The Boston Beer Company, Inc. (SAM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We're going to get started. It's wonderful to have Chairman, Founder, Brewer and CEO, Jim Koch, joining us in Boston once again. Jim, as you know, and I say it every year, enjoying a beer with you on stage is the highlight of my September and a wonderful way to end the conference. So thank you so much for being here again and prioritizing this event for us and for Barclays.

So it's your first time in the CEO seat in nearly 25 years, but obviously, you've remained highly active in the company and the industry since founding Boston Beer in 1984. How would you say your leadership style has evolved? What are you doing to ensure a strong succession plan?

Yes, you're right. It's the first time in this century that I've been CEO, I've sort of avoided it for a long time. And it hasn't been a big change. It's not like I left. I mean I've been engaged more than full time all through the executive Chairman type thing. To answer your question, evolved, I think I've learned to delegate more and I very much focus my role, not on things that come with the title, but on sort of a matrix, a 2x2 matrix of can I add value or not? Yes or no. And -- is it important to the company's success, yes or no. So I try to focus on the upper right-hand quadrant. And don't do things and maybe I should do like meet with analysts or something like that, where I'm not really adding any value to the company. So does that make sense? And I am -- I don't want to do this for a long time. So it's going to be a few years, but I'm working on developing multiple CEO candidates internally because my experience has been -- and the statistics are very much in favor of internally promoted CEOs. I believe the success rate internally promoted CEOs success defined as are they still here in 18 months is about 80% and for external hires, it's 50%.

Okay. Yes. Okay. That's great. I can't [indiscernible] it was my second question, but I am. The debate among the investment community around soft U.S. alcohol consumption and whether it's cyclical or structural, we've been trying to wait until like the 10 minutes or so the conversation.

We worry about it too.

We're jumping right in. Yes. So when we were here together last year, you were probably the most direct and open-minded, frankly, of any of the other CEOs or leaders in the alcohol industry around the chance that there are some things here that are sustaining. And you, at the time, talked about the various structural headwinds is amounting to like a 1- to 2-point drag to the industry to consumption, maybe some offset from population growth. How do you think about these puts and takes today? We've got a year later, we've got this challenged Hispanic consumer base that could weigh on population growth and social behaviors over the next couple of years. So how your thinking evolved?

I think those are real. It's -- the issues -- last year, I felt like they're not going away, and we should recognize them. I think that's still true. The -- and I don't know whether you categorize them as cyclical or structural. There's definitely nonstructural is that we had -- the weather sucked in the second quarter, okay? And we're seeing a little bounce back from decent weather. But there are -- and maybe to simplify it, we can think of 3 ages. The most important is health. The dialogue on the alcohol causes cancer is at a much higher and more pervasive level than it was a year or 2 ago for -- and that to me is probably the biggest thing, but the pressure -- social economic pressure on the Hispanic population, which was the contributor to population growth has probably reversed. So I don't know whether -- I don't know how you classify that. We get a new administration, maybe the current one satisfied and they let up. But that's not something that's going to go away next quarter. And that's affected everybody. And then there's hemp and that's very spotty. It depends on what state you're in, but you get places like Minnesota, Louisiana, where it's clearly taken mid-single digits or something like that out of beer. It's different than marijuana. Weed is not sold in the beer cooler, but hemp based THC is in some states. And it's -- I mean, and it just ranges this gamut here in Massachusetts, the government just said, it doesn't matter where the THC comes from. We don't care about the farm bill. You're selling THC, it's got to go through a dispensary. So it's out of the mainstream. It's not on your shopping trip. You got to be -- make a special trip to a dispensary. And when you get there, they don't have big coolers. They don't have space. They want to sell bud, they want to sell gummies. Take Louisiana or New Jersey and New Jersey in a total wine, you may see 30 feet of hemp-based THC products and they're totally unregulated. You literally could sell a can of hemp-based THC with 100 milligrams of THC in there next to the crayons at a Toys "R" Us and put it in your child's lunch box and they could share it with their friends. It is -- that's the range that you have. And it's very uncertain. There's a lot of flip-flopping. We've all watched Texas. First, it was legal and then tenant Governor Patrick went after it, and they passed the bill to the House and Senate, got to Governor Abbott's desk to just ban it, the same as any other THC. Abbott decided no, we'll regulate it. We'll call a special session back. And then they decide they're going to redistrict and THC gets off the -- and they never really revisited it. So it's it went from unregulated and legal to banned and regulated and all the way back to unregulated and legal. So it's hard for us to deal with that kind of stuff. I don't know is that structural? Is it cyclical? It's out there and it's real, but it could go away tomorrow.

Yes. So we had health, Hispanic, hemp. We're missing one.

No, just 3.

I thought I said 4. That's great. No.

I could make up one.

Okay. Thinking about medium-term growth for beer versus beyond beer or as you put it, the fourth category, how do you think about that?

I think traditional forms of the 3 traditional alcoholic beverages, beer, wine and liquor I think they are all 3 going to be under some pressure for a bunch of reasons. One is they've been around for a long time, and so they're a little stable, but you need innovation within those. The other is they're inherently acquired tastes. They all have a flavor structure that our physiology evolved to not like. Beer is bitter. It's supposed to be bitter. It's got hops. First time you taste beer, that's bitter, particularly a good beer because evolution-wise, things that were bitter tended to be bad for you. So we evolve not to like it, but you can overcome that and begin to appreciate it. Same thing with wine. It's panic and it's acidic. Your first sip of wine is not, again, what we evolved as humans to like. And of course, liquor has that ferocious ethanol attack on your pallet that you reject your first swing of vodka, it's not something enjoyable. And the -- and liquor maybe was the first ones to figure out, well, let's not sell them liquor. Let's sell them mixed drinks where you have a whole different flavor profile drinking a margarita than a swing of a shot of tequila. And that enables the producer to make things that people are wired to like, which is basically -- I'm oversimplifying it, but sweet and fruity. We're kind of wired to like sweet and fruity. And in the fourth category, that's -- you're getting as a maker, I can make -- I'm not limited by the structure of the base underlying alcoholic beverage. I can make things of almost infinite flavor plasticity and adapt to consumers and move with consumer taste. So to me, the fourth category is inherently advantaged in terms of innovation. And it's -- for us, we came to recognize this quite early, 20, 30 even years ago and began evolving in addition to craft beer, we've made hard cider, which was once the biggest form of alcohol in America before the civil war. And it's sweeter and fruitier though it does have some tannins in it, but they're modified and then Twisted Tea and so forth. So -- and today, that's by far the biggest part of our volume base is this fourth category, which is this year, will it grow? Not sure, but it's going to outgrow traditional beer. It's going to outgrow traditional wine. It's going to outgrow traditional liquor. And finally, those products want to be sold -- they want to be made and sold by brewers. Because there -- they have the price structure, they're in the cooler, you need efficient logistics. A beer wholesalers truck carries 1,000 cases, a wine wholesalers truck carries 300. I mean the logistics, the economics, and you want to produce them in a place that has high-speed can lines, has mixed blend technology and maybe has pasteurization. Only brewers have all this stuff. So brewers should win in the fourth category. And so that's where we've focused.

Okay. Great. The beer industry is on track for a mid-single-digit decline this year following a few years of outsized declines even before 2025. How would you assess the industry's response to the slowdown? What more can or should be done from an industry standpoint?

A couple of things. One goes back a long way. For many years, the beer industry funded an institute at Johns Hopkins, whose mission was research, medical research in alcoholic beverages. And we were a tiny, tiny part of it. It was based on your volume. So we were like 1% of it. Most of it was the big brewers. And it produced a lot of studies. Some of them said alcohol is good, some said alcohol is bad I'm oversimplifying it. But that was the whole point is fund studies so that there is neutral research out there. And 11 years ago, the beer industry stopped doing that. And we are now kind of seeing the results because the research and the health effects of alcohol has basically been funded by anti-alcohol groups and gone to researchers who were more likely to produce negative stuff based on their previous research. So there's been an absence to me, of balanced research, and that's a self-inflicted wound that the beer industry did to save a trivial amount of money. So that's I think we should be thinking about that, and that's not going to make a difference for the next 4 years, but all of our -- at least I care about where we're going to be. I'm not going to be in another company in another job. So -- and I think there are other people in this industry that feel the same way. So maybe it's -- we can get it revived. The advertising needs to be good. And I think just continuing to execute at retail. And I think the industry has gotten a little bit away from that into marketing, social media, but they've pulled back and the distributors same way. They pulled back their resources from executing at retail, especially on-premise, which is where fun happens, where people build great memories, where brands get built. Wholesalers in COVID discovered it's only 10% or 15% of our volume, but it takes up 30% of our sales force time making a call -- make a call on this hotel, it's a couple of hour call. And if you really -- and there's 4 people you got to see. There's a guy who runs the bars. There's a person who runs catering, which is actually the biggest. There's the one that stocks the mini bars, and there's somebody else who does the restaurants. There's I mean -- and the volumes aren't that huge. So I think the industry has -- and this is more true at the distributor level has withdrawn support for the on-premise. And we've stepped up our sales force. We've tried to fill some of that gap. And we very much focus on on-premise. Sun Cruiser in New England is very successful, and it was built on-premise. We went there first. And it's more expensive, but it builds a stronger brand.

Okay. Great. Just closer in for a moment. I know we talked about the terrible weather in June, you mentioned earlier. But overall, what would you say about the U.S. consumer environment through the end of the summer? Do you think more promotion is needed to drive volume improvement if the consumer backdrop deteriorates if we get the anticipated inflation broadly coming off of tariffs as we go through the end of the year?

I will preface this with -- I'm not the expert on this. I mean we don't do tons of research at that level. We just read what everybody else has read. I live in Newton and Palm Beach. I mean that's a bubble. So I'm opining about a world that I don't necessarily see. So with that caveat, my sense is the top quintile of the income spectrum is doing reasonably well, has confidence. The other 80%, which is a lot of our drinkers is uncertain, anxious. I mean there's just -- there's a lot of turmoil in our country right now. We're really not sure where we're going to be. Trump puts in tariffs and then the court says, well, you don't have the authority to do that, but then it's going to go to another court. I mean these things are -- there's a lot of instability that causes fear, uncertainty, doubt at the consumer level. And especially, I think, in the 80% that is less economically secure. I mean I do see that when you're calling on retailers, there is that fear.

You mentioned Sun Cruiser, so I want to talk a little bit about that. You've had great early success with it. I'm curious how you're applying lessons learned from Truly. Truly had a really rapid rise, but then a subsequent decline. So how do you apply lessons learned from the Truly experience to Sun Cruiser?

There's a couple of lessons. One of them is build it from the bottom up, put roots down. So we're -- with the rollout of Sun Cruiser, we're not doing it with like national advertising and national programs. We're doing it -- we're looking market by market in the 30 major metros that make up probably 70% of our demand. So it's -- we're looking at what's going on in Orlando and why is that different from what's going on in Jacksonville. And south of Delray, you got to -- we're seeing a different set of circumstances than we are in Broward and Palm Beach counties. So -- and we're very focused on on-premise, which I think gives it more durability. Second, we are being more hesitant about SKU proliferation, flavor proliferation. We basically got with Truly at its peak, I think we had 7 different flavor families. We've got 2 lemonade and tea with Sun Cruiser.

Okay. Great. And then on the flip side, Twisted Tea has carefully scaled that brand over several decades now but more recently has had some challenges. Can you talk a little bit about the action plan to optimize Twisted Tea's pricing and retail presence to get back to that historical growth rate and also preserving brand equity while you address these dynamics?

Yes. Well, we're not -- Twisted Tea was a very long-term build. It grew double digits for over 20 years. I don't think we're going to grow at double digits, just too big at this point. It's, I think, the #10 brand in beer. And to be totally honest, we were surprised by the slump. I mean we came into this year with it's growing in high single digits. And in 6 months, it's down to low single digits. So I mean, honestly, it caught us by surprise. So we spent the last couple of months trying to sort out what's going on, the responses that we have are multiple. One, we need to strengthen even in these hard times, the Hispanic connection. So we have now a Hispanic Twisted Tea ad in -- literally in Spanish. We have a sponsorship with Boxing, which over-indexes among Hispanics, particularly Mexican Hispanics. We are extending it for the Anglo population, we're renewing our sponsorship with NASCAR that was the first real big sponsorship, and then we moved on to college football. We're going to -- we're adding, as I said, boxing for Hispanics and NASCAR for the traditional Twisted Tea blue-collar base. And we -- in some markets, raised price too high and too fast, particularly on 12 packs. I mean what we're seeing is singles are fine, but 12 packs are off 15%, 18%, 20%, depending on the weakened Circana you look at. And that tends to happen most where the price went over $20 a 12 pack, and we got close to craft beer pricing. Historically, it's been lower than that. So we're looking at those markets where we got -- I mean, it was growing 20%. If you can't raise price when you're growing 20%, when are you going to raise price. So now we're going back and addressing those markets where the gap between mass domestic and Twisted Tea got almost as big as the gap with mass domestic and craft and tea needs to be in the middle there. It trades off against mass domestic, Bud, Bud Light, Coors, CoorsLight and the gap got too big in some markets. So we're going to surgically set that back to where it was the gap was earlier.

Okay. And do you have a sense for time horizon for that, so when people can sort of expect or I guess, gauge whether or not that is the answer.

Yes. Well, when we simulate it, you can do that with numerator data and so forth. It's like 20% of the answer, 15% of the answer. It's not the full answer, but it's a lever we can pull. We'll start and we'll meet with our distributors, explain it, show them the data and get their consent and agreement on it because we don't just reduce the price to the wholesaler and they pocket it. So it will take a little while to undo it measured in months. But I mean the rest of the -- so that's a fraction that's one package in maybe 1/3 of the markets. But we do believe -- I mean that's -- it's clear in the data that we overreached. So I -- I mean we're starting these actions now and we'll see them. And we lost display activity because frankly, RTDs took it. I mean you go into a store and there'd be a display of High Noon and Lucky One and Sun Cruiser and Surfside and a smaller display of Twisted Tea. A year ago, we had that display. So hopefully, we're going to focus over the summer of '26 for getting those big displays back.

Okay. Great. So gross margins have emerged as a key achievement and you recently raised the 2025 margin guidance. How do you plan to sustain and build upon these gross margin improvements this year while still addressing challenges that you have like the 70 to 100 basis point hit from tariffs, ongoing inflationary pressures. So maybe talk about ongoing some of the productivity programs and initiatives that you're focused on.

Yes. Those obviously have been a significant success and fueled a lot of the resources to support the brands. I think there's still significant savings to come out. They're sort of in 3 buckets. One is procurement. And we're now -- we're just getting out of some of the legacy contracts especially for cans that we put in place 5 years ago when there was a can shortage. We were bringing seltzer exploded. We were literally bringing in cans from China. I mean we're shipping 40-foot containers are basically air. There's maybe 300 pounds of aluminum in there, rest of it was air. So those contracts are rolling off. So you're seeing some of that, and there's still some more to be done on that. The second is just production efficiencies in the breweries. Again, there's a lot of this after effect of Truly. I mean our volume doubled in 3 years. We weren't worried about cost effective or anything. It was once literally in a lifetime opportunity, this explosion of hard seltzer. So I've always said our margins can get into -- can get over 50%, maybe even in the mid-50s. So I believe there's still some run room there. And then there's these network optimizations. It's a bunch of stuff, but we -- the truly explosion, we need outside warehouses. And so things get handled lots of times. We'll make it in the brewery in Pennsylvania, but then we load it on a truck and ship it to a DHL warehouse 10 miles away where it sits and gets handled and then gets back on a truck and gets shipped back to the loading dock of the brewery and goes out. So over the next couple of years, we're going to get rid of all of that and begin -- and that's a lot of money. We have that in all of our breweries. We believe we'll get out of those warehouses in the next 6 to 12 months in Ohio completely and then Pennsylvania comes after that, and we have the same things at City. So there are still significant pockets of savings. And what we do with that is maybe a little different, but we believe and have demonstrated over our 40 years of existence, I mean we're a growth company. We've been able to find growth when nobody -- when it was rare in the beer business that's been driven by effective innovation and by the largest sales force in the beer business that can execute innovations at retail. So we're built around growth. And the fuel for that is continued cost savings that will enable us to properly to realize the potential of our existing brands and to get incremental growth on top of that through innovation. So that's kind of my standard is in our core brands, we should hold share. And in general, we're weighted to the fourth category, so holding share is pretty healthy. And in our innovation brands, that should give us volume on top of that.

Yes. Okay. And to this point, you're increasing advertising investment meaningfully this year, which I think is largely driven by Sun Cruiser and then the Truly refresh. How are you measuring return on investment? And should we think about 2025 as an elevated year? Or is this a reset to a more appropriate run rate level of support?

Think of it as the latter. And yes, we spent a lot of money on Sun Cruiser, but we got a payback. So it didn't fall the bottom line, but we suddenly got a significant new brand without having to invest more than the gross margin. So I consider that if you're the first real year of national rollout where you're investing in advertising heavily, yet it still has some small contribution to the bottom line, that's very successful. We believe we have a pipeline that is -- that has similar potential. Sun Cruiser was a holy s*** thing, but we believe that we can generate further innovations. Now, we have lots and lots of failures. We're -- I mean hopefully, you haven't heard of Loma Vista or general admission. No? Okay. That's good. In market now, we have -- what do we have? We have a product called Sinless, which is vodka cocktails with no carbs. So you can get a cocktail knowing it's 100 calories. It's 4.5% alcohol, tastes great and it's carb-free. We have -- just hard squeezed, which is a 10% real juice product. We'll see. We've got social pop, which is an alcoholic version of poppi. And these are just -- they're in test market. And I guess from my point of view, if we do 10 of those and 1 becomes a 10 million case, $250 million brand, I'm good with that. So -- and we're kind of built around regular failure as a company. We're built to generate those. We're overweighted in the skill sets that it takes to do that. But growth is expensive. So we will take most of those savings and put them behind maintaining share in our existing brands and growing the overall volume of the company, not just share and then, yes.

Great. We have time for one more question. So I wanted to end talking about capital allocation. You repurchased 110 million of stock in the first half of the year and recently announced a 50 million share buyback through the end of this year. How are you thinking about the priorities in terms of uses of your healthy cash balance?

I mean I'm the biggest shareholder. So I tend to want to think as a shareholder. And so to me, it's like, okay, we have -- we're cash generative. We have a pretty good model that way. We have no debt, and we're generating a 9-figure number of cash, which we then return to shareholders. But the needs of the business come first. And when we get to the point where we say, I don't know if we're going to get a payback on this $20 million investment in sponsorships for Twisted Tea or advertising for Sam Adams. And so we don't spend that. And we -- if the proposal comes to me and I don't see a payback, it's okay. Let's give it to the shareholders, and we believe the share buyback is the most tax-efficient way to do that.

Okay. Great. We're going to wrap it there. We're going to have our traditional annual closing reception/breakout outside. Boston Beer has provided us with some drinks. So please join us outside and join me in thanking Jim and the rest of the team for being here.

Thank you.