.5 million in sales, one product and in one region only of Costco. If you fast forward a bit to fiscal '25, we did $10 million in Costco sales with active rotations across the country followed in fiscal '26, the year we just completed. We started the year in Q1 with our first digital MDM and low and behold $10 million we had already met or essentially met what we had done in fiscal '25 after one quarter in fiscal '26. Continued rotations through the year, but culminated at the end of the year in Q4 with our first print MVM which is really the -- that is the trophy when you think about in Costco as far as moving volume. That exceeded north of $14 million of business for us in that quarter as well. So an exciting year in Costco. What does all that lead up to? That leads up to the announcement here in the beginning of the new year of achieving everyday item status in the Northeast region. Again, where it all started. Our expectation will be the domino effect on everyday item status, but that's where we are today. That was our immediate win and very, very exciting to us and allows us to have this steady state Costco business. And I'm going to take just a second, I really want to call out -- I want to call it my partner, Skip and the operations team, this happened because we delivered, and we delivered in very challenging situations to suddenly do in a quarter, $10 million or $14 million of new business. It's not an easy thing to achieve and do it without a hitch. And what I can tell you is from our customer, there were no hitches. So that builds trust. And that constant trust building over the years and through an increasing amounts of trust that they put in us allows us to continue to advance the business, and that's the culture we want to continue to promote. I'm excited about, if you look over on the right, our new customers across channels in '26, we really cover them all when you think about C-store, the grocery channel, the mass channel, the discounter channel was covered in new customers as well as just a great number of customers that represent large volume for us across the board. And so that will take me to the next slide, Slide 12. I started to talk about this at the beginning of the customer success slide. But this is our category diversification and branded product growth. It's as important to diversify our products as it is our channels that we're in. And so some great successes to talk about here. We are planning a balanced category mix that is optimal for trim utilization and does give us reduced commodity market exposure. What does that mean? Chicken trim, how does that affect us? If you look over on the right, chicken bottoms and trim utilization, usage of our chicken bottom. So let me stop there real quick. The chicken bottom, I'm sure Adam has explained this because he talks about it to everybody, right? This is -- as we make our beautiful grilled chicken breast, there is a bottom piece that is as every bit as great equality as the chicken breast itself, but it's going to be in varying sizes [indiscernible] it's not that pretty same-sized chicken breast that we sell and we flame grill. So there needs to be other products made from it. Our use of those bottoms will more than double in fiscal '27. The utilization of our shredding capabilities that came with Bayshore is going to be part of that win along with our Panini category. If you haven't seen our Paninis, certainly, if you're in the Southeast, make sure you pop into public. We've got a new assortment of Paninis in there. These are incredible. They're great to reheat at home. They are a phenomenal item. They're growing at a rate of over 80%. And the primary ingredient in most of these is chicken trim. Our branded chicken meat ball sleeves have received placement in our top-tier customers. And I've already referred to Walmart, but this is where this gets really big, right? Chicken trim going into the production of a stuff cheese chicken meat ball is one of the 7 branded items that are going across the country in Walmart. Also, one of the branded items that's going to go into Target this year as well. It's one of the 5 branded additions in Food Lion. If I -- if we think about public, one of our great partners and retail partners out there, we've got the panini in there and as part of the 6 branded additions that have occurred in public as we entered this year along with the part of the branded additions in [indiscernible], a couple of other great customers of ours, I could go on and on. These are the top branding wins for us. And I think a big note to take home as well is we're targeting a 100% increase in branded sales in fiscal '27 as we are known and the consumer recognizes us across the country, it makes us even more enticing to our customers and to open doors into some of those customers we haven't gotten into yet. So an exciting year ahead of us built on a lot of successes. We can go to -- let's go to talk about trade and trade promotion investments real quick. That's the next slide, Slide #13. Our trade investment strategy is, first of all, we don't want to be a discount item. So I want to emphasize that. You shouldn't be looking for our products to be at sale prices all of the time or waiting it out because they're on sale so often. We are a premium product, and we're proud of that. We're GRANDMA-quality. But the place for trade promotion has multiple areas. You see it in the leaning in with Costco to get the national recognition and reach this point of everyday status. But where we're going to spend a lot of our trade this year is focused on new items. You've heard me talk about it through this throughout the strategy, new SKUs and our top 10 customers, new multiple branded SKUs across the country. Look, the easier part of the sale tends to be the sale itself, getting the placement, doing all those things, those are where most companies forget. It's the next part and more critical part is getting that customer addicted to our products, getting it in their mouth, getting trial and then -- and the confidence in knowing once that happens, our customers come back over and over and they're no longer looking for promotion. They're no longer looking for a deep discount because our product is worth every penny and more what it sells for out in our retailers. An example, over to the right, we certainly always do the public branded promos. That's really built our name in the Southeast. But the graphic below shows our how our business was driven and our case sales were driven following conducting [indiscernible] with one of our great retailers. And this was on the introduction of our [ Meals for Ones ] and this is the pull that then occurred after the fact, and you see that upward trajectory. So product gets in the consumer's mouth, consumer loves the product, they bought it for a great discount, but they come back. And you know what, I'm going to buy even more and I'm not paying attention to that discounted price. So it's a great way for us to use trade. We're going to lean in very heavily there in fiscal '27. And -- but it will remain a single-digit percentage of our sales. Lauren will go in a lot more about our wide arsenal of marketing type of opportunities when she gets to that point. We do support a lot of sampling events as well. And we can go to the next one because I want to talk about people people or what make all this happen or what grows our business. So one thing we talk about a lot on our sales team and into the development of our selling culture is that everything starts with the GRANDMA-quality products. We want to be proud of what we're selling. I'm not the sales guy that you can give me a broken pen, and I'm going to sell that to you. That's just not how I'm built, and it's not how our team has built. Give us a product that we can be passionate about, that we know, that we feed our own family, and we can speak to that that's when we can sell product in a big way. And that's where we become the GRANDMA-quality service as well as the product itself. And I think about it anecdotally, I'm getting older. Adam reminds me of that all the time, makes fun of my white hair. But the -- I'm a grandparent now. I'm not a grandma, I'm a grandpa. But I would never farm out the relationship with my grandchildren to somebody else. I have a relationship with my grandchildren, so that I understand their wants, their needs, what it is they're looking for in success in their life, and then I might reach out to like in our case, from a business perspective, we utilize brokers. We utilize brokers as an addition as a service piece, and we have some great broker relationships. But it doesn't replace the one-on-one relationship. Just like me as a grandparent, I may hire a tutor, I may hire a coach to help one of my grandkids achieve something in their sport but I'm not going to hire them to have the relationship. And that's how we marry that up from a sales team. It requires top talent acquisitions, people who understand that. We've made 4 acquisitions in the last 13 or so months. We -- this allows us increased direct customer contact and with near and dear as a former retailer is the vertical relationships in our strategic accounts. we get connected at the top at the strategic level. We want to be there to support and understand our customers' needs and build partnership and then have those relationships as they funnel down all the way to the individual buyer, which sometimes can be a single category within the Deli. There are buyers in some of our customers, all say managers, deli salads, that's it. And we have to have that relationship, but you want to be above that as well to understand how that fits into the total picture. So we can go back to what I mentioned earlier, selling a portfolio versus selling individual items. We are expanding our culinary capabilities in the field. We'll be bringing on a field chef, a great experience, retail-facing chef. We will work to help do direct innovation, directly understand the food needs and the chef needs and the development needs that are within each of our retailers. It's going to be a great asset as we open up the new year as well. And over to the right, you see a picture of our sales team along with a few of the folks in operations, but that's at a plant. We like the team to understand every aspect of our production, what's going on in the plant, what the plant needs are and to make sure we're communicating and having a great relationship with our operations team as well. So that's a picture of the team, don't judge us, but we do follow all QA restrictions and where the hair nets and all that good stuff when we tour. So that's -- that's it in a nutshell as fast as I could go on our fiscal '27 sales plan. And I think with that, I get to either kick it back to you, Adam, or go ahead and introduce Lauren Sella, our Chief Marketing Officer.

Absolutely. Thank you, Chris.

Hello, everyone. I'm Lauren Sella, I lead marketing for the organization. I'm very excited to be here for our third Investor Day, my third Investor Day as well and talk to you about our plans for next year. So as we think about brand building, we're really focusing on both the consumers and the retailers to drive long-term growth. Can everyone hear me okay on the line?

Yes.

Okay. Perfect. From a consumer perspective, our priorities are awareness, connection and loyalty. We recently fielded a survey to 575 participants on their their beliefs about the prepared food category. And one of the things we learned a lot of great things. One of the things that we learned is the #1 trial -- the trial generator is Brand I Trust, which really supports our increase in marketing investment going forward, and as we've been doing it in the past. Our storytelling leads into authenticity and what you've heard us refer to as GRANDMA-quality. We're continuing to build upon our customer relationship management database to really drive our reengagement with consumers and we're also activating more earned media to build upon our paid media channels. From a retailer perspective, we're positioning ourselves as a strategic deli partner, bringing insights and innovation to the retailer to help them with their full meal solution. We're also expanding our presence through trade show participation, advertising and thought leadership and we're supporting our innovations with a full portfolio of activation, as Chris alluded to, things such as trade marketing, trade promotions, in-store demos and retail media, which I'll talk about a little bit more. Just recapping our activation and some of the highlights from last year. From a consumer activation perspective, we added in additional marketing activations last year. We started doing some micro influencer activations really to support key in-store activities such as our Costco NBM or our public launch as well as brand partnerships. Adam mentioned earlier during our lunch, how we did a couple of partnerships with another brand in the space, Brooklyn Bread and then we also brought in Mike's Hot Honey and those are things that we're going to be continuing to do. We doubled our email list, and we added 8,000 new SMS subscribers, which is a really strong reengagement platform for us, and it's a great own channel for us, a way for us to communicate to consumers as we have new news to engage them also on B2C activities. And then we improved our site help to 96%, which I was told is more than best-in-class. I'm really excited about that and really strengthening our digital ecosystem. From a B2B perspective, we optimized our strategy and really focused on prioritizing our trade show presence to the most impactful ones. We generated over 100 new leads and then also received new inbound retailer interest through B2B advertising, which we started for the first time last year and will be continuing. Then moving over from the portfolio innovation perspective, we launched Mama's Creations branded items into public and BJ's. And we expanded MamaMancini's with our Paninis and [ Meals for One ], increasing both the dayparts and the usage occasions for our [indiscernible]. And then finally, from a retail media perspective, we doubled our retail media investment last year. We added 4 new retailers, and we drove significant grows at about $8. I think a little bit over $8. We see significant performance on the retail media platforms, particularly as we have these Costco rotations. A lot of consumers are purchasing their Costco items on Instacart. So we make sure that we're present on there, both from a search perspective, we also do display advertising, video advertising, and we have good relationships with Instacart. And so we're continuing to expand and see different ways that we can build upon that relationship. Chris mentioned from an R&D innovation approach, we're making sure that our innovation is really supporting margin health, not only top line expansion. So Chris already talked a lot about the chicken trimming, but it is a key priority for us from an innovation perspective. It allows us to have greater control over our yields and our cost. And we affectionately call our chicken bottoms, our artisan cut products. They really are -- I mean, the folks in the room tried some of the products here that Costco cheese chicken meatballs and really are premium items that we're excited to bring to consumers. And then as Chris already mentioned, we're launching multiple new Walmart items that use these artisan cuts -- these artisan cut pieces. And this really allows us to innovate across multiple product categories. So the ground chicken for meatballs. We have the cheese of chicken, but there are a lot of other ideas in the pipeline. Chris mentioned how we're how we're focusing not only on this year but 3 to 5 years out. So we're constantly building our flavor bank. Folks in the room met [ Chef Min ], and he's always building out new product ideas in the areas that we're focusing on. And then our paninis also use the trim and then as well as our [ Meals For One ]. So we're leveraging this innovation across a number of different platforms. We know that these are categories that are growing for retailers and consumers, things like handhelds. Obviously, chicken is a very strong and growing protein. So it's exciting to be able to bring a lot of innovation in the space that benefits consumers, benefits to retailers and also helps us as well. And then finally, as we look at fiscal '27, our goal is to increase our marketing investments by 50%. And really, as we look at a new item launch, we look at it through 3 phases across the full shopper journey. First is sticking in their mind, building awareness. From the retailer perspective, we're attending trade shows. We're submitting ourselves for awards. I can't tell you what, but there may be an award sometime in the future that gets announced, it's an embargo now. We're also, as I mentioned, we started doing B2B advertising, which has been -- has proven very successful for us. There are a couple of instances where retailers have seen our ads and have reached out proactively to our sales team. It's creating [indiscernible], so that's great. And then ensuring that we have the right selling tools, again, folks in the room, you see our brochure, which we update on an annual basis. And then from a consumer perspective, I look at it as they're living their life. So things like influencer partnerships, digital social ads, earned media, which is something I mentioned earlier that we're reengaging in. We are going to be doing more PR this year than we have in the past year and then product placement as well. So that's something that's always fun. We work with an agency that you can find us in different game shows or movies or TV shows. So just a way to drive awareness of our brand. And then when the consumer is in the shopper mindset, the retail media, content and search and Instacart, as I mentioned. And then once we're in store, ensuring that we have -- we're getting in their cart, through all of the trade promotion that Chris and his team is doing, from a marketing perspective, we're partnering up with the sales team, ensuring that we know when we are on ad and supplementing that we have the right demos. Demos are a big part of our Costco relationship. In-store displays, that's something we're working on enhancing and testing in the near future, even our on-displays. Point-of-sale. Adam's parents are always giving him also the circulars from public every week, every time we appear. So we always know we did our job [indiscernible] what we see the circular on his desk. And then finally, after they purchased driving that advocacy and customer retention, one of the things I -- we started in the last year, 1.5 years, is putting QR codes on some of our packs. These are customized QR codes. And when you scan the pack, it will take you to a specific landing page. So that allows us to do things like on our Costco [indiscernible] we offer consumers the opportunity to get a coupon for repeat purchase to drive second purchase of the item. As well as our e-mail marketing, I mentioned that we doubled our list in the last year, something that we can [indiscernible] started the SMS, which allows us also to geo target. So the SMS really came out of some digital advertising that we did in the public location. So when we have a promotion at Publix, we'll send an SMS or when we have a new rotation with Costco, we can send people text messages and emails, so really driving that loyalty. So that's really our full portfolio partner, obviously, with Chris and his team and Skip from an operations team to ensure that we're always working effectively, and we're all connected on all elements of this because all of us have to be part of this success to make it work. Thank you. And now turning it over to Skip.

Okay. Thanks, everybody. Skip Tappan, COO for Mama's Creations. And I was doing a head count from the back of the room, and it doesn't seem like we lost anybody on the tours. That's a good sign. You all remember here and Adam shared over the last couple of years, one plant, 2 locations. So as of September 2 of last year, we are one plant 3 locations and maybe in another few months. And a few months after that, that number will continue to grow. But some of this might be a little bit of a review for Farmingdale because in the summer of 2024 is when there was a large capital expansion in the Farmingdale facility just a couple of months before I joined, and basically took the existing facility and reconfigured it and added about 10,000 square foot of usable space. That was the addition of Grills and our Spiral [indiscernible] and additional trimming capability [indiscernible]. And so this was just a real huge unlock for increasing capacity in a fixed footprint of the operation. One of the other things is it started last year and has really solidified this year is the use of contracts for our commodities and our proteins, more contracted pricing, both for [indiscernible] chicken. In this particular case, with the addition of Bayshore, we were able to look at our chicken purchases as one company instead of 2 different separate organizations and really put a much higher percentage into contracted pricing for our chicken to not only be able to have better visibility into what our commodities were going to be, but also for better cost control. The trimming and tumbling, which you all have heard, some of you have heard before, is one of the really the biggest unlocks for us. The more that we can trim chicken ourselves and tumble it and then marinate ourselves, so that's one of the biggest gross margin unlocks that we have. And we're going to more than triple or double to triple what we have done in prior years with the addition of [indiscernible] we look at everything collectively. So it really is the slides that you saw from Chris earlier, where we talked about the artisan cut chicken, not chicken bottoms, but artisan cut chicken, as Lauren said. I know. [indiscernible] I actually came up with artisan cut. It took a year for it to stick, but that's good. But anyway, that is really the big unlock because when we trim the chicken and we cut the perfect portion breast out of it, the artisan cut piece, if we don't use it, then obviously, it's just a waste. And the more we transform that in the strips or meatballs or shredded chicken or diced chicken, then we have this better balance of portion cut chicken as well as the remainder chicken that we use in our other items. So the fact that we have a sales plan linked to the marketing plan linked to our purchasing plan linked to our operating plan really makes us a much better balance and why we can able to fully realize the gains that come from that. All 3 plants, I'm going to mention this one on this, but all 3 plants have a slightly different shift schedule, but none of them are running 24/7 yet. So on one of the tours, I mentioned the difference of staffed capacity and bolted down capacity. You all have heard Adam shared that before. If the equipment is on the ground, it's bolted down. If it's not running, then it's not staffed. So if we think about where we're going to try to get better asset utilization, it is really making sure that when we have assets, they're running, we're using, they're running efficiently. And we have some room in our schedules during the week as well as weekends to be able to continue to increase our throughput and our capacity through just our bolted down capacity. That doesn't mean that we're not going to focus on efficiency improvement. It doesn't mean that we're not going to also have some capital purchases in the future, but we really want to sweat our assets to get the best return on invested capital. Also in the other facilities, you'll see this, too, but partnering with Bayshore, when we added Bayshore, there was multiple benefits that came from that aside from the customers, equipment capabilities with people. But the fact that we truly can't operate as one plant 3 locations means that we started within the first month of moving some items into Bayshore out of [indiscernible] here just to help us prepare for that [indiscernible]. And the fact that we had the right integration process just really made it much easier for us to be able to do that. And we're now going to add more and more customers to the Bayshore business from our legacy business as well. And the one thing that is also that Farmingdale has piloted, some of the folks there have been amazing operators, but they've not gotten into as much of the data analytics. But in the last year or so, this team has actually taught themselves in a lot of cases, how to do much deeper data analytics and have gotten so good at that, that is actually piloting some of this work and role modeling up with our other sites. So we really are operating much more seamlessly than we have in the past. And it's great that the Farmingdale facility has been able to make such a transformation sort of leading the way for the others. East Rutherford, which you all just went through, there's a 19,000 square foot warehouse attached to the side of it. Both tour groups got to hear the fact that we're partnering with an industrial engineering firm that is not only looking at the physical footprint and the physical space, but the way product flows throughout the facility. So again, we're trying to make sure that we're as efficient as we can be before spending any capital to ensure we're getting everything out of our assets. And then we use that space. We'll use that space for extra refrigeration and freezing for extra production manufacturing, material flow to really unlock what doubling the size of this facility will actually be able to provide us. You saw some of the examples of prior investments in technology with the MAP technology, Modified Atmosphere Package and we have more on the way. And one of the things that has also become obvious with the acquisition of the Bayshore business, which is primarily refrigerated, I'll talk to the build a stock model in a second, which we did on the floor. But as much as we've used frozen as our ability to be able to build the stock, now we need to be focusing even more on greater shelf life on fresh items, so we can still maintain that bill-to-stock model, but on refrigerated items and not just have it be frozen. Same examples of shift schedule. Yes, they're running 5 days a week, sometimes 6, 2 to 2.5 shifts, but we have schedule optimization in this facility that will also allow us to get more out of the existing assets. The one thing that East Rutherford is doing also for us as our pilot, you all heard about the 3PL facility that we're using 30 minutes from here. We are limited to the size of refrigerated and frozen storage we can have on site, but we don't want it to be a constraint to our growth. So we have turned to -- starting last June, we turned to this 3PL facility, Lineage, that has been a great partner with us for our first really true 3PL experience. And we see that, that type of engagement with outside third-party partners as something that will help us continue to grow when we have constraints on our existing footprint. Bayshore, and I think you'll see a video right after this since we all couldn't be in Bayshore, you'll see a couple of minute video about that. But this facility is double the size and square footage of our Farmingdale and our legacy East Rutherford facility. It will be about the same after we build out the space. But it is a great facility. There was a large capital investment into the facility prior to our acquisition, and we'll talk about integration here in a minute. But one of the things that they have is that our Farmingdale facility can only trim so much chicken from a physical space. The size of the Bayshore facility is more than double that. So when we actually show the amount of chicken that we're going to trim in this next year, 2/3 of that is going to be done to the Bayshore facility and 2/3 will be consumed at Farmingdale and over here at East Rutherford. So again, being able to really truly operate as one plant with 3 locations, it's just really -- it's going into all aspects of it from our raw and pack material purchasing to our processing and to our finished goods. I think the other thing is that on the last statement officially onboarding as the part of one plant 3 relocation strategy, as I mentioned, in the first month, we were moving items between our plants within the first month of September. We did a couple of more items in October, November. And now when we work with Chris' team and looking at what the future forecast is for this year and next, we don't want -- we want Chris to be able to sell with unconstrained demand of -- so that production operations is not limiting what they do. That requires this crystal ball to be a little more clear and for us to be able to develop and have improved throughput and capability that hasn't existed in the past that we're really leveraging this integration to help with. And I've not seen this video, so I'm hoping to use some good AI to spruce me up a little bit.

Okay. Here goes nothing. [Presentation]

So we just wanted to try to give you a glimpse since you couldn't be there as to what the Bayshore facility is like. So it really is a great facility. It has a little more elbow room than we have here at East Rutherford. But again, that's one of the reasons why we're grab the attached space to the building so we can really spread and operate more efficiently.

To really talk about the acquisition and integration on this, and I'll highlight on this top right slide here [indiscernible] slide in a minute. I think most of you are familiar with what the deal overview was for when it got announced and what the acquisition cost was. The facility is 42,000 square feet; revenues, $56 million, and Chris of course, will make it go higher than that. We added 200 employees roughly to the team, and it's only 10 miles from Farmingdale's. So that -- a couple of things that I want to highlight on there. Number one, Adam has shared this before, but we really -- when we acquired the business, we acquired great talent and great people. And recently, just a couple of weeks ago, we announced to the company a dozen or more, dozen to 15 different promotions and leadership changes that occurred across all 3 locations. And what we -- this is the first time in my career ever that we've had this amount of a percentage of leadership moving to new roles at the same time, where we have a critical mass really starting out the journey together. So it's almost like their own sort of cohort. We have individual one-o-ones with everyone, but we've moved to an enterprise level sort of where we do HR, procurement, planning, finance, obviously, maintenance and it's really looking at it as a company instead of individual locations. So not only did the talent that we acquired with Bayshore unlock or gave us the ability to help unlock some of that enterprise level capability, we had folks that are in our existing businesses that were chomping at the bit and raising their hand and say, I want to do more as well. It's a great opportunity for us. It was a really big celebration moment for us as a company. Having Bayshore [indiscernible] so close together also allowed us to have single point of leadership that could be over multiple locations, people flowing to the work, technical resources, hourly folks. So if we have overtime needs or last-minute demands, we can flow to the work. So that proximity has really, really helped. One of the things we did early on out of the gate was integrating 100% of the Bayshore suppliers into the Mama's network. So we sort of got rid of the middle man to be able to operate more efficiently. Next step has been, and we're in process now of using the scale of the 2 sites to be able to find the best combination of suppliers that can service all 3 locations instead of having individual ones. The NetSuite, you heard about that earlier, but we're working on converting over to NetSuite to be on one single ERP system by the middle part of this year. And already mentioned the organizational changes. The other thing is that the gross margin journey that we're on in Bayshore, we have a legacy glide path that we've delivered in East Rutherford and Farmingdale, and we have increased expectations for this year. And over the balance of this year, we will bring Bayshore into the same sort of gross margin performance as the rest of the business. The revenue strategy, Chris talked a little bit about this earlier, but we are -- like the rest of our legacy business, we're looking at exiting lower-margin business, in this case, our street business and replacing that with higher-margin branded growth and using that facility capabilities to help support that. And they're also doing -- Chris' team is also doing cross-selling between the Mama's branded customers and the Crown 1 branded customers. We got into some customers with the Crown 1 business that were not part of the Mama's base and vice versa. So now we've been able to do that cross-selling. The last thing here was around the Crown 1 integration playbook. This is really using our M&A playbook and using the Crown 1 integration to help us inform what the next acquisition will look like, things that we missed and how we make improvements on that. On the top right of that slide, really, and I highlighted this when we were on the tour. Again, we are -- we have methodology and assessments that would say that we could get up to 50% of increased capacity of our existing network without spending capital. That is through schedule optimization, that is through doing good old-fashioned industrial engineering optimization work, process optimization, reconfiguring how our lines are configured. And if we put some modest capital up to 100%. So when we think about our growth and you do the math, 20% year-on-year plus acquisitions, this has us going out several years still being able to absorb that organic growth and acquisition.

Again, 3 things. First one, you're going to hear this at least 10 more times. First one, obviously, NAE, huge differentiator for us. Two, hopefully, you guys were a little happy with Chris' modest wins at Costco and Walmart. This would be my third one. This is huge. The amount of work Skip's built his team, Shane and Carlos and others that are helping now every day on process improvement. I've given you guys some examples that you say, Adam, this can't be true, you're showing the AI pictures, no. There really is this much opportunity. And the fact that Skip has seen that with his team and going against that, that would be number 3 to me pretty big on we can expand just fine with the 3 facilities.

Thank you. Hey, everybody. I'm Anthony Gruber, I'm the CFO of Mama's. I've been here for about 3 years. I think about 2 years, 2 weeks after Adam joined, I joined the organization as well. And it's been a pretty nice glide path from there. We've been able to accomplish a lot in a short time. We have 3 locations now, which is awesome, one manufacturing facility. But I'd just like to take you through the targets that we have for the upcoming fiscal year 2027. So on the top line, we're looking at double-digit growth. As Adam said, the area of the deli prepared food area is growing about 5%. So right now, we're pretty far above that. It's quite nice. We're going to continue, and we do anticipate growing that sales line. The gross profit, we have been growing that and having it grow kind of quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, we'd like to get into the mid- to high 20s or lookouts. Some of the ways we're going to do that and some of the ways that Skip talked about, was by trimming. So trimming more, using those artisanal cuts, Skip's word, I do believe, from a year ago and putting those into some of our other products that trimming unlocks a lot of efficiency for us, a lot of costs that we don't have to waste on buying trimmed product that's already been tumbled for us. We get it in-house, and we're able to trim and use that product on some of the things that we had for lunch today, which were like the cheese stuff, chicken meatballs, which are one of my favorites, I must say, and one of my children's favorites as well. Commodity costs. We talked about some of the contracts that we have in place. So we're trying to stabilize the cost across the year. We can see some headwinds from time to time in different commodities but we also work with different commodities. When we started the organization, the biggest commodity and probably only commodity that we really looked at was beef. We're now on to chicken, and we're on to vegetables and other things as well. So that kind of controls the costs. And then the one manufacturing facility, 3 different locations as well. So we truly look at all 3 locations, Bayshore, Farmingdale, East Rutherford as interchangeable, and we can move production from one to the other, depending where we're more efficient, if we have capacity constraints in one, we could move it over to another. And we can use machinery that may be off-line or maybe more efficient in making the product. So we're confident that we're going to be able to meet those gross profit or gross margin percentages. Operating expenses, G&A. So marketing spend, we're looking at increasing at about 50%, and that's going to be balanced with what type of margin that we're pulling in. If we see the margin is not coming in, where we'd like it to be, we're not going to spend as much on marketing. Same thing, which you don't necessarily see on this slide, but we have gross sales and to get to net sales, we spend dollars on promos. So we may look at that promo and marketing in kind of the same light. If we don't have the dollars to boost that margin and bring it to where we want, basically, our levers are to pull back on the promo or the marketing. And if those margins start to come in higher than where we're anticipating, we can also use those levers and start to do a little bit more promo, a little bit more marketing, which will then just facilitate more sales and more brand awareness as we go through the year. Investing in the build-out and continuing investment in the build-out of the middle management. I think Adam has talked about kind of the team that we have built at the top and the leadership team, very proud of everybody that's come into the organization, and we feel pretty confident in the group leading the organization. This is to round out that next layer of management and make sure that throughout we're kind of picking up the little areas that we can make a difference in either in margins and bringing in the right people to get us further along the line, different thought processes. And then on the OpEx side, we're targeting about 20% of sales, and that's without the marketing spend. So -- and that all goes in line with building the management capacities at the middle management level. So building that world-class team, not at just the top level, but it's starting to trickle down. Skip was able to speak and he talked about the promotions we were able to do internally. Those are not just promotions for the sake of promoting people. It's people's wants to get up to that next level and really putting in the level of work that showed us that they're able to get to that next level and make the company very efficient. Other income, interest. We're going to keep paying down the debt that we have. We have a very small amount of debt. The purchase of Bayshore, we were able to do -- we had the line and the bank right behind us the whole time. They offered more money to us than we even wanted to take. But what we were able to do is do a pipe at that point in time, use those dollars and pay all our debt off. We wound up being in a better cash position and in a better debt position after buying Bayshore than beforehand. Plus now, we have a whole new facility and a whole another round of sales and a customer base that came with it that we had not tapped into in the past, which is 3 wins, I think I mentioned there. It was a pretty good acquisition. Very happy about that. So on the net income side, going from the low single digits to kind of the mid-single-digit range as a percent of revenue. So basically, looking at the levers that we have to control our marketing, our expenses, our promo and then becoming more efficient in the manufacturing arena. We've made a lot of headway there. We've become more efficient, but there are always a lot of other opportunities ahead of us. We see that year in and year out. They're a bit smaller over time, but they're still every time we acquire another organization, we find another bunch of items that we can capitalize on, turn that into dollars, make it more efficient for our gross margin, grow the bottom line. And on the adjusted EBITDA side, going from kind of get into the mid-teens vicinity and keep that going on the way forward as well. We'll be investing in the organization. We do anticipate and we always look at M&A opportunities, they come through, and I could hear Adam speaking about them in the office next to me all the time, and I always ask him to get a lower price. I bang on the wall a little and -- so sorry, you got to take another $1 million off of that price, and we'll get that company for a good level. We were able to really grow the organization, I think, in a really beneficial way by the Bayshore acquisition this year of Crown 1. So very proud of what we've done this year. And thank you, everybody, for making it out here, especially during the snowstorms. Yes, Ada is 3 for 3. I think during next year, I [indiscernible] back the other way. I don't know, 3 times you're out. So I don't know. And then [indiscernible] to Adam for some closing remarks.

Thanks, Anthony. So super quick because I want to do Q&A. But look, again, I want to bore you, our M&A strategy hasn't changed since the first day I started communicating it to you. So we have this one-stop shop. Again, we tell you what we're going to do, and we just do what we say. Acquisitions. As we get bigger, obviously, the acquisitions will get bigger. We've done a number even in my past life, a number of acquisitions that I find ironically, the smaller the acquisition the harder it is to integrate. So we'll grow with it. And then our deli strategy our M&A strategy in the deli space with existing manufacturing and then the third one, actually, Chris and I spoke after he send me a love note after the storm, hey, Adam, you get off your butt and find me something not on the East Coast. So I'm working on that. But yes. Look, [indiscernible] measure of success. Again, this -- and again, I'm not even going to apologize. I hope this happens. I hope you guys are just getting so bored because all -- I just said the same thing over and over and over again. So the same metrics that we've been tracking this whole time, what gets measured, it's improved, right? So all the work that Chris is doing around increasing AI getting to new customers, all the work that Lauren is doing on increasing the ROAS, the return on advertising spend, at these players, the work Skip is doing to drive more and more efficiency throughout the plant network, all the work Anthony is doing to manage SG&A so well, these are all the things that we're putting together. So with that, I will open up for questions. You get extra credit for not asking me and putting Lauren or Chris or Skip on the spot. But Mitch?

So you're rolling out a new items [indiscernible] more customers. Are you -- when the customers are evaluating, are you getting them any data [indiscernible] how does that kind of [indiscernible]?

Yes. So I'm going to [indiscernible]. So first, the question is, and I'm going to have Chris answer it. The question is when we go to a new customer, how do we help -- how do we sell that in, right? Do we share information about the product, maybe at another customer or why -- Lauren, why we did consumer insights work to say that this labor is better? Chris -- how do you sell, Chris, is the question that Mitch is asking.

If I tell you that I have to kill you. I mean it's like the top secret stuff. No, it's multifaceted. And sometimes it's a little bit situational, depending on what you're hearing or what I'm hearing or listening to the customer express. In part, it would be -- it comes from the data we have from existing customers. So we know we're never going to share proprietary type data, but we can rank products, we can rank flavors but it's also tapping into things like the Food Marketing Institute or IDDBA and the other data that we pull about what is the consumer is looking for and where the trends are going. So we'll utilize that as well if that's the tone of the conversation. But some of it's a little bit of judging what the customer needs to hear and how our product is going to solve maybe their angst a little bit. What I'm seeing a lot out there is people being charged with moving forward their fresh business, moving forward prepared foods, and that hasn't necessarily been where their history has existed in their roles. So they're just looking for somebody to come and say, hey, how do I get this done? What should I be looking for? And so that's where we're reaching back into a lot of industry data as well.

Sort of related to the question on selling. So idea of portfolio selling versus single item is intuitive but it's sort of seems obvious like why weren't we doing that previously, like what changes in the sales [indiscernible]?

So the question for Chris -- well done, guys are doing really well. 2 for 2. The question was -- of course, everyone is going to say they want to sell in a portfolio, not a single item. Why is that winning, I guess, is your question?

Why wasn't that happening?

Why wasn't that happening before?

Well, I think in part -- it's a great question, actually. But in part, that is because we didn't quite have the breadth of items. So when you think about what we did in fiscal '26 and what we're continuing to do now, is develop out these items to where it is more a hand-in-hand portfolio. So if I'm selling into a customer and they're saying, hey, I really love -- the star of the show is always our chicken breast or our beef meatball. I mean that's always just the start of the show. But it's like, hey, you need a category play here. So if you bring in shredded chicken, if we let a sample to shredded chicken to you, let a sample chicken strips to you, oh, by the way, we've got this [indiscernible] chicken meatball and you can start to build out a total solution for your customer. That's always helpful in the selling process, and it's yielded some good results for us. But probably the biggest reason we didn't sell more portfolio-wise in the past was we had more limited portfolio in a lot of ways than what we have to work with today.

Yes. I would actually add, I think what Chris said is just really powerful, and it's even bigger than the sales question you asked. Our success begets success. So Chris is absolutely right. We didn't have anything else to offer except the meatball. I can either give you a meatball or I got nothing for you. The same is the case. I always have positive intent for before this leadership team came. I would have loved to have bought a shredder. I couldn't afford it. I wasn't making any money, right, before we all got here. So now I actually have equipment I could buy, hey, why didn't you hire Alberto our head of procurement. Why? I didn't have any money, right? So before we all got here, we had no money. So I'm sure the team might have thought to think procurement is kind of important in this industry. So what's really great, and I truly believe this is the better we do, the faster we're getting even better. It truly is the acceleration, right? [indiscernible] again, my son will be proud of me, acceleration versus velocity. Our acceleration is going up, the speed at which we're growing is actually going up because we have the products. We have the customers. We have the equipment. We have the people. And that's what's so exciting and why I truly believe you didn't see nothing yet.

Adam, there's another aspect that I want to piggyback on. 100% right there, but it's also -- when I was referring to GRANDMA-quality service, in the past, we had a very tiny sales team and everything was done through brokers. And again, I'm not negating brokers in any way. Those are very important relationships. But oftentimes in that selling environment, there's a cutting on chicken breast at Albertsons. I'm just kind of making that up. And the broker says, hey, send me your sample. Versus when you have the developing relationships that we have as well you get the understanding of what are you looking for in totality? What is your strategic need? And now I can come to you with 5 or 6 items and present -- it's not about a cutting where I'm just sitting against a competitor. So we have a lot more meetings now that are -- there's no competitor in the room. There's nobody cutting against us. We're having a strategic conversation and that we're being invited to, yes, share all 5 of these items. Let's try them. Let's go forward. I think that's a big differentiator as well.

You have big budget increase this year, 50% [indiscernible]. And with the mantra that which is [indiscernible] can be improved. [indiscernible] specific measurements on the marketing [indiscernible] you look to see that work [indiscernible] whether you gave the examples of Brooklyn Bread or Mike's Honey or doubling the retail and [indiscernible] retailers. Like what are some metrics with that market increase that we can [indiscernible]?

Yes. The question is how we're going to measure the increase in marketing, the effectiveness of the increase in the marketing spend? We're not at a level, and I think I said this in the first investor conference, where we're not quite at the level to do full multivariant marketing model mixes. But where we do measure things such as our retail media, we see the return on ad spend there. And then there are other ways that we can measure the effectiveness, things like looking at our engagement rate on our digital media, for example, things like building our own channels. So last year, we doubled our e-mail database, and we added 8,000 new SMS subscribers. That's a powerful tool for us because we own that. We own that information. We can have one-on-one conversations with those consumers. So those are ways -- things -- other indicators like the health of our e-commerce business, which is a function of other -- we do advertising on that as well on social media as well as e-mail marketing. So open rates also are -- we are always looking at our at our website, I mentioned the site health was improved significantly and in the top tier. So there are a number of different metrics that we look at quantitatively like the kind of the [indiscernible].

[indiscernible] the checklist you've come through?

Chris, the question is, what is the opportunity at Costco?

Do I get to put a ceiling on it? No, the opportunity is really probably in the near term, everyday status in every region of the country. That's kind of how we approached getting rotations in. That's how we approach getting full acceptance across all the regions so that we could do something like an MDM. And now it's that progress to get everyday status. How many items that could eventually be? Costco runs a limited assortment. So you're probably never looking at double-digit number of SKUs in there despite what Adam tells me, right? He says, hey, Chris, you got to do, but always do my best. But it's get everyday status and then what's the next item you can get every day status.

Your growth expectation for the year double-digit revenue growth, could you be more specific at all. Is that organic growth? [indiscernible] because you're still lapping the [indiscernible].

So I believe -- again, I want to continue to tell you that we will beat the market, we'll grow market share. I would tell you that, that double-digit growth is organic growth. So I don't count. So it's really good, really good on the record, right? I don't want to guarantee you. I'm telling you, I'm not going to -- I do not put pressure on us to acquire a business every single year at all costs. I'm going to pay 50x revenue because I told you guys I'm going to buy a company. I've told you guys that we built a plant. The plant had 0 inorganic growth. I tell the Board, I have no corporate goals of acquiring a business every year. Personally, I know from my experience across multiple companies that I could digest an acquisition every year, and that tells me that once Skip gives me the okay, I start looking. But that inorganic growth has nothing to do with the algorithm of I'm going to get to double-digit growth. I will never get to double-digit growth because I acquire another business. Is that helpful?

Yes. When you get to the final [indiscernible] to go after the independent channel more? And is there [indiscernible] the path to actually get through [indiscernible]?

Yes, Chris, the question is, is there opportunity in the independent grocery channel?

Yes, there's -- yes, there's opportunity, a simple question. There's opportunity in every channel. But the volume and the distribution component in the independent grocery channel gets a little bit more challenging. It tends to get a bit more expensive to distribute into independent grocers. For instance, they don't have their own warehouse facility or you're going through a third party. We have business in that channel today, and it does well for us. So I would just say there's no channel that I don't have on my list. I wouldn't put it as a top priority on my list today.

You talked about volume growth outpacing sales. And that's great because volume growth is hard to come by in the broader category. But just curious if you could maybe provide some of the pricing outlook that you have for the category because that does obviously imply some central pricing pressure when the volumes are outperforming the sales growth?

Yes. So the question is -- and this will be for Chris and then I can always add is what's our thinking on pricing for the year ahead? Yes, Chris?

Yes. Right now, we want to continue to show great value for our customers. So I would see pricing relatively in line with inflation through the year, but really, we're -- what we see in the gains that Skip and the operation team brings from an efficiency standpoint and improving our COGS, or better position and stability that we have relative to the amount of our chicken that we have under contract, all helps us not have to get kind of crazy and get our growth simply out of inflation. I always like getting growth, a balanced approach in everything we do. So there's got to be that balance between volume and inflation along the way. We got some good inflationary growth last year. But I would anticipate it to be, nothing that's going to outpace what we expect from a food inflation standpoint.

So I'll just add a couple of the dirtier things to it. So one, reading recently, the markets, not that they know anything, but everyone's thinking that food inflation is going to be actually lower this year than where it's been in the past couple of years. It's certainly not -- it's going to be above 0, but it's certainly going to slow versus where it's been. So that's just one piece of information. Second one is I like -- and again, also, Chris gets to disagree with anything I'm about to say. So he's the boss. Two, I like where our margins are roughly now. So the good news is we're in the right place when we all started 3 years ago, nothing was in the right place. So that leads me to point 3, which is, if we will keep up with inflation like Chris said, we're in a good place. We don't have to push any harder. Skip has done an amazing job with managing our chicken commodities are the biggest driver of why we would need to price. Chicken, we're in a very good place from a contracting standpoint. I think chicken is relatively stable. It's going to go up in the summer like it does for the past 250 years of this country and then go down, but I think we're in a good place. Beef, as you all know, that it's on the front page of every paper in America, is a little bit silly right now, right? I do not believe that's going to come down anytime soon. But Chris and his team are working to make sure that we're at the right price. And then, again, if you told me -- roughly, if you told me that there's no inflation whatsoever on any of our products this year. I would tell you there's really no need for us to price this year. But we're just going to keep up. We feel we are proud of our products, I think we do good work. I know we're all very frugal. And obviously, if inflation goes up, we have to -- you see it right along with us.

[indiscernible]

So Chris, the question I'm going to combine it with the question Brian asked because I'm telepathic. The question was the new items, how many stores is that in Walmart? And the second question from Ryan, not from Adam is, Chris, why are you no good at your job and why are you not in all 5,000 stores immediately? Obviously, I added a little artistic color to that. But the question is, could we -- is 2,000 the cap or could we be in 5,000 stores, was the question from Brian?

Yes. I don't know what the cap would be. We certainly could be more than 2,000. So approx -- again, I would use that approximate number. I think in total, we're in 2,150-ish stores today. It goes up constantly, but there's a mix of items in there. So on average, it will be 2,000 stores. It tends to be the stores that have the best opportunity from a Walmart perspective, from a fresh perspective and from Deli. So if you think about their stores, super Walmarts versus regular Walmart, that type of thing, that dictates it. But yes, there's potential for more stores. There's more stores that have deli operations [indiscernible].

Yes. Lauren, on marketing, you said that the #1 driver of trial [indiscernible], but to trust the brand, you have to know the brand. I would like to hear a little bit more about what [indiscernible] to get customers trial in different markets or rather in different channels? And related to that, you do some private brands with brands that people do trust. And just how are you thinking about that part of the business as well?

Sure. So the question is how do we build awareness and trust with our products? And then how do we approach private brands? So a couple of things. I mean we use different marketing levers depending on who the customer is, what the items are still, for example, with Costco, one of their big vehicles in general, for the retailer, it's in-store demo sampling, and we participate heavily in that as well. So that's an area where we're building that awareness with the consumer and it's clearly working for us, as Chris mentioned in terms of the growth that we've seen in Costco, especially as we go into new regions and getting that -- getting those samples out to consumers really drives -- build that familiarity and the trust. And then with other things like the retail media, again, what we're doing is we're making sure that we show up when people are searching for any relevant keywords. So they're seeing the familiar seeing our brand and becoming familiar with it, adding it to their cart, hopefully, through the different platforms. From a private brand perspective, we are doing things with private brands. We are doing advertising to support that because ultimately, it is our product. So we still do search marketing on certain private brands where it makes sense. I think it is like where we have product at Walmart. It also depends a lot on the retailer and where they are in their marketing digital ecosystem. So there are some retailers that are more sophisticated than others. So Walmart, for example, very sophisticated in terms of what they're doing to reach consumers and shoppers. And so we're able to work in that space very easily versus there are some other customers that aren't. We advertise across multiple search retailer media platforms, either their own or with the big retailers or other third-party platforms that have a number of different grocers. So we actually advertise -- I don't know actually the total number, but we're across any customer that has -- is on a platform, we're doing some sort of campaign with them.

So coming out of the [indiscernible] integration, you had a [indiscernible]. Can you just kind of talk about the evolution you have in that [indiscernible] just kind of what you've learned from [indiscernible]?

Yes. So the question is kind of what's the evolution of the M&A playbook. So the first is, I borrowed with pride the work I did for 5 years before at Mondelez. So I promised you I brought my M&A playbook with me. The -- there was great learnings. Actually, we're doing it right now with the NetSuite integration. So when we did [indiscernible] ERP is part of that M&A playbook. It's a very thick playbook. And I'll tell you, we didn't do it right. And that's my fault the first time with Creative Salads. We did not, for one instance, train the trainer enough. We pushed the ERP on to Creative Salads and that's going to work, and it caused a lot of -- it made it more difficult than it was. So actually, then I'll combine the 2. The other thing is we didn't have an expert -- an ERP expert to running the implementation. We have now John who leads all of our IT efforts. He's done ERP implementation is about 850,000 times. We have -- and Anthony and I and Skip and others meet with John every week now. There's Gantt charts upon Gantt charts around all the training that we're doing, actually on the steering committee are the folks from Crown right because we're not doing it to them, we're doing it with them. So that's one example. There's not enough time in the day to talk about all the things that I failed at. But every time we do it, it's going to -- it gets better and better. But I can give you [indiscernible]. Just 1 more question, another question from Ryan for Chris. Chris is the winner today. How much white space remains with these top 10 customers?

How much white space with the top 10 customers? It would be almost impossible for me to put a number on that. So I would say where we're -- when you think about Walmart and 8 items in there, that's a lot of items for them to allow to be in by one supplier in that deli space. So I would say it's more about growing the velocity of the items that we put in there, making sure we get a good rotation of new items, things like that in there. When you get to some of our customers, we may only have 3 or 2 items in that white space gets very, very large. I'll give you an example. We've got a customer who will be a top 10 customer that the very next meeting I have is with them. They have 5 items branded today and they want to expand that by a significant number, and we've just gotten started. So when you start looking at that, you go I don't know it could be 2x white space with our top 10. It could be 5x in some cases and others might be approaching a little bit of maturity when you think about just SKU count. But -- so I know that's not a good answer. [indiscernible] all you guys in your roles, right, you want to hear a definitive number. It's still a lot of white space. That's what I could certainly put out there.

And Chris, tell me if this makes sense to you, just a couple of metrics, right, that are facts. We know the category [indiscernible] is a $40 billion category, right? Even at $1 billion, what is that? 2.5% -- a 2 share. I mean we used to have a 50 share in the cookie space, like a 2 share is nothing, right? So that's $40 billion, $1 billion is only a 2 share where Chris used to work, multibillion. So it's not unheard of. There are multibillion players, right? [indiscernible]. These are multibillion-dollar players. So again, I agree with Chris. I know everyone wants a particular number. I don't know how we could do that. But what I could tell you from a triangulation standpoint is there are $1 billion players in our space that still puts you at a pathetically low market share. And again, Chris and team are just getting started.

Question for Anthony. I think you had said mid-teens EBITDA margin. Is there like a revenue number you need to hit in order to get that? And what do you think about the opportunity for incremental margins or contribution margins on [indiscernible] revenue growth?

So obviously...

Please repeat the questions.

So the question was, what's the opportunity to get that EBITDA margin up and keep it in that teens percentage range and what's the lever there. The main lever, I would say, is margin optimization and brings gross margin optimization and bringing that up. So using the levers that we talked about there, looking at promo and marketing. The biggest one always is top line sales. And they have to be profitable sales. We make sure that -- Chris makes sure of that when he's pricing the product out. Those are our 2 biggest levers. And as we bring in organizations, it's just leverage. The more that you can spread the cost around to more entities into more sales, the higher your EBITDA, your net income is going to go up and your EBITDA is going to go up in turn as well.

Yes. I'd specifically add and Anthony is the boss here. We have been reinvesting all of our profits over the past 3 years into building this team, right? There was no Lauren when I started, right? There was no Skip. There was no Chris. There was no Chris' team, right? You saw Chris' team, which is amazing. We had one salesperson in total when I started. So every year, you have seen Anthony has done an amazing job. Our SG&A as a percentage has really not gone up. It stays around 20%. That's amazing focus and fortitude when everyone comes to him every day, say, I need more, I need more. We have probably another year or so where we're adding, right? We said this year, I'm done, right? Our leadership team is awesome, right? I don't need to hire anybody else, but we said we're going to build a middle management team this year. I really think after this year, we're sort of done building the team we need. That means every incremental year, SG&A only goes down, right, as a percentage only goes down. And therefore, EBITDA is one for one, right? It only goes up. So we've been intentional to build the team in the future. Once we have done that, and I think another year we'll be pretty close to done, then every incremental dollar goes up. So -- and again, I look at you guys as partners. I hope you agree that the investments we're making and you see these people around the room is a good use of our dollars. If I wanted just to take it, right? I don't need to hire anybody. I can make EBITDA go up, but we don't have a strong foundation and then what's the sense of that. So I hope you guys agree with the investments.

Just to put a finer point on that, I think the mid-teens number [indiscernible] many of us were not expected for next year. So because you've previously talked about mid-teens like an aspiration like once we scale -- so by putting mid-teens out there [indiscernible].

I think we said to make sure we'd look at it. I think we said we'd end [indiscernible].

Yes. It's going to glide. It's not going to start at that point, definitely.

[indiscernible] year in the mid-teens.

Okay. So not mid-teens for the full FY '27? I'm just asking because it's financial targets for FY '27 [indiscernible].

Yes, I would love to say we could go back and take a look. Again, I think we're going to end -- we're going to go through the year with mid-teens. [indiscernible] I'm happy for you guys [indiscernible] say, again, all I do for the past 3 years is under promise and over deliver. So I'm happy to say we will -- we'll be leaving the year in the mid-teens and then over deliver [indiscernible].

[indiscernible].

Chris, the question is for the customers that we're not in, do they give us a reason? Sorry, well, the customers were not in, why are we not in them?

It's not so much pushback as it is just the bureaucracy of a large business. I can't explain this enough because came from that side of the world through most of my career. And it's challenging to get the first step. It's always the first item. One of them out there, we've been to, I've personally leverage relationships, and we've shown a ton of samples and it's always [indiscernible] products the best. We're excited. We'll get back to you type of thing. So for me, it's going to be persistent. And oftentimes, it's right timing. Some of the big customers that we still get out there that we could get, they've had a lot of distraction in the last year or 2. So you can kind of put the math together a little bit who I might be talking about. And in that distraction tends to be people that move physicians and suddenly have different responsibilities. And we've seen ourselves get caught up in that a little bit. So a little bit excuse oriented there, but to me, it's still just persistence. It's not that we don't have the right items. It's not that our items aren't great. We have gotten pushback in the past on pricing to some degree. And that is just more us staying -- I don't mind that. I'll lose the sale every time if it's simply going to be about price because I'm going to get another opportunity on that one when they get disappointed by a lesser product.

Yes, totally agree.

[indiscernible] focusing on the NAE chicken product. Is that -- are you pushing that as a replacement for the rest of chicken products of some retailers? Or is that kind of incremental to the products you already have [indiscernible]?

Chris, the question is, are we doing NAE for -- I know the question [indiscernible] the answer. But are we doing NAE all customers? Or is it just for new items or transitioning all of our items?

We're transitioning all our items to NAE. It's just who we're going to be. It's just like the way we choose to flame grill and our chicken and do it to the highest level of quality. That's how we're viewing NAE. It's just who we are. So it doesn't require a new -- if you're thinking about it this way, it's a new item where we have to resell into the customer? No, absolutely not. It's -- hey, you're buying our chicken, by the way, it's all NAE now.

Right. There's nothing bad like in the sense that, again, we don't have to change the SKU number or it's one of those things. If it's not -- if it doesn't say NAE but we accidentally make it NAE, that's absolutely fine. So it's only a benefit. There are some customers that will buy because it is NAE. There are some customers that will want it more. Equally, there are some customers that don't care as much, but we know it's better, and we're still going to upsell it.

[indiscernible], how much more expensive is an NAE chicken versus [indiscernible]?

So the question how much more expensive is NAE chicken? So I could answer that in 2 ways. One, it's roughly [indiscernible] $0.15 necessarily more. I mean you could check the same information on the [indiscernible] stuff is what it is in the market if you buy in the spot. Because of our scale now because we're able to contract in advance that helped us a lot.

[indiscernible] everyday item that is more [indiscernible] '27. What does that mean to [indiscernible]?

Since it's a softball question because I don't give Chris the hard ones, I'll answer that. The question is, what is Costco and NAE -- sorry, what is Costco every day item? That means carry the one, it's exact -- every day. It's in Costco. So Costco traditionally is a rotation program, right, the treasure hunt mentality, most items at Costco actually rotate in and out. There is a very small subset -- how Chris said already the club channel has a smaller set of items, assortments. There's even fewer that are in every day item and Chris' team and Scott got us everyday status at Costco and [indiscernible].

[indiscernible]

No, just the beef balls -- jumbo beef meatballs.

[indiscernible] just like the revenue opportunity [indiscernible] you've gone from 1 to 10 to 30. And then that is you have every day [indiscernible].

I think it's great. I'm very optimistic [indiscernible].

Yes, back to the M&A topic, you obviously focus on adding incremental customers [indiscernible], all that good stuff. I'm curious if you could dive deeper to the capabilities aspect. Where is your priority there? I guess maybe asked differently, where do you feel like you're underdeveloped today that's kind of necessary to help your business scale over time?

Yes. So the question is from an M&A perspective, you keep talking about capabilities, Adam, what the heck are you talking about? So it really could be anything. So when I think about M&A, since here when I tell you, I don't care about the revenue and the profit that just comes along with it. But if they could get me into a customer, right, [indiscernible] and the customer that shall not be named, we tried forever. We couldn't even get a call return to us. Magically, they called Chris, the next week. Getting into a new customer is pretty awesome, getting into new items that maybe we don't make today, right? New technology, whether it's HPP or MAP technology, those are examples where -- are there things that we can learn from, from other customers, stuff like Skip was talking about industrial engineering like capabilities, I would love -- I would be thrilled to have someone even more hard core on the data than I am, right, on the way they track fixed, the way they measure throughput, how do we learn from one plant to the other. Skip does an amazing job on his leadership team that we're one team any given day, a product could be anywhere that means you better be sharing with each other because we're all family here on, what are you learning? There's a super cool guy [indiscernible] that -- he's hard core, right? He's tracking throughput every single day. He sees me in his excel sheet, he gets excited or nervous depending on the numbers. But now he's taken on a broader role because, look, if we're doing this in Farmingdale, let's do this in Bayshore also, let's do this East also. And we're sharing that information. So capabilities to me can be anything that again, we could use across the network. The fact that they -- where do we learn -- I mean, not that it's rocket scientists -- science, but NAE, I guess where we learned that from? Crown. Crown [indiscernible] NAE with everything that we do at Whitemans is NAE. Oh, wait a minute, maybe we should do this broader, maybe customers would be really interested in, maybe this could be a differentiator for USDA. That's why we're looking at M&A. It just so happens that it comes with $56 million at 0.3x revenue very profitable.

[indiscernible] they go into that every day, [indiscernible]?

No, I believe, Chris, for Costco, just the customer and every day item, that's not to say that we couldn't do any sort of promotions or tasting, et cetera, et cetera. Is that correct, Chris?

Oh, yes, that's absolutely correct. We can do other promotions, other rotations. We can still conduct an MDM even on that item. If we -- if they want to do that nationally into some regions that aren't every day.

[indiscernible], like how long -- would you become ever day [indiscernible]?

You're just a hater today, aren't you? [indiscernible] Look, we have to keep up great quality and great service. I have no doubt, and I would actively do it myself. Yes, if we actually have a credit product or we don't actually deliver, I'm sure they could take away every day status. And I would take it away myself because I want to keep getting better, like Chris mentioned, and I think it really was an amazing partnership between Chris and Skip. Yes, we sold it in. But at best, that's only 50% of the challenge. Can you actually deliver on it? So I am super proud just like Chris said, right, first you start with GRANDMA-quality products, but what really keeps you is GRANDMA-quality service. That service is sales service, customer service, supply service, et cetera.

[indiscernible] may not have seen outside of Crown [indiscernible]?

Question is anything from a macroeconomic standpoint on the deli space, prepared food space? I would say, if anything, it's only getting better. I truly believe it's really getting accelerated by customers. Customers are seeing it. Customers are investing in more and more linear feet of shelf space -- refrigerated shelf space, one of those things that you just take out the next week, right? And they have to invest in it as well. So I feel great about that. I don't feel great that the economy is not as awesome as it could be for everybody, and that means people aren't going out as much. Inflation, I'm not happy about this, but inflation is 2x, 4%, right. Away from home inflation is 4%, at home inflation 2.1%. It's 2x. Again, it goes back to the acceleration point. It's getting more expensive to eat out. Again, I'm not happy about that for my 330 million friends in America, but it does help our business.

[indiscernible] M&A transaction in the last [indiscernible]?

Again, it's an interesting dynamic. We're the only publicly traded company out there. It is still a massively fragmented space. It's -- I feel good.

A couple more for you.

If I get past 3:00, I get double pay today.

[indiscernible] What is that -- is that a big deal over the next few years? And like of your product, [indiscernible] is it a pretty small part of the mix? And how should we think about that growing?

So the question is just the opportunities for mapping. I think there's more and more opportunities, right? It increases shelf life I don't know the exact number of our business, but it's going to be a lot. We map a lot in Bayshore, all of our MFOs in East Rutherford are mapped. I'd love to continue to do it. Again, it's a natural way, right? There's just nitrogen gas. It's a natural way to extend shelf life that helps our customers and by helping our customers, that means they're going to buy more from us. So I'd love to do even more of that. We have -- it's pretty cool. This goes back to your question on capabilities, we took like 400 years when I got here to should we get our first mapping machine, which you guys saw today, right? And then we just fell into Crown and they had 4, that's pretty cool. So there's more opportunity. There's more room, like Skip was saying, you could play soccer [indiscernible] your country, in some of the spaces at Bayshore, we have a lot of room to grow and add more [indiscernible] into, if that's what we chose to.

One other one, Sam's Club. Maybe -- how should we think about this year [indiscernible] so much success there? The momentum feeling good about it, new product addition -- like anything [indiscernible]?

Chris, the question is, hey, what are you doing at Sam's Club?

So Sam's Club is like our other top customers, we're looking for additional SKUs in there. And we've had some things rotate in and out. Sam's Club itself, I want to express a little bit of just caution of all the marvels in one place at some time. So we want to make sure that we keep it a proportional part of our business as well. But we've got a great relationship there. Our chicken -- so they have a policy. Basically, you can't be as the single supplier relative to what we do there. But -- so there's another supplier in there that supplies grow chicken to them. Our performance is, I don't know, Adam, is it like 3x what the other supplier is. So they love us as far as year-over-year-over-year type of sales. The customer keeps telling us we're the best product. And our sales continue to grow, even sometimes when we try [indiscernible] just to kind of keep -- have it grow a little bit slower, they just grow. So we're in a good spot. We do want to get some -- strategically, I want to get some additional SKUs in there.

Good. What does the PP&E CapEx look like for fiscal year '27?

Yes. So I think Anthony is the boss here, again, roughly, we spend -- again, most importantly, you don't spend anything we don't have. So you could look at our cash flow from operations, and I will tell you roughly how much -- we're not going to spend more than that. Spending 5, 7, definitely not double-digit millions of dollars is more than enough for what we want to do. So I would factor in mid- to high single digits.

Are all of you guys out? Let's see if any other questions. In fact, Well, if that's it, thank you guys so much. I really appreciate everyone making out here listening on the call. Luke and I are always available if there's additional questions, George or anyone else or no one has -- I'm available 24/7. But [indiscernible], I am so incredibly proud of this team, and [indiscernible] the only 1/10 of the team. This is what I am proudest of. This is what we have built that is not going away. And really excited to share with you more what we accomplished this year in the years ahead. So thank you, everybody.