Utz Brands, Inc. (UTZ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. Let's welcome Utz Brands to the CAGNY stage for the very first time. And before we get started, please join me in thanking the company for their generous sponsorship, both for that awesome break outside and for the extra drops of tasty snacks throughout the week. Thank you, guys. Utz offers a robust savory snacking portfolio, including its namesake brand as well as Boulder Canyon, On The Border, Zapp's, among others. Over the past few years, the company has delivered consistent top line growth despite a tough overall snacking environment while also driving significant productivity across its supply chain. As we turn and look ahead to this year, Utz is looking to build further on that commercial momentum as well as driving a meaningful free cash flow inflection. Presenting today, we have CEO, Howard Friedman; and CFO, BK Kelley. Let's welcome the team. And again, thank you for the generous sponsorship. With that, I'll hand it over to Howard.

Thank you all. Again, I'm Howard Friedman, CEO of Utz, and we're glad to be at CAGNY for the first time since going public. And we're excited to introduce to you the company and lay out our strategy. Before we start, I'll just remind you that our remarks today include forward-looking statements, and I'll give you a second to look them over. With me today is BK. Kelley, our CFO, who joined our company about a year ago with extensive background in CPG. Let me start with some key messages and why to consider Utz. Despite being a smaller capitalization company, Utz is the largest pure-play salty snacking company in the country. Our video ended with a nod to our 100-year history and our potential, and we're leveraging this history and our strong portfolio of brands for our next phase of growth. We have multiple top line growth drivers to scale these brands nationally and expect that several of these differentiated growth drivers have multiyear runways. Since joining Utson as CEO at the end of 2022, our focus has really been on integrating and modernizing the company for this next phase of growth. We built a strong operational foundation and have more margin potential in the years ahead. Importantly, we plan to deliver accelerated cash generation to delever as we exit the more capital-intensive stage of the last 2 years. While the Utz brand started over 100 years ago in 1921, the company you see today was really built through a number of acquisitions over the last 25 years, including 3 of our Power Four brands, Zapp's, Boulder Canyon and On the Border. In 2020, we became a public company. Beginning in 2024, we embarked on our supply chain transformation, where we divested several plants and modernized the remaining plants, creating a more efficient and capable network. This multiyear project is winding down as we enter 2026. And in just a few weeks, we begin our expansion in California. We'll talk more about this multiyear growth initiative later in the presentation. Our long history of strategic acquisitions and successful integrations have created an approximately $1.4 billion revenue business today with significant growth potential. Turning to our brand portfolio. Our Power Four brands, Utz, On The Border, Boulder Canyon and Zapp's comprise 70% of our portfolio with Utz being our largest brand and Boulder Canyon, our fastest growing. Branded salty snacks represent 89% of our revenue at the end of 2025, and we will continue to shift this mix. The remaining 11% of our portfolio is partner brands, which we distribute for other companies and our non-salty business, which is mostly branded dips and salsa. Our brands compete in nearly all salty snack subcategories with potato chips being 46% of our sales, followed by tortilla chips at 17% and pretzels at 11%. Importantly, we aim to gain share in all the subcategories in which we compete. We have a well-defined brand portfolio architecture, which prioritizes the growth of our Power Four and allows us to focus our marketing and innovation resources accordingly. We also leverage targeted growth opportunities with our regional and subcategory-specific brands. Golden Flake in the Prok Rinds subcategory is a good example. We also have the Hawaiian brand primarily on the West Coast, which has significant potential as we build our distribution capabilities Westward. Lastly, there are a small group of regional brands that we manage for consistent revenue and cash flow. Importantly, we have been and continue to be active managers of our brand portfolio over time with both acquisitions and divestitures. In salty snacking, strong retail distribution and shelf presence is a key competitive advantage, and we have found it strategically important to service our customers through multiple distribution methods. We use what we call a hybrid distribution model with about 50-50 split between direct store delivery or DSD and our direct to warehouse. We also have some geographies where we partner with larger distributors, especially early on when we're building scale. Importantly, we believe that DSD gives us an advantage in salty snacks given the breadth of the subcategories in which we compete. This hybrid distribution model enables us to achieve broad retail channel coverage. Our largest channel is food at about 50% of our sales, and we have had success broadening our distribution to faster-growing channels, such as club, which now nearly comprises 10% of our sales. Over the past few years, we've built a strong foundation of consistent organic top line growth faster than the category by holding share in our core geographies, the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast and gaining share in our expansion geographies across the rest of the country. This strategy delivered 2.4% compounded annual growth over the last 3 years. Over this period, importantly, we've been able to hold our volume share of 8.2% in our core as we invested to maintain value for consumers. Our expansion geographies have gained almost 0.5 point of both dollar and pound share since 2022, but with our retail dollar share at only 3% and our volume share at 4.2%, we have a lot more share to gain. This concept of hold the core and grow and expansion is central to our strategy, which we will continue to cover in much greater depth. Our strategy has been to focus on and grow our branded salty snacks and deemphasize our non-branded and non-salty business. Since Q1 of 2023, we have shifted our branded salty business from 82% of our sales to 89% by the end of last year. With the revenue and margin significantly higher on branded versus non-branded, this shift continues to drive mix improvement. Our focus has driven strong branded net sales growth quarter after quarter, even in the most recent quarter when we experienced some destocking from the SNAP payment delays and the government shutdown. As I've said in my opening remarks, we've built a strong foundation of operating efficiency over the past several years. Our productivity program plays an important part in both funding our growth and expanding our margins. In 2022, our productivity savings was 3% of adjusted cost of goods sold and has consistently grown to an exceptional 7% in 2025. This productivity, our mix improvement and our growth has driven our adjusted gross margin from 28% in 2022 to 32% last year. Our EBITDA margin has improved 300 basis points as some of our gross margin improvement was reinvested back into marketing and capabilities to drive future top line growth. Importantly, we believe there is significant room for more margin improvement over time. With our focus on organic revenue growth and productivity, we've been able to generate relatively consistent high single-digit adjusted EBITDA growth year after year with an overall 8% compounded annual growth rate from 2022 to 2025. Accelerating and improving our marketing support has been a significant area of reinvestment, increasing at a 40% compounded annual growth rate over the past 3 years. We plan to increase marketing at a similar rate in 2026. Our marketing efforts are impactful with high ROIs and are driving strong awareness and increasing purchase intent of our Power Four brands. As I like to say, our marketing needs to drive sales overnight and brands over time. Our marketing efforts have been very successful in growing our household penetration with total Utz penetration up over 300 basis points over the past 2 years to 50% of households, which is our highest level ever. Compare this to a salty snack category where penetration while growing is closer to flat. We're focused on attracting younger demographics where we're gaining households even faster. Among millennials, our penetration increased by nearly 500 basis points to 48%. We think this bodes well for our brands and their future potential. Now let's shift to our long-term strategy, which has served us well over the past few years in a dynamic category in which we are evolving slightly for our next phase of growth. We're confident that when executed well on the following 4 strategies, we will create value for the company and its shareholders. Our first strategy is to outgrow the category by 200 to 300 basis points profitably, driven by growing in our expansion geographies and strengthening our core geographies. Our second strategy is to consistently expand margins through productivity and mix improvement. Our third strategy, which is new versus prior years, is to accelerate our free cash flow to be able to delever and allocate our capital efficiently. And finally, our fourth strategy supports these aims by deploying the leading capabilities that we've built during the past few years into a best-in-class organization. Turning now to our first and most important strategy, outgrow the category profitably through differentiated revenue drivers that I will review in detail. Looking at our path to outgrowth versus the category, we think it can be understood through 3 major components. First, expansion geographies, which represent 45% of our retail sales and can continue to grow at a high single-digit rate, particularly with our California expansion. The expansion geographies growth could contribute 3 to 4 points of our total growth over the category. Second, hold our core geographies, which represent 55% of our retail sales. We believe through innovation and focus on our Power Four, we can hold our share and grow with the category. Third, manage an expected headwind of about non-branded and non-salty. However, this headwind should dissipate over time as the business becomes less of our portfolio. These 3 components comprise the 2 to 3 points of Utz growth above the category, which we believe is an achievable goal in the years ahead. One of the misconceptions about Utz is that it's a zero-sum game between us and the category leader. However, there is a significant opportunity to source share from all other branded, mostly regional players that represent 14% of the category. Importantly, private label also plays a relatively modest role in the category at 7% share. Relatively limited private label is a structural positive for this category. Salty snacks has been and will continue to be a terrific category within the food industry. Prior to the pandemic, the category grew at about 5% annually, driven by strong brands, innovation and rational competition. During the pandemic and the period of inflation that followed, the category grew over 11% per year, driven by pricing. Over the past couple of years, the category has been down slightly as consumers adjusted to these prices. However, we are encouraged by the most recent quarter in which the category was up over 1%. Prudently, our plan only assumes a flat category in 2026, but we have conviction that the category will return to growth in the medium and long term. Now let's talk about the key growth differentiators that drive our net sales to 2 to 3 points faster than the category. First is our fastest-growing brand, Boulder Canyon, which still has significant distribution opportunities and a robust innovation pipeline. Second is our geographic expansion westward with California being meaningful. Third is strength in core geographies where we aim to hold share through new initiatives on the Power Four brands. And finally, fourth is our winning innovation with exciting new products also focused on our Power Four. Let's start with Boulder Canyon, a brand we acquired 10 years ago and has experienced rapid growth more recently. We have multiple levers to continue Boulder Canyon's strong growth. First, continuing to grow in the natural channel where Boulder Canyon got its start. second, increasing distribution and assortment in other underpenetrated retail channels; third, driving brand awareness with Boulder's first fully national marketing campaign; and fourth, launch targeted innovation, leveraging the brand's better-for-you credentials. I hope you had an opportunity to sample our Boulder Canyon products at the break because the brand is attracting new consumers with better-for-you snacks that taste amazing. The vast majority of Boulder Canyon business is seed oil-free and non-GMO and has become a snacking choice for modern consumers without sacrificing taste. We're proud to say that Boulder Canyon is now the #1 salty snack brand in the natural channel. And importantly, we believe the brand can successfully stretch into multiple salty snack subcategories and packaging formats. While the brand has grown rapidly from $45 million in net sales in 2022 to nearly $200 million last year, substantial opportunity remains. With the space gains, strong velocities and innovation planned for 2026, we expect another year of very strong double-digit growth for Boulder Canyon. Longer term, with more items per store and space, we believe Boulder Canyon has the potential to be a $500 million-plus brand, which would equate to about 1/3 of our total company sales today. Boulder Canyon's performance in the natural channel has been outstanding with several -- with share in the natural channel doubling from 3.2% in 2022 to 6.6% in 2025, assuming the leadership position. We continue to work with our natural partners to ensure that we're bringing innovation and driving more awareness and trial. Continuing our momentum in the natural channel is important, and we are also expanding Boulder Canyon in other retail channels by growing distribution and assortment. One of the key reasons we are confident in Boulder Canyon's growth trajectory is that our ACV distribution, excluding the natural channel, is still well below some of our other brands. Boulder Canyon's ACV was only 50% for the full year 2025 compared to Utz, which is nearly 80%. Second, our average items per store at 3.6 is well below other brands like us, and we would expect 8 to 10 items per store for Boulder Canyon in the medium term. Another unlock for Boulder comes from our first national marketing campaign called Be for Real. The idea of the campaign is to get away from our screens, artificial intelligence prompts and the other parts of modern life and journey back into the real world. We believe this reflects part of Boulder Canyon's brand strength, nothing fake or artificial, real simple ingredients that taste good. We will use our marketing playbook of digital and connected TV, social media and partnerships along with point-of-sale activations. Let me show you now some of our commercial spots. [Presentation]

We're also excited by our Boulder Canyon innovation pipeline, several of which I hope you were able to try at the break. Last year, we launched Boulder Canyon tortilla chips made with blue corn, and we're excited to expand our product range this year with a selection of flavored tortilla chips to include on-trend flavors like Chili Lime and Sweet Spicy Chili, all cooked in avocado oil. Early consumer response has been encouraging, and these will launch nationally throughout 2026. Also starting this quarter in select retailers, we will launch Boulder Canyon potato chips cooked in beef tallow, a non-seed oil fat that has received significant consumer attention. Moving to our second key growth driver, geographic expansion. As you saw in my earlier revenue build, this is a key driver for outgrowing the category. Expansion geographies represent just 45% of our retail sales versus 64% for the category, which illustrates the tremendous white space opportunity ahead. Over the long term, we would expect that our business will become more evenly split between our expansion and core geographies. We believe there's significant opportunity for strong share growth in expansion geographies given we had a 3% share in 2025 versus our 4.4% average nationally and our 6.6% share in our core geographies. We have a proven track record of consistently building share in expansion geographies, and we believe California will accelerate this. To demonstrate the expansion geographies opportunity, let me share the significant distribution and items per store potential for each of our Power Four brands. For example, On The Border only has 64% distribution with just 3.7 average items on shelf. Over time, we would expect to increase the distribution and items per share per shelf on all of our powerful brands within our core assortment and innovation, and we'll talk shortly about how this playbook has played out in our Florida case study. A common question we get is how are your initial expansion geographies doing and are they still growing? We're introducing a split out by stage of expansion geographies to answer this question, which we're calling initial expansion and recent expansion. In our initial expansion geographies like Florida and Illinois, we achieved a strong retail sales growth of 5.8% in 2025. In our recent expansion geographies, which represents 30% of the salty snack category, our growth was an outstanding 11% in 2025, and that's before our current expansion into California. With expansion geographies, we use a phased growth strategy, leveraging our hybrid distribution to scale efficiently from entry to greater maturity. The first phase of market entry utilizes direct to warehouse and distribution partnerships to establish a foothold. This is how we were structured in California before our expansion initiative this year. Phase 2, as we build scale, we add dedicated DSD. This is what we're doing in California in 2026 after our purchase of DSD route assets last year. The final phase is when we leverage our scale by setting up a fully independent operator network, augmented by select distribution partners. This is what we have done in geographies like Florida. We remain selective about DSD activation, focusing on concentrated population centers, large retail partners and supply chain proximity. As I mentioned, Florida is a great case study on how we execute this proven playbook. The build-out of our DSD route infrastructure in the early 2020s led to a significant retail sales growth and share in Florida, with retail sales of $118 million and share of 4.3% in 2025. This share in Florida is now approaching our company average, up from just 2.5% 5 years ago. Importantly, we were able to keep our contribution margin in Florida steadily ramping up with sales even as we transition to a more dedicated DSD model. To achieve this strong revenue and share growth in Florida, we increased our total distribution points by approximately 2.5x from 2020 to 2025, with average items per store increasing by a similar magnitude, all unlocked by the DSD routes we acquired or built. We plan to apply the same playbook to California. California represents 10% of salty snacks nationally, but only 5% of sales today. So there's significant opportunity for growth in the state. To support this expansion, we acquired DSD routes and assets in the state towards the end of 2025. While this was not a meaningful capital outlay, it does give us the infrastructure to quickly pursue new retail growth opportunities. Expanding California could add approximately $125 million of incremental sales on top of our $80 million retail sales today. This means that California could represent a $200 million-plus retail sales business for Utz. Calibrating this with the Florida case study, even if we went from our current 2 share to 4 share, which is less than our 4.5% share in Florida, we could gain $85 million in incremental retail sales. While we expect this to be a multiyear journey and gradual, we're encouraged by the long-term potential and what California can do for our expansion geographies growth. Being even more specific, we plan to achieve this position in California by capturing the huge distribution and assortment opportunity available to us. We currently have about 1,600 distribution points in California. For context, the category has over 61,000 distribution points. In our currently very limited distribution, we only have 9 items per store, while our expansion geographies typically have over 15 and our core geographies have over 30. Now you can understand why we're so excited about this opportunity. I mentioned earlier that California would be an accelerant to our overall expansion geographies growth. And recall that these markets we have already been in growing sales in the mid-single-digit range during the last few years. We think our California expansion can accelerate this to high single digits longer term, which ties to our 3 to 4 points of overall sales growth contribution from expansion geographies. Now let's talk about our next growth differentiator, strength in core geographies. Core geographies represent 55% of our retail sales. And while expansion geographies are important for growth, we also must hold share in the core. And to hold the core, we need to strengthen our core. Within core geographies, the Utz brand is the key to holding share since the brand represents 61% of our retail sales within these geographies. And while we're focused on ensuring the Utz brand is successful, there's still great potential for our other Power Four brands in the core, some of which were introduced in expansion geographies like Boulder Canyon. We have 4 key strategies to strengthen our core. First, investing marketing behind the Utz brand while ensuring optimal price points; second, expanding distribution of our other Power Four brands, Boulder Canyon, On The Border and Zapp's; third, building distribution in faster-growing channels and optimizing assortment across channels; and fourth, launching winning and on-trend innovation across the Power Four brands. As I said before, we have held volume share in core geographies at 8.2%, but our retail sales have been relatively flat due to channel mix. Looking forward, we plan to hold both volume and dollar share in our core. An important aspect of investing behind the Utz brand is our marketing support, and we're addressing consumer interest in simple and clean labels through our Snacking Made Simple marketing message. This is a broader than an ingredient story and can be delivered across multiple consumer touch points. Over 80% of Utz branded products have only 3 ingredients, and we rolled out packaging late last year, highlighting only 3 simple ingredients, no artificial flavors or colors. Critical to success in core geographies is addressing consumers' price value needs, and we do this many different ways. The first is by leveraging brands up and down the price ladder from value brands like Golden Flake to mainstream brands like Utz and On the Border to elevated items like On The Border Organic to premium brands like Boulder Canyon. Price pack architecture provides different pack sizes to address different consumer needs and occasions while offering value at each price point. We've invested significantly in our revenue management capabilities over the past 3 years to ensure that we have the right price discount or premium to competitors depending on the brands. We balance base price and price promotion strategy depending on the retail channel, and this slide shows our retail strategy in a variety of channels. Our next key growth differentiator is winning innovation. As we ramp up our marketing and scale nationally, innovation becomes a more important part of our growth, and our pipeline has improved significantly, and we are excited and proud to talk about some of our 2026 innovations today. Our innovation pipeline is organized by key consumer drivers in salty snacks that we've identified from our research, those being delivering craveable flavors, capturing occasions, driving value and expanding positive choices. We plan to launch innovations in each of these areas during 2026. On our Utz brand, we are continuing to introduce on-trend flavors. This year, we are introducing a restaurant-inspired one called Sweet and Smokey sauce. We are also rotating in a new seasonal item after last year's success with our lemonade flavor called Sizzlin' Summer Burger. And lastly, we will continue our occasion-based offerings, including those tied to major sporting events, Easter and Halloween. One of the more exciting innovations we plan for Utz brand in 2026 is our protein line. While consumers have been asking for protein offerings for some time, we felt it was critical to introduce products that met this need without sacrificing taste. These products will offer 8 to 10 grams of protein per serving and will be available nationally in a variety of pack sizes starting in the second quarter of 2026. Shown here are 3 pretzel items, which I hope you enjoyed at the break. In addition to pretzels, we will also have 2 Cheese Curl items with 10 grams of protein per serving. While we focus on innovation on Power Four brands, meeting consumer need for value in our price ladder is a priority with brands like Miguelito’'s and Golden Flake. We'll be expanding these brands with Miguelito’'s, Crunchy Curls and tortilla chips and Golden Flake Fries, which will launch in the second half of 2026. Our winning innovation is supported by our increased marketing support, which I said before, needs to drive sales overnight and brand equity over time. We've made significant marketing investments over the past 4 years with spending rising at a 40% compounded annual growth rate. We expect to continue increasing marketing meaningfully again in 2026 to approximately 2% of sales, and we believe that 3% to 4% is the right long-term level, although this will continue to be a multiyear journey. I've just reviewed our 4 key growth differentiators, Boulder Canyon, expansion geographies, strength in core and winning innovation. Taken together, these differentiators allow for multiyear growth potential well into the future. Longer term, we believe these differentiators represent approximately $500 million of incremental revenue opportunity, taking our total revenue potential to $1.9 billion. We believe our expansion geographies, excluding Boulder Canyon, can achieve 4% market share, still well below our core geography market share of 6.6%. I said that we expect Boulder Canyon to be a $500 million-plus brand longer term. And we will also continue to strengthen our core so we can hold share and participate in any category growth over time. With that, I appreciate your time. I'm going to hand this over to BK Kelly, our CFO, to present our other key strategies.

Thank you, Howard. Let me start with our second strategy to expand margins consistently over time by driving productivity and mix improvement. Our supply chain transformation and productivity accelerated when we divested several plants in early 2024, which resulted in substantial outperformance versus our expectations. Our manufacturing footprint has been rationalized from 16 plants at the end of 2022 to 7 plants today, increasing revenue by per plant by nearly 4x from $60 million to $207 million. The capacity utilization for our key potato chips and tortilla chip subcategories is now above 80%, up from approximately 55% 3 years ago. We also outperformed our productivity savings target, generating 6% productivity as a percent of COGS in 2024 and 7% or $66 million in 2025, a significant step-up from just a few years ago. While we are in the later stages of the capital-intensive phase of our transformation, we still have a robust pipeline of productivity projects in the years ahead. This operational excellence has driven significant adjusted gross margin expansion, up by 400 bps since 2022 to 32.3% in 2025, and we will continue to drive this metric higher in coming years. Our adjusted gross margin now includes outbound freight and a large portion of our DSD costs. We have made a substantial $200 million CapEx investment in our Now Focused Network over the past 2 years to modernize the equipment and automate production. This was a requirement to in-source production from the facilities that we closed or divested. Our network is now geographically dispersed and should support our national expansion plans very efficiently on a go-forward basis. Our CapEx spending is now normalizing after the significant step-up over the past 2 years when our investments in capacity, automation and modernization reached 7% of net sales. With this transformation largely complete, we expect our CapEx to step down to approximately 4% of net sales in 2026 and expect it to step down further to approximately 3% of net sales in 2027 and longer term, which will help drive stronger free cash flow generation. This normalized CapEx will deliver strong ROI with 80% of spending for high ROI productivity and growth projects and with maintenance projects only being approximately 20% of spending. Putting this together, the average ROI of our CapEx spending will be significantly above our cost of capital. With the completion of our supply chain transformation, we are pursuing new efficiency initiatives in addition to base productivity and have multiple levers going forward. We expect base productivity to continue to deliver at least 3% of annual COGS savings. A new efficiency initiative is our distribution network optimization, which I will discuss shortly. We expect this new initiative to deliver approximately 1% of cost of goods above our base productivity of 3% for a total of 4% COGS savings over an extended multiyear period. Lastly, we are working across the enterprise to use technology to become more efficient, which should generate incremental cost efficiencies, particularly in our SG&A. The sources of base productivity are in these 3 areas: procurement, manufacturing and logistics. Procurement will be a larger area of savings going forward at 45% with a focus on key initiatives like value engineering and strategic sourcing. Manufacturing savings will normalize at 35% as we complete our supply chain transformation, but we have continuing opportunities in automation and line efficiency. Lastly, logistics between our plants will continue to be an area of opportunity at 20% with route optimization and integrated planning. We believe direct order delivery or DSD distribution is a strategic asset for the company and represents half of our sales. We continue to scale this DSD network nationally with independent operators, or IOs. Today, our DSD system is 99% IOs with 2,500 routes serving 125,000 retail outlets weekly. To support these IOs, we have 130 DSD warehouses nationally, and we believe there is significant opportunity to improve efficiency in this distribution network. Importantly, this distribution network optimization initiative will improve the network's effectiveness and service of both the company and IOs at a lower cost and expect to deliver 1% of COGS savings per year. We will achieve this productivity savings through drop size improvement and digital enablement, ensuring we have the right products and the right warehouses at the right time. There will be better asset utilization through a more efficient network structure with warehouses strategically placed and highly utilized. And finally, this optimized network will have working capital benefits and improved inventory turns. Our historical financial performance provides a good framework for our expectations in the future. Our CAGR from 2022 to 2025 has been 2.4% organic net sales, 5.5% adjusted gross profit growth and 8.3% in adjusted EBITDA growth and 13.8% in adjusted EPS growth. Going forward, our priorities is to deliver consistent and predictable revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth. We expect organic net sales to grow 2% to 3% faster than the category, which we are assuming is flat in 2026. We would expect the category to return to growth longer term. We plan to expand adjusted EBITDA margins at a solid pace, supported by productivity of 4% of COGS, but this pace is dependent on our level of reinvestment, inflation and our top line trajectory. Our target is to grow EBITDA by 6% to 8% annually, with some years being more top line driven and others being more margin expansion driven based on the business environment. 2026 is modestly below this algorithm at 4% to 7% without the 53rd week as we invested in our California expansion. Lastly, on adjusted EPS, we would expect adjusted EPS growth to follow adjusted EBITDA growth before any share repurchases. 2026 is a unique year given headwinds from depreciation and amortization, interest and tax rate, but we expect this growth relationship to normalize in 2027 and beyond. Importantly, relative to our peers, there remains significant longer-term margin -- long-term margin opportunity. Given our strong productivity program, we believe that we have the potential to achieve 17% adjusted EBITDA margins over time. However, the pace and the time line will depend on the category, reinvestment needs and inflation dynamics. Our focus will be on growing adjusted EBITDA in the range of 6% to 8% per year. How quickly we achieve a 17% adjusted EBITDA margin will depend on where we perform in the range and whether our adjusted EBITDA growth is more top line or cost driven. We remain confident in our long-term structural margin drivers, including productivity and mix. Turning now to our new third strategy to accelerate our free cash flow to delever and to be able to allocate our capital efficiently. Our historical cash flow generation has shown improving cash flow from operations over the last 2 years, but this has been offset by the significant step-up in CapEx that I discussed earlier. As a result, our new adjusted free cash flow metric has been relatively flat at around $30 million. We are including sales of property and equipment in this adjusted free cash flow metric as these asset sales have increased as a result of the reconfiguration of our supply chain and are considered when we make our capital allocation decisions. Our aim is to increase conversion of adjusted net income to free cash flow, and we have multiple drivers at our disposal to achieve this. In 2026, we expect adjusted net income to adjusted free cash flow to convert around 70%. Looking at 2027, we think the planned step down in CapEx in addition to working capital initiatives and further monetization of noncore real estate should allow us to reach our target of 80% to 90% adjusted income conversion to adjusted free cash flow. As we expect our adjusted free cash flow should accelerate nicely on a multiyear basis given these drivers. From approximately $34 million in both 2024 and 2025, we expect $60 million to $80 million of adjusted free cash flow in 2026 and $100 million plus annually thereafter. This cash flow will allow us -- will give us the ability to deleverage and pursue our capital allocation priorities over time. The higher cash will be used according to our capital allocation priorities. We will always first invest in our business if the proper return is available and our plans capture these needs. Our second priority is debt paydown and deleverage remains our key priority. We will continue to pay our current dividend with modest growth. We just announced our first share buyback program of $50 million, which we plan to use over time opportunistically. And finally, we will pursue M&A if the value creation potential for shareholders exceeds other capital return options. More specifically, our stronger cash flow will allow us to delever further to a 2.5x leverage ratio longer term. After ending 2025 at 3.4x, we expect to be able to reduce leverage approximately 0.3 to 0.4 turns per year, targeting to 3.2x at the end of 2026, 2.7 to 3x at the end of 2027 and then 2.5x longer term. Returning to M&A for a moment, we will remain disciplined in valuation. We'll be thoughtful about the leverage impact of any transaction. We have an acquisition-savvy management team, an experienced Board and a scaled manufacturing and distribution system capable of capturing synergies effectively. Any acquisitions must be strategically additive to our to our brand portfolio. They must be incremental from both a consumer and retailer perspective and enhance our long-term growth profile. Finally, as we discussed since our transition to the public markets in 2020, part of the strategic rationale has always included the optionality of a Reverse Morris Trust transaction. We believe we continue to be a strong candidate and credible RMT candidate. Let me talk about one initiative in our last strategy, deploy leading capabilities. This initiative is about technology enablement and capturing AI opportunities. By deploying advanced analytics, we are confident that we can drive end-to-end efficiency. More specifically, within our commercial operations, AI will drive our planning and forecasting and support more predictive revenue management. In our supply chain, we will leverage optimized manufacturing and distribution along with automated processes. And finally, in our digital core, we'll achieve common unified data to better support our integrated business planning. Let me now summarize what you have heard today and why we believe Utz is a great investment. We are targeting to deliver sales growth 2 to 3 points faster than the category consistently over time given the differentiators that Howard discussed. We are focused on continued and sustainable margin improvement, leveraging our productivity engine. We are targeting long-term annual adjusted EBITDA growth of 6% to 8%, driven by solid top line growth and margin expansion. And finally, we will ensure that our bottom line results convert to accelerating adjusted free cash flow, which we can use to delever and allocate capital efficiently. Thank you again for this opportunity, and we'll be happy to take questions during our breakout. Thank you.

Maybe we're going to head right over to the breakout. So I know you all just clapped. Let's do it one more time to thank Utz for the generous sponsorship of the conference.