Vital Farms, Inc. (VITL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome. We're really grateful you made the trip to Springfield to be with us today. Before we dive in, please take a moment to review our disclaimer. We got that out of the way. Let's get started. Today, you'll hear a compelling story of our unique brand, our growing farmer network, improving capacity, our trusted and growing retailer relationships and our attractive financial model. We'll begin today with our President and CEO, Russell Diez-Canseco; followed by other key members of our senior leadership team. After the presentation, we look forward to answering your questions. Then we'll break for lunch before loading buses and touring ECS and our new [ Cold Zone ] facility in the afternoon. So with that, let's hand it over to Russell.

Thanks, Brian Thanks, everybody. I'm so thankful you could all be here with us in Springfield. We've called Springfield home since before 2017 when we grand opened -- when we did the ribbon-cutting at ECS. And it seems like in some ways, a lifetime ago, the ECS you'll see today is completely transformed and multiples of the size of what it was back then. So I'm really glad you could be here to see it in person. It's also been a wonderful place to call home, and hopefully, the travel wasn't too rough for you. I'm excited today to show you some of the magic behind how we have made Vital Farms into the leading brand in its categories that it is. I'm glad for you to hear it from some of the leaders who are making it happen. And I'm pleased to be able to share with you our vision for the next phase of growth. Here at Vital Farms, we've built a rare CPG company with a brand based on trust, transparency and a very intentional approach to everything we do. Back in 2007, we didn't just set out to start up an egg company, the unique culture and purpose that drives us to improve the lives of people, animals and the planet through food led us to want to change the system. It just started with getting the birds out of the cages and out on in the pasture. Our way of thinking differently about every aspect of our approach to business is what really makes us such a unique company and so enduring, and I'm excited for you to hear some of those details today. You're going to hear about our differentiated brand and our really strong enduring relationship with consumers. You're going to hear about our relationships with farmers and how it is that we are able to attract and retain the very best. You're going to see with your own eyes our ability to scale our production capacity and our plans to expand it into a new facility in Indiana starting in 2027. You're going to hear from Pete about our trusted relationships with retailers and the way that we partner with them to create long-term value for both of us, not just to negotiate how we split it up. You're going to hear a little bit from me about our culture and the amazing leadership team we've built. And for me, that's really a subject near and dear to my heart, and I think a critical piece of the puzzle. And you're going to hear more details about the attractive model, business model and the financials behind it. Our growth has been driven by brand strength, disciplined execution and a really resilient operating model. The farm network and the supply chain scale sustainably as we continue driving growth in our brand. And these foundations give us confidence in our long-term runway. Our purpose, voice and transparency resonate uniquely in food. Vital Farms wins repeat loyalty at high prices, premium prices, and that's rare in this category. And that brand loyalty is the engine of our enduring growth. Yes, the photo on the lower right is one of our raving fans who did tattoo our cartoon on his arm. No, Joe. I think we have two examples of that actually. Our hands-on pasture-raised model is unmatched in its scale and its consistency. It starts on the farms. We partner with over 575 family farms and treat them each as long-term stakeholders, investing deeply in building trust-based long-term relationships, helping to ensure that we keep raising the standards and that those farmers succeed by working with us that they don't lose at the end of the movie as so often happens in this country. And that, in turn, ensures their resilience and their loyalty. Owning our own packing capacity is a crucial part of the strategy. In general, it's capital light, but we've chosen to invest specifically in packing capacity, not only to ensure our ability to scale with the growth but also to support the superior quality that's such an important part of our consumer value proposition. This supply chain is a competitive moat. A growing number of consumers in this country are choosing premium brands with superior animal welfare and high quality. You can see it in the stats. Pasture-raised eggs and grass-fed butter are the fastest-growing segments of the two categories in which we compete. Our portfolio is well positioned where the growth is strongest. We've consistently outpaced our growth objective since the IPO. Back in 2020, we forecast reaching about $500 million in revenue by 2024. By the end of '22, it seemed we were ahead of schedule, so we offered updated guidance that got us to about $1 billion in revenue by 2027. And again, we're reaching our objectives even more quickly than we said. Since 2020, revenue growth has compounded at nearly 30%. And so it's time to share our vision for the next 5 years. We see a clear path to $2 billion in revenue by 2030 from existing categories. Our track record since the IPO should give you confidence that we can hit this. Gross margins in the mid-30s, EBITDA in the 15% to 17% range allow us to drive disciplined growth for the long term, investing in scaling our organization and the brand along the way. These goals reflect our confidence in our brand strength and supply chain durability and scalability. And the key elements are all ones we're well familiar with, continue growing household penetration through awareness and retail expansion; continuing to scale our capacity by adding more world-class farms, expanding our throughput at ECS, adding a second facility in Seymour, Indiana, and continuously improving productivity throughout, continue scaling our world-class organization, attracting and retaining the very best in the business and maintaining disciplined OpEx and CapEx leverage to expand margins over time. Now you're going to hear about our plans in more detail from some of our exceptional leaders. What I want you to take away today is that this is an integrated strategy built across brand, supply, sales and operations. Taken together, these components create a durable, multiyear growth engine. To get us started, I'm pleased to welcome our Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of Butter, Kathryn McKeon.

Good morning. I started an exciting career in marketing, working on some pretty iconic food brands. 9 years ago, 9 years, kind of at Vital Farms, because I saw an opportunity to be part of building another iconic food brand. I brought my experience, I brought a pretty ferocious competitive spirit. And I brought a real love of brands. This brand, Vital Farms, it's a special one. Today, I get to tell you why, to tell you why that is. Here's the story I want you to be able to tell about the Vital Farms brand. We are a brand and it's a special one. Vital Farms is growing awareness. For us, that translates to loyalty. And we know how to choose the right consumers, and they love us. So what's at the heart of this brand? I want to show you Sean, let's play the video. [Presentation]

Our job at Vital Farms, it's a little different than other marketing jobs. We didn't make a tool called brand to put in our toolkit. The brand is who we are. And the job of Vital Farms is to tell the stories that get credit for who we are. That really is something different. So really fun. It's unique, but it's fun, but how do you fund building this brand. Okay. I want to tell you the secret sauce of the brand. This is something we actually get asked about a lot. What's the secret sauce? I'm going to tell you the 6 ingredients of the secret sauce of the brand today. Bull**** free is our brand promise. We don't give it. We don't take it. We showcase conviction in our purpose. There is heart and grit in every single thing that we do. Utilizing expertise to always raise the standards. Look no further than the side of every single pack of eggs to see traceability. We figured out how to show you the farm and the hands where your eggs, you're eating for breakfast came from. Extraordinary product experience. We are relentless in ensuring that every single time you're getting consistently high quality in everything a consumer takes home. Real humans who deeply care, bucking corporate norms. We hire for this, and it shows up in every single thing that we do. Our small, but mighty community management team, for example, has had over 77,000 human-to-human interactions with our consumers this year. That matters. Another example, you have a handwritten note in your welcome bag. I hope you saw that. Our team decided that we wanted you all to have a handwritten note. So the team sat together and wrote notes to each of you, real humans who deeply care. A strong voice. We have a strong and meaningful voice that shows up every single time in every single touch point. Okay. Here's the real secret of the secret sauce. These are the six ingredients. Only our team knows how to execute this. The actual secret is the people. The people who are the secret sauce to execute these ingredients, it's the people. So how might it show up in the world? Where do we see it? What are the receipts you might say. So in a lot of places, and I think in many industries, there's kind of norms or even what you consider the rule of how things are done. We just don't buy it. Vital Farms isn't doing that. We have our own way. Let me give you some examples. The rule is that advertising creates the brand. I think that's a generally accepted norm. It's not ours. Advertising amplifies our message, does not create the brand. Another rule, scale requires compromise, not at Vital Farms. We scale with integrity, no shortcuts. A rule. Animals are a cost to minimize, not at Vital Farms, animals are foundational. And then there's this rule. It's certainly been true everywhere I've ever worked that you're supposed to choose whether you grow with a household penetration strategy or a buy rate strategy that you have to pick and you have to focus. That's not how we're doing it. We're growing with both. We have been year-over-year, and you can count on us to keep doing it. It's part of how we'll get to that $2 billion. We talked about how special the brand is. Let's turn to how we grow awareness and turn it into loyalty. We chose an awareness strategy, wanted to widen our lead in the category, have a strategic advantage. We also have a really strong conversion funnel. So we believe that if we fill that funnel, we could drive growth. And frankly, we just want people to be thinking about us when they get to the shelf. It's working. Our awareness strategy is working. Let me show you. In early days, we were setting the foundation of the brand, building who we are, getting that right. In 2022, we built an awareness strategy and began to execute. There's a thing at Vital Farms when we decide to do something, we get it done. And that's what happened. We started growing awareness phenomenally. You can see the results. We have a huge lead to our competitive set, and it's a major advantage for us. Here's where the rubber meets the road. It's translating to more households. When we grow awareness, we grow households. That's not an algorithmic given that doesn't just happen, at Vital Farms as awareness grows, households come in, they buy, that's the brand. But it doesn't just stop there. This chart shows us every year the group of consumers for the last 5 years, the households that came in and started buying Vital Farms. Their purchase frequency goes up very consistently over time. So in 2 years, they're somewhere around doubling even more their purchase frequency. When people go to Vital Farms, no matter what year, they keep buying more and more Vital Farms eggs. Okay. So what does that mean for total growth? The dark blue here is retained households. The retained household number is going up because we're bringing people in and keeping them. We're bringing in millions of new households, they stay more retained households. What does that look like for dollars? You can count on us to be bringing in incremental dollars from new households, but this business is driven by loyal dollars. We're bringing households in, we're keeping them. They're spending more over time. The business is driven by loyal dollars. And let me dispel any possible assumptions. We appeal across all income groups, and all are growing their spending with us over time. That's loyalty. Vital Farms grows awareness that becomes loyalty. Let me tell you how we chose the right consumers and how much they love us. Three years ago, we identified Bridget and Ben. This is our bulls-eye consumer. This is where we're spending our ad dollars because these are the folks we know are most likely to convert and stay. But I want to tell you more than their demographics because actually, what's really interesting that I want you to know about them is it's a mindset. These are folks who are health focused, they're educated foodies. They care about where their food comes and they're looking for brands whose values reflect their own. In a nutshell, we are for them. We chose the right consumer, and we've grown with them. And just as consumers evolve, we will, too. As we've done every few years, next year, we will announce a new target consumer, an expanded group that will help us unlock further growth. You know we've built awareness. That secret sauce team, the people, they built a one-of-a-kind system to build the awareness to grow. It's a team of social media experts, wildly talented creatives, brilliant portfolio strategists, insights, Pros, PR experts, savvy brand managers and more. The marketing team at Vital Farms is phenomenal. Here's how we go after it. Across paid, owned and earned media, we're getting scale and reach, building trust and driving amplification. Okay. So what does it look like in the real world? You'll see our platform campaign, Good Eggs, No Shortcuts across all major networks. If you pause your show on Netflix, you'll get an ad from us that thinks farmers because they don't get to pause and an invitation to thank them as well. We're being featured in places like Good Morning America and every foodie influencer is talking about us on their networks. But we can't stop there. It doesn't stop with media. We got to see it all the way through. We've built the product experience for the consumer, what they experience in home with relentless intention. In fact, there's 52 things that we've identified that are part of that product experience for the consumer. We've defined them. We've set the highest standards, and we've ensured that we can deliver every single time. A couple of the features of that, the beloved Vital Times, the newspaper insert in every carton and our traceability program. Every single carton will show you the farm 360 view. In fact, when you walked in the videos playing on the screen are some of those videos. Okay. Is it working? We've got our secret sauce, we know what we believe is the magic of the brand and how we do it. Does it land with consumers? Does it resonate for them? We asked a couple of weeks ago, we just asked consumers why do you buy Vital Farms? It's working. And it's not just one thing that works. It's all the things. That's the brand. An actual ethos that means better quality. The package is beautiful. I like knowing where my eggs come from, and I like the newsletter. They make you feel good about purchasing and eating eggs, the brand. You see from our consumers, we've built trust with intention. This is a trusted brand. We're bull**** free. We operate with purpose. We raise the standards. We have an awesome product experience, real humans who care and a strong brand voice every single time. Now you can feel confident in telling the Vital Farms brand story. We are a brand, a special one. Vital Farms is growing awareness and for us, that's translating to loyalty. We know how to choose the right consumer, and they love us. Before we hear from Pete, I want you to hear one more voice that of our consumer. [Presentation]

Good morning, everybody. Thanks again for making the trip in. My name is Pete Pappas, I had the pleasure to join the organization about 5 years ago as the Chief Sales Officer. And today, I also have the privilege to serve the organization as the President of eggs. And before I jump into a discussion around our farm network, I want to give you just a little bit of an overview of our egg category and the reason that I am so excited and energized about the future. I've been in consumer products for a little over 30 years. And I got to be honest with you, I can't remember a time that I've had as much fun or as I have been as energized as I am today about the future of our organization and the opportunities that lie in front of us. And the reason for that are threefold. One, we've got an unbelievably powerful brand. As Kathryn just shared with you. We're well positioned with our farm community, and we're unbelievably well positioned with our retailers. From a category perspective, eggs are huge, huge and dynamic categories. Incredibly important to our retailers and the role in which we play with those retailers is that of revenue and margin driving, offsetting what has predominantly been a low-revenue, low-margin category. Secondly, Avian influenza continues to impact the category. We believe that, that will continue in the foreseeable future. I'll talk a little bit about that. And then lastly, outdoor access, the segment in which we play, is fast growing and is well positioned as well to continue to grow moving forward. So let me talk a little bit about each three of these. First, the category. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. category is big and dynamic. It's $16 billion. It's more than doubled in the last 5 years. But what you may not know is the role that we play for our retailers in the category. And that is that we offset what has typically been a low-margin, low-revenue commoditized space. Today, given that we play in the super premium segment of that category, we deliver, as Kathryn shared, high loyalty, high-value consumers that are delivering high revenue, high margin to a category. That is incredibly important to our retailers. It's sticky and these consumers stay with the brand. Secondly, eggs strengthen loyalty, drive traffic and reinforce the retailers value proposition. They bring feet into the doors said other ways. Just is milk, just as bananas. And in the past, same as soft drinks. Lastly, as I mentioned before, the critical traffic driving category. Avian influenza, we believe, is going to be here in the foreseeable future. It has reaped havoc on this industry. This is not a secret. You can see the impact it has on the bird population over the past 5 years. But I think what I'd like you to understand is how well positioned we are within our small family farm network and our strong track record of biosecurity to weather this dynamic. We've navigated successfully the past 2 years without any incidents on our farm. And given our commitment to biosecurity, I believe we're well positioned to navigate this into the future as well. As you can see, the population is rebounding, and I'll share a little bit more about this as we talk about our farm network moving forward. And then lastly, the space within outdoor access in which we play, you can see just as the category has doubled, outdoor access has more than doubled, and we are the driving force within this space. We are well positioned here and I anticipate that this will continue to outpace the category moving forward. Okay. So we've talked a little bit about the category. Let's get back to what our road map for the story today would be, and that is delivering strong and growing relationships with farmers. I'd like to oversimplify my role in the company, and that is get eggs and sell eggs. When I first joined about 5 years ago, Russell likes to tell a story. In fact, we were sharing it a little bit earlier. I think he got so frustrated with me in my sales role when I just kept saying, I need more eggs. I need more eggs, we're running up against opportunities that we just can't fulfill. That he finally said, great. I'm going to put you responsible for both farms and sales now. So you stop complaining about getting eggs. You have now the responsibility of securing more eggs and then you can go sell them. And as I said, I'm having a blast. I've got the good fortune of working with what I believe is to be the best farm network and farm support team in the business. I'm going to talk a little bit about -- more about that and the best network of farmers in this industry. So let's talk about this a little bit more. We are investing in these relationships, I believe, more so than we ever have in the past. What does that look like? When we last sat down together 2 years ago, we had a farm network of roughly 300 farms and 5 million birds. It has taken us roughly 16 years to build this network. And you can see the dispersion of farms across the pasture belt. Today, as of 2025, we're roughly 600 farms and almost 10 million birds. And you can see that dispersion as it continues to move east closer to our planned facility in Indiana, which Joe will talk about a little bit later. Over this last -- in 2025, we have added roughly one farm for every 2 days in the year. That's unbelievable expansion. And what I'm excited to tell you about as well is we've already contracted all the farms that we need in 2026, and we're actually starting to recruit farmers for 2027. We have got a rich, robust pipeline of farmers anxious and willing -- and wanting to do business with us moving forward. Our capacity aligns with our multiyear growth needs, and we scaled responsibly keeping our standards extremely high. Well, how are we doing that? Kathryn told you about the work that we're doing to recruit and retain fiercely loyal consumers. We do the same thing with our farmers. Now this is an example of a billboard that we have built or utilized right in the middle of the pasture belt. And the reason we do this is just as we do with consumers to drive awareness. This has allowed us to bring potential farmers into our farmer meetings where we have an opportunity to explain to them and outline what it means to be a Vital Farms farmer to provide them everything they need to know about our commitment to small family farming and to allow them to understand how we will prepare them to be a successful farmer. They begin to understand our commitment to perpetuating family farming and to allow them to understand how potentially we can create a generational business for them. Our value proposition is grounded in long-term outcomes. They can become stewards of their land. You got to understand that many of these folks have this land today. They're farming it in many different ways. How can they continue to expand that economic opportunity on their land. Long-term contracts that provide a better, more meaningful economic model to create stability and alignment. We invest in training, support, relationship building through boots in the dirt on their farms with the best farm support team in the business on the farm supporting them every day. Whatever it is that they need, we are there to help them. Ultimately, farmers choose Vital Farms because they feel set up to succeed, and they trust us. There's that word trust again. Kathryn talked about it in the brand. and that brand carries through in the way that we treat our farmers. The best way to bring this to life is with another video that we actually share with them in our farmer meetings. [Presentation]

So after we've recruited our farmers, we retain them and we grow with them. So as we've recruited farmers, I've started to learning from Kathryn write a personal note to each of them. That concludes with welcome to the Vital Farms family. And I'd like to think that they feel that they're part of an extended family. We're in it together. We're excited about growing together. And the numbers don't lie. As you can see here, we have a 95% retention rate with our farmers. 32 of those farmers have opted to building additional barns in the last 2 years, which is a reflection of confidence and satisfaction in our economic model. And 50% of our farmers in 2025 were referred by current farmers, indicating, again, a satisfaction in this model and what we're doing moving forward. So we feel great about where we're headed with our farm network. So we sometimes get asked, are there really enough farmers to continue to perpetuate your growth? And the answer quite simply is, yes, and the proof is in the numbers. Within the pasture belt, you can see the numbers here, 400,000 small and midsize family farms are scattered throughout the pasture belt, that's less than 0.2% of those farmers are currently with Vital Farms today, less than 0.2%. We have plenty of farmers and the land to go along with it to perpetuate our growth. Our standards and our model are highly attractive to aligned partners with aligned goals. Supply expansion is not the limiting factor for our strategy. And as you look at land, you can see the same thing, more than 125 million acres of farmland in the pasture belt across all agricultural farm used for crops, pasture, grazing. That's 0.02% of the land occupied by Vital Farms today. And even if you took all of the eggs in the United States that are consumed and assume that they were pasture-raised eggs, it would amount to 1% of the farmland available throughout the pasture belt. So we have plenty of farms. We have plenty of farm land. We have plenty of farmers available to us to continue in this growth trajectory. So how are we ensuring long-term success for our farmers. I want to give you just two examples of investments that we're making to improve outcomes for farmers, ultimately raising our own standards. First is our accelerator farms. Now these are company-owned farms that we're learning -- that we are using as learning labs, innovation properties to try out new practices that we won't ask farmers to invest on our behalf. Further, our animal welfare, regenerative practices. We are using these locations as opportunities to learn different things about animal behavior regenerative practices on the land, different ventilation and cooling systems and barns. All these different things that we believe will potentially improve the outcome on that or in that barn. Second opportunity is in the pullet program. Now these pullet programs are contracted farms similar to our lay farms. We do not own these farms. We contract with independent farmers. But the pullet, which is from roughly 1 week to 16 weeks of a bird's life is the most critical period in a bird's life, which will influence the productivity and outcome of that bird. And we are investing in this period of time because we know that outcomes are incredibly important and influenced by the bird's health and well-being between the 1 to 16 weeks of life. So accelerated farms drive innovation and welfare, animal welfare and regeneration, pullets improve the high quality of before laying. Both programs support consistency and long-term cost structures for the business. And only because of our size and our scale are we allowed and able to invest in programs like these moving forward to improve outcomes, not just on our company farms, but on behalf of the independent farmers that we're partnering with. So when I began, I shared that eggs are a big important dynamic category for retailers, and I gave you a little bit of peak into the role in which we play. We've nearly doubled our supply of farmers and the robust pool of farmers that we have available to us, both in farms, farmers and farm land moving forward. And we're well positioned to continue our growth moving forward. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Russell, who I believe will now talk a little bit about our capacity expansion and our ability to pack these eggs and bring them to market moving forward.

Thanks, Pete. We -- our Chief Supply Chain Officer, Joe Holland, is with us today. He's a little under the weather. We made the mistake of having sushi on a Monday, which apparently you're not supposed to do. So hopefully, we'll see them later today on the tours of our facility. So I'm going to try to do my best to do justice to his section here. He's actually got the, I think, some of the most fun things to talk about. So he wanted to share a little bit of just how much money he is having here. I'll let him tell that story when you get to see him personally. But what's exciting here is that the operations are scaling along with the exciting brand and sales story and market opportunity that Pete and Kathryn shared. There's a solid foundation here going back to building Egg Central Station here back in 2017, and there's so much more that we've added and we'll continue to add. There are going to be three key areas we're going to focus on. Our terrific crew; our stakeholder partners, some of whom are in the room with us today; and the physical assets and facilities, there's an awesome combination to support our business. So after we were founded, it didn't take long before we realized that we needed to own our own destiny by building a world-class packing center here in Springfield. I think it's -- in the early days, we started like so many other start-ups do without the physical assets. We are too small to justify the investment, and we relied on others to do that for us. We found a couple of things wanting in that model. One was that, that excess capacity, we were able to use in other companies' plants tended to get a little tighter in the peak winter season. And so in order to make sure we had enough capacity to support our growth, we needed to build it ourselves. The other is that part of what we're doing is creating a premium superior product. That means, frankly, having a higher standard for what makes it into a carton versus what doesn't. And try as we might, we couldn't always convince other players in the space to filter out what looked to them like perfectly good eggs, but that simply didn't meet our high standards. So again, in order to make sure that happened reliably, consistently, we wanted to build it ourselves. The next plant under construction now is in Seymour, Indiana, and that will continue to create the capacity we need and also benefit from the learnings we've had over nearly 10 years here in Springfield. And I think we want to show you a video now of just a little bit of what makes our facility here so special. [Presentation]

So I'm excited for you to see Egg Central Station. And the crew members and leaders there who will walk you through our frankly, so they're just as highly engaged, if not more so, and what we're doing as the wonderful marketers, salespeople and other team members who bring this whole thing to life. Engage with them. I want you to ask them why they do what they do, ask them how long they've been with us. There are some really impressive people on the ground there. One of the things that I think is really important to know is we run this place like a food facility, not like a farm packing facility. The distinction can be subtle but where it shows up is you'll see it in design. You'll see it in cleanliness. You'll see it in maintenance. You'll see it in engagement of the crew members. There are small differences that, frankly, make a big one to us. On a farm facility, the standard work rules don't apply. You don't have to pay over time. You don't have to pay worker's comp. You don't have to offer benefits or paid off holidays. We never intended to skirt what we think are critical parts of an employer value proposition. We want great people. We treat them like the professionals they are. So our plant is in the city. In fact, it's right at the end of the runway of the Springfield Airport. We're not hiding it off an Egg land. And you will meet a plant safety leader who is driving some of the best in-state, best in industry safety outcomes for our people as one example. You'll meet a crew full of full-timers who have full benefits. These are just small examples of how we built this place with a different vision in mind of being a world-class and most trusted food company, not just an egg company. You'll see that we have a long and successful history of growing capacity to support our sales growth. Starting when we opened Egg Central Station, actually back in 2017, but heading into 2020 with about $300 million in revenue, at least of capacity to support about $200 million in revenue, and again, expanding it in '22 into '23, expanding it again this year successfully, that Triple Lindy of adding a packing line, opening a new cold storage facility and doing an ERP transition in the same month, which maybe we can revisit for next time. But as we look ahead to $2 billion by 2030, we've got a clear path to that with Vital Crossroads offering the missing piece to that capacity. And one of the great things about this model is that we've been able to scale to support the revenue as it grows. For example, in Springfield, we didn't start with all the automation you're going to see today because we didn't need it to support the volumes. We've layered in additional staffing and additional automation to support volume as we grow, making the cost structure here a bit more variable than in some food processing facilities. So Joe likes to talk about the chicken and egg phrase coming with our operations. Is it the crew? Or is it the assets, the automation, the robotics, which is the center of the stage. The reality is that here at Vital Farms, it's all about people. People are what bring this place to life and the assets are there simply to help empower them to get to greater outcomes. If you were here back in 2017, you saw a lot of manual labor. And frankly, you may have seen a few of the folks you're going to see today, some of our long-term crew who have helped us learn along the way and improve along the way and help bring our newer crew members along to help drive even better outcomes. So here are just two examples of the technological investments we've made to help improve productivity and our crew outcomes. We focus our investments on the hardest jobs which has the benefit not only of helping improve throughput on those areas of the plant, but also reducing risk injury and fatigue on our crew. First, we invested in automated pack lines. Those pack our highest volume SKUs automatically into the master cases, which go on to the pallets. The second is automatic palletizing, which is kind of impressive when you see it. I hadn't seen this before we put it in our own plant. It takes those finished goods, master cases and actually palletizes them for us, which is, frankly, that's that 40-pound lift over your head that's in the job description that I hope to reduce the need for in the future. And we've invested to improve. We've invested a lot in our talent as well to improve capacity. We have -- I mentioned earlier, we've driven a safety record now that's the envy of the industry and the envy of the state, we've been recognized by the state of Missouri for the incredible safety outcomes we're providing. Our safety leader likes to say that we're not doing that by under reporting. We report near misses, which I guess is a rare occurrence in the food manufacturing. And so having that low an incident rate despite our essentially over reporting is truly remarkable, and I think a reflection of our values. We've done big investments in training our crew, not just our frontline crew but really the leverage at the manager and supervisor level to help every one of our crew members experience what I've experienced over the years by having a boss who cares about me by having a crew that I want to work with and who are just as dedicated as I am. And again, talk to them, talk to the folks you see on the floor. So as impressed as I think you're going to find ECS, I think you're also going to be blown away by this new fully dedicated Cold Zone facility that was opened just a few months ago. We've got both John and Christina at the back of the room who are the owners, family owners and leaders of the Erlen Group, which is the owner of the Cold Zone facility. They'll be on hand not only to lead that tour, but also to answer your about what it's like to partner with us and what it's like to run that facility in support of our business. This is a truly integrated part of our supply chain. And it's only possible because of an enduring 10-plus year relationship, a lot of learning together, a lot of trust and a willingness to make a big bet on Vital and vice versa. The inspiration to build this facility came from our last Investor Day back in 2023. John was in the audience as a stakeholder, and he heard about our plans to get to $1 billion in revenue by 2027. He came back from that meeting and he can tell it better than I can, but realize that this was going places and that if they want to continue scaling as our partner, they needed to start thinking about the next phase of investment, which thankfully open this year right on time. This facility has several benefits over our prior location for cold storage, which was in the Springfield underground. First, it's bigger. It's 171,000 square feet. It's actually about the same footprint as ECS with three lines in it. It's expandable. It can grow with our growth. It enables us to hold 4 weeks of [ Nestron ] eggs, the one straight off the farm, as well as the week of finished goods, which enables much more efficient longer runs in our facility. Essentially, we produced finished goods at Egg Central Station. We ship them over to Cold Zone, and they're able to pick those products to fulfill orders and ship them out to customers. We've reduced the drive from the original underground facility to less than a mile from ECS, which will reduce road miles by about $100,000 a year, which is great for cost and environment. Let's talk about Vital Crossroads. This is the unlock to get to $2 billion. We can get to about $1.2 billion with what we've got in place today to get to [ $2 billion ] Vital Crossroads is up and coming. We purchased land back in June of '24 and announced our next facility. In August of this year, we announced that we're accelerating the build-out because the growth is there and it's unrelenting, thanks to some of the folks up here on the stage. And so we anticipate opening it in 2027. And a couple of the key innovations for this new facility. One, we've now taken that cold storage facility that's now just a mile down the road in Springfield, and we've co-located it with the plant. This is a critical learning from our experience in Springfield, and the benefit there will be in cost, in complexity, in touch points with eggs, which are fragile, as you know. The good news is that our partners at the Cold Zone will operate it for us. That's not the thing we're the best in the world at. They are, but we'll own it and it will be ideally located for our needs from day 1. The other piece that I think is going to benefit from some of the learnings in Springfield is the way that we're building capacity for two lines at once instead of having to add the building to add that second line. So the two lines will be phased across '27, but the plan is to have them both operational in '27, so that we're -- they're in place well in advance of our need for that capacity and so that we avoid the extra cost of breaking down a wall to expand the building. So I appreciate you hearing the story. It's going to come to life when you see it. I'm really glad you could be here in Springfield to go see all that action. I think it's pretty exciting. Sometimes when people ask me what they're going to see when they come to Springfield. My simple answer is robots. And there are a few robots, and I think it's kind of cool. I don't know. I'm still a kid at heart, I guess. So back up next is Pete, who's going to continue talking about his areas of responsibility and the role he plays here.

All right. Thank you. All right. So we've talked about on our journey to -- our journey to $2 billion. We've heard about a strong brand. We've talked about farms. We've talked about our ability to secure eggs. We've talked about our ability to pack those eggs and get them to market. I'll talk about now our ability to sell those eggs through our great partnerships with retailers. And this is the second aspect of my get eggs, sell eggs responsibilities, and that is selling eggs and building trusted partnerships with retailers. So again, a big important category and the role that we play again is revenue margin, bringing in households that are sticky for retailers. I want you just to remember that. All right. So our approach here is really twofold. One, we have a very, very clear strategy for growth, bringing in valuable shoppers and the impact it has on their categories, retailers understand this, and they value this from Vital Farms. Secondly is the approach that we take in translating insights into action and solving retailer problems. I want to talk about both of these things moving forward. Our strategy for growth, it's really not that complicated. It's a very, very simple and straightforward flywheel, but in this example, it's obviously very linear. It starts with distribution. That distribution obviously establishes our ability to drive awareness and create velocity. That velocity begets an expansion into more doors or more banners of a retailer. Once we're able to start to spread our wings, expand into more doors, into more banners, that velocity starts to then allow a retailer to understand I need more items. We start to get more items, we start to get more presence on shelf. It drives awareness, that awareness begets more households. Households gets more space. Then we get into this virtuous cycle space, expand SKUs, expands households, that starts to build on itself and creates momentum. And that's the cycle that we're in today. We're in 23,000 stores, actually, more than 23,000 stores. For the most part, we're in the stores that we want to be in. We don't have a lot of new store opportunities. We probably have some that we should be in. But by and large, we're in the stores where we want to be. The opportunity for us today is expanding SKUs and expanding space. Productivity is the name of the game for us moving forward. So is it working? Again, the proof is in the numbers. Today, we are either the #1 or #2 branded shell egg items sold in 9 of our top 10 customers. Retailers value high velocity, loyal incremental customers. We deliver loyalty and incrementality to the category. The data consistently shows that we drive value in category performance. And then lastly, it earns us more distribution and merchandising support in store. Again, that virtuous cycle. So let's pressure test the approach. We got four scenarios that I want to walk you through. What's it look like when we're the first mover or what did it look like when we're the first mover. Back in 2017 when we were the first one in the store, and we had competitors coming after us head-to-head when we were first in, and we were going head-to-head with competitors, challenger when we were the second one in and then how does it look in the face of really deep discounting and competitive activity. So back in -- back in the day when we were the first mover, we have been under siege ever since. We've had a number of competitors who have come after us in this scenario in a big natural retailer where we were the first one in. We've had a manufacturer after manufacturer try to break in. In addition to private label, who has this retailer has introduced private label in a pasture-raised format. But in this particular example, this is about a branded manufacturer who has taken four different swings at introducing branded pasture-raised offerings in an effort to either cut into our share position or displace us. And in this example, through the last 5 years, we have not only been able to continue to grow, our growth has been almost 4x what they have been able to deliver in their entirety. So the brand is incredibly powerful. The innovation that we have been able to deliver through partnering with this retailer has outperformed the base business in which this competitor has been able deliver. The consistency, the sustained growth is incredibly valuable that we deliver to the category. Velocity, loyalty and consistency are what really drive performance. In head-to-head in this example, back in 2016, '17, at Kroger, competitor A and Vital Farms both came into the store together, competitor B in this example both came into the store together. Immediately, we outperformed that competitor. We were then able to start to expand into more doors, into more banners, into more geographies. To those -- that expansion led to more items on shelf. That expansion and those velocities actually demonstrated an ability then to scale in a manner that allowed us to innovate with scale for this retailer. To the point to the retailers said, I'm not sure we need to have multiple pasture-raised branded SKUs on the shelf and the competitor was displaced. And today, you can see that we're experiencing over 30% compounded annual growth with Kroger, who's an outstanding partner of ours moving forward. Superior velocity drove more doors, the flywheel amplifies performance. And ultimately, this competitor is no longer in the store. So in a little bit greater detail, you can see the velocities over time, unlocking more doors increased 16 percentage points from year 1 to year 2 in '16 to '17. And you can see how that growth is perpetuated. Shortly thereafter, our average item selling has increased consistently. But the real payoff and the value that Kroger sees in what we deliver is 1 million incremental households that we have been able to deliver. And those households stay within the Kroger brand. That's the value that Vital Farms delivers. Feet in the door, incremental high-revenue, high-margin consumers that stay at Kroger. That's why retailers value Vital Farms and the power of the Vital Farms brand. They cannot get that with anybody else in this category. So as a challenger. And now the reality is there are very, very few places today that -- where we're not in distribution. There are and there are a few -- and there are a handful of places where we want to be and where we need to be and we're not. But in this case, at Publix, we were the second entry back in 2016, 2017. But very quickly, once we got on shelf, again, we were able to demonstrate that we stand for more than just simply price. This brand, as Kathryn shared with you, stands for more. We stand for transparency. We stand for animal welfare. We stand for things that matter to consumers more than just simply a commoditized cheap egg. And that resonates. It resonates in its differentiation. It resonates in its consistency. And again, it resonates in its repeat purchase at the retailer -- is valuable to the retailer. Rapid growth driven by strength and awareness and the category dynamics reward us in strong and trusted performance to the tune of 45% compounded annual growth over the last 6 to 7 years. Okay. Lastly, and this, I think, is a very, very powerful story that demonstrates what I just said about the resiliency of the brand in the face of deep price -- in the face of price -- discounting or price resiliency. And this is a recent example with our friends at Kroger. And they understand the role that we play again. So in this case, Kroger used their own brand to drive traffic, 18 count at $1.99. They understand our role when we talked about this as we're looking at their strategic approach to the category. They do not want us as a deep discounted item to drive traffic. That's not the role that we play for them. They'll use a different brand or they're going to use their private label to drive feet in the door. The role that we play, given the velocities that we can maintain is to keep that performance high, we are the offset to deep discounting, where the offset and the balance to revenue and margin. They can use private label to bring feet in the door and will continue to generate high margin, high revenue dollars on a consistent basis over time in the face of these deep discounted items. Premium pricing does not impair performance. And that's, I think, the power of the brand. We do not see switching. Our consumers stay with the brand. Our consumers are not interested in cheap eggs. And I think that's incredibly valuable to understand. This brand resonates for different reasons. We are not a commodity nor are we interested in renting share or renting volume, not going to see us out-promoting just for the sake of promoting. And nor do retailers want us to do that. Here's another example, not in the face of a deep discount, but as our price gaps have widened. This is with a natural retailer. And in this example, you can see back in 2021, our average price gap was at about $2. And we enjoyed about a 26% share of performance in the category. Today, we're at a price gap of about $3.40, yet our share is almost at 35. So again, in the face of widening price disparity, we're expanding our share performance. Meaning that consumers are staying with us, and even in this case, coming into the brand at an accelerated rate. The value proposition holds a relatively -- as relative prices shift, brand strength offset the category volatility and shoppers remain loyal because they trust us. Okay. So we've talked about our strategy for growth. Let's talk a little bit about how we're helping retailers solve their problems. So today, the #1 challenge retailers face is space optimization. The reality is when you walk into a grocery store, retailers are not adding more cold space. They just can't. It's fixed. It's too expensive. They don't have the ability to knock out walls and add more space. They're simply not adding the space, is too expensive. So how do we make it work harder for them. How do we make it become more efficient for them. So this example might be one of the largest exits that you'll see, probably 20, 24 feet of space. And you can look at this and say, well, that looks pretty good. I look at it and I see chaos. Now I'm pleased because you'll see Vital Farms at eye level, and we have a number of great SKUs. But when I tear back -- when I peel back the onion and I look at the data, I'm almost 1/3 of the branded dollar sales, I'm 25% of the unit sales but I'm only about 17% of the spacings. I'm underleveraged. I'm underutilized by this retailer. I'm underdelivering from a category perspective. So the opportunity for us is to be working with them to optimize their category performance. And if I can help them drive category performance, the brand will win as well. So space optimization is going to unlock category growth potential. And if I can unlock category growth potential, we're going to unlock branded growth potential as well. Increasing these facings reduces out of stocks because what happens later in the day, and I'll show you, that doesn't provide us with enough holding power given the velocities that I'm generating both in dollars and units. By later in the day, those items for Vital Farms and perhaps in some other categories that get sold down. Lastly, this isn't a self -- this isn't a proposition that is self-serving. Retailers see this as a win-win proposition as well. If we can rightsize this for them, they win because the category overall performance as well. And we've been able to demonstrate that with retailers in tests that we've executed. Now here's a second example, probably a more realistic view of most sets that we see, which is about a 6 to 8-foot set in the typical grocery store. You can see what this looks like in the morning. And that's -- typically, in a grocery store, you're going to see kind of a sporadic set of what it might look like. You can see Vital Farms relatively well positioned, but you can see a lot of dead space in that cooler, how do I help the retailer optimize that space. But when you look at what happens at the end of the day at 4:00 p.m. It's completely wiped out. This retailer is out of business in essence. One of the opportunities that we have is helping them rightsize this limited space, limited optimization basically puts them out of business. It's lost sales, loss performance for both of us. More shelf space, fewer out of stocks, higher turns demonstrates the economic rationale for facing expansion. So this is where the opportunity sits. As we create more space, more SKU availability, that virtuous circle that we talked about, starts to perpetuate itself. And this is why the opportunity -- this is why our opportunity towards $2 billion, I'm so excited about it moving forward. So when I began the morning, I told you I was excited about where we are and why I'm excited both from a farm perspective as well as from a sales opportunity. Eggs are big and critically important to the retailer. We've talked about that. We have a clear strategy for growth. I hope you understand how we're demonstrating that with our retailers and how well positioned we are to win. We have a solution mindset in translating our insights into action and well positioned with our retailers moving forward. We have a robust network of farmers, great relationships with them. We're putting down more hens and we're producing more eggs than we ever have, and we have more capacity than we've ever had positioning us to win moving forward. I'm so excited about the future, and I can't wait to see where this takes us. So we're going to take a short break now for about 15 minutes, and when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about our culture, and Thilo is going to wrap us up with a financial overview. So 15 minutes, we'll be back in our chairs. We're running about 5 minutes ahead of schedule. So we will restart the second presentation at 9:55, okay? Start at 9:55 sharp. Thank you. [Break]

Okay. Good morning again. Let's take our seats, please. We're going to get started right away.

So we're back. I'm back a third time, this time to talk about a subject that's really near and dear to my heart, and that is culture and purpose. Some of these words can get overused, sometimes they can start to feel a little bit squishy. I'm going to talk to you about some of the ways that this really comes to life for us the way that we've intentionally built and fostered it and why I think it's the fuel for everything you've heard about today. This is our version of a page that you might have on a wall in your office that talks about our purpose, our mission, our values. These were arrived at very intentionally, collaboratively. What's really important is that we start every all-hands meeting reading the whole darn thing. We've operationalized it in the way we do talent reviews. We hire against these values. These values are the leading indicators in my experience of success as a leader at Vital Farms. And essentially, not unlike the way that Kathryn shared the recipe for building this enduring brand, this is the recipe for how we are building and have built an enduring organization. And we're happy to share it. It's easy to read. It's hard to execute, and it's something that we work very hard at and very consistently at. In short, this is our culture on a page, it's our culture and action. We talk a lot about conscious capitalism, this multi-stakeholder model that focuses on having a higher purpose than just making money and having a stakeholder orientation. And those concepts can sound a little squishy. I tried time and time again in '20, '21, '22 to explain it. People said, let's move on to the numbers, fine. But there's actually something really powerful here. And so what I want to share with you, what I want you to take away when we say conscious capitalism are three things. First, we work with all of our stakeholders, including our good friends at the Erlen Group in the back of the room who operate our cold storage facility. We work with all of them to grow the pie, not just to negotiate a share of a fixed pie. That's a critical piece of this. We are better off for that partnership. We are getting the better outcomes for that partnership. It's not just about a tough negotiation for a commodity called cold storage space. They're integrated into what we're doing. Two, we make long-term decisions and plans, which we believe create better outcomes, improve resiliency and reduce risk to our business. And three, that higher purpose to improve the lives of people, animals and the planet through food, it's a galvanizing force. It attracts a very special kind of crew member, one who is here for more than just the paycheck. In fact, they demand more of this place than just their paycheck. And the result is in the attraction and the retention and the engagement, I hear read headline after headline about how engagement has gone by the wayside in the world, and we've got more disengaged employees who are quiet quitting or retiring on whatever the phrase they use is there. They're not engaged and they're not driving the outcomes that their employers want them to drive. These aren't employees to do my bidding. These are people in my span of care. I exist to support them and them in achieving our purpose, our mission and our vision, and it's a privilege to work with them, talk to them. You're not going to find what you might expect in an hourly role in a food packing plant. You're going to find people who actually kind of give a s*** about what they're doing, and they see that we're about more than just making enriching shareholders at their expense. This is something that benefits all stakeholders, including shareholders. Our strong culture has enabled us to successfully scale. This is a -- this can be a tough thing for a small, fast-growing company like ours to scale our organization size at a 30% CAGR and expand EBITDA per crew member. We're becoming more productive, more efficient even as we're scaling this organization. It's because of the intentionality with which we're doing so. I would argue that part of my role is Chief Culture Officer, and I'm fiercely protective of it. And it's shaped and defined and reinforced by this incredible leadership team many of whom you've heard from today. I feel so lucky to support this incredible team. I would argue this isn't a team you're going to find at just any company that plays in the categories in which we play. This is a special team that's doing so much more than pumping out eggs and butter. I put them up against any in CPG. And they're not just experienced. Collectively nearly 150 years of CPG experience and about 40 of it at Vital Farms. Hopefully, you've seen today how passionate each one of us are about our purpose, our values and our culture. And these folks are unleashing our potential of this incredible company and brand in ways that I could only have imagined in our founder can only have imagined years ago when we both got involved here. Next, I want to welcome Thilo this stage to share a little bit more about the numbers and the financial story behind the success.

Thanks, Russell. So I get to bring us home. I got to wrap this all up and turn it into the financial story. But I want to start off with just recapping a little bit what you heard this morning. Russell started us off this morning talking about our purpose, what makes us unique in the packaged food space. He talked about our aspiration to become America's most trusted food company. And why that really matters to us, well, it's important to us, what we're trying to accomplish here by disrupting the American food system. . Kathryn came up and talked about really in -- I think, in an extraordinary way, how we -- how our brand is so unique. How our relationship with consumers is so special. The brand is at the core of what we do. The brand is at the core of what makes us successful. Without this brand without protecting the brand, this business wouldn't work. And I think Kathryn gave some very good examples of all the work that we put in to make sure that the brand stays as strong as powerful as trustworthy as it is. The brand is our moat. We operate in a commoditized category. We are very aware of that. But the brand is the moat that gives us this advantage in this category. Pete then talked about in his first role about what we are doing with the farming community. Obviously, in order to keep the growth going, we need to keep recruiting farms. And the relationships that we have with farmers, the relationships that we have built in the farming communities and the pasture belt, they're crucial to maintain this growth. And similar to consumers, the brand is a very important piece here. The brand that we have in the pasture belt is one of trust, is one of collaboration. And that sets us apart when we are going out and recruiting farmers. Joe would have talked about it, but Russell stepped in for him, what we do with all the extra come off the farm. Obviously, we want to put them in a carton with our brand on it. And that's where we're putting a lot of money right now into scaling our supply chain. And I'm excited for all of you to see ECS later this afternoon and the new cold storage facility. Pete then talked about our relationships with retailers and the virtuous cycle that we have built with them. Similar to the brand promise with consumers, the relationship with retailers is one built on trust, one build on transparency. And the strong retailer relationships are obviously very important for us, right? Retailers are the conduit that get our farms ECS to the consumer fridge. And the relationship that we have with retailers, the ability to grow velocity and distribution at the same time, that is an important differentiator for us. And then Russell just talked about our culture, the leadership, the values that we have. To me, that is one of the other moat that we have. I don't think you'll find many egg companies that have this kind of cultural promise, and that is what makes us special in this space. So with this tour of Vital Farms almost complete. My job is now to wrap this up with all the financial implications. Before we do that, though, I just want to address some of the news from this morning. And then we can focus hopefully on the long-term story that we are trying to tell you here. I know you have all seen in the press release that we put out this morning. All the questions I got this morning already were about these new numbers. So I'm just going to address them upfront. We updated our net sales guidance for this year 2025 to a new range of $755 million to $765 million. It's a result of a longer-than-anticipated return to normal order patterns after our ERP implementation at the beginning of Q4. This return to normal order patterns, we are now back to it. This was a temporary disruption. And so we are now moving forward again. That is why we are providing also an initial outlook for 2026 net sales of $930 million to $950 million. That's 24% net sales growth that we are aiming for next year. This is not official guidance yet. It's an initial outlook. We'll provide guidance as we always do on the fourth quarter call in February. But we want to give you the confidence because we have the confidence that this business continues to be in excellent shape. With the guidance update this morning, we also reconfirmed our adjusted EBITDA guidance of $115 million as a minimum. And with a few more weeks of spending under our belt since we updated our guidance on the third quarter call, we are now narrowing our CapEx guidance to $80 million to $90 million. It's simply a reflection of the timing for the spending for Vital Crossroads. There's no other explanation behind that. It's a timing question. I want to talk about these order patterns that I just mentioned a little bit more. As you know, we implemented our ERP system at the beginning of Q4, September 29. We continue to be damn proud of that implementation. We were the rare exception where we implemented an ERP system, and we didn't stop shipping because of it, but shipments were slow in the beginning. ECS had to learn a whole new process of producing eggs. And because of that, production was slow for the first few weeks after the ERP implementation. And so as a result, retail takeaway, this is retailer data or scanner data from Circana, as a result, for 6 weeks, retail takeaway was below what you would consider the normal seasonal pattern. Production actually was back to pre-ERP levels, the week of October 20. That's in the middle of this highlighted period here. It just took a little bit longer for retail consumption to pick up again, to go back to what we would consider as the normal seasonal pattern. Important to point out here the last 3 weeks of scanner data that we have from Circana, we are now above what the patterns were from last year. And so in fact, our retail volume, the number of EQ units that we are selling for the last 3 weeks, we're at well above the levels that we were at prior to the ERP go-live. Growth rates have recovered, so we are now in the mid- to high 20s again. And so with that, this temporary disruption from the ERP implementation. We are through that. We are behind that. I'm sure you saw in the press release as well that we have exited the hypercare phase of the ERP implementation. This ERP implement -- sorry, this ERP implementation is done, and now we're moving forward. So with that, let me step back and now focus on the long term. You saw the numbers this morning. We're establishing a $2 billion net revenue target for 2030. We're also establishing a 15% to 17% adjusted EBITDA target for 2030. And we are maintaining our gross margin target of at least 35% for the next 5 years. The gross margin target is the same target that we've had so far. We think that is the right level for us where we generate enough gross profit to fund the rest of the business. The adjusted EBITDA margin target is a 3-point improvement relative to the targets that we set for ourselves at our last Analyst Day in 2023. We're confident that we can deliver these targets because of everything that you have heard this morning. We have this unique differentiated brand that's trusted by consumers. I find it amazing how steady the trusted brand metric is going back for the last 4 years. Because it is such a trusted brand, we have done, I think, a very healthy improvement in our ability to retain new households. Over the last 5 years, we have increased that by 5 points. And because we have such a trusted brand, we are able to expand consumer interest in Vital Farms and consumer loyalty. Over the last 5 years, we have doubled our aided brand awareness. Over the last 5 years, we have doubled our household penetration. And we have done all of that while increasing buy rate by 70%. To me, that means we are far from acquiring the marginal consumer. There's plenty of growth with consumers left out there. That then translates into success with the retailer that Pete talked about. Over the last 5 years, our average items carried in the grocery store in the U.S. has increased more than 40%. While the velocity on the shelf of the items that are there has increased almost 70%. Again, to me, that means that we are far from putting the marginal product on the shelf or acquiring the next marginal retailers. We are still very much in the hypergrowth phase of this business. And so with these metrics, it shouldn't be a surprise that our growth at retail over the last 5 years has predominantly been volume driven. It's been a great mix between velocity and distribution gains. And distribution gains really predominantly by putting more SKUs on existing shelves. We've had a healthy contribution from mix improvement. It's a shift from conventional to organic gig, so we have been talking about for quite a while now. Price and promotions are actually a very small part of our retail growth. Going forward, we anticipate that this distribution will roughly hold up. The growth is supposed to be volume driven. It's going to be a combination of velocity and distribution. Not every year will look exactly the same. But over time, this contribution, almost 3/4 of the growth coming from volume gains that should hold up. And so with this growth outlook, we are very confident that we can follow up the 29% revenue CAGR that we've had since the IPO with a 21% CAGR over the next 5 years. I would challenge you to find many other consumer companies that can put up this kind of growth 5 to 10 years after the IPO. Let me round out to the financial picture by just highlighting a few things from the rest of the P&L. First one is, since the IPO, we have grown our gross profit faster than net revenue, 31% CAGR, and we have we've improved our gross margin by almost 3 points. Gross margin, obviously already ahead of the targets where we want to be, the 35% level that I laid out a minute ago. With the growth that we have had, we've also had economies of scale. So we have been able to grow adjusted EBITDA actually at a much faster rate than revenue and gross profit. We've put a 47% CAGR and we have almost doubled our adjusted EBITDA margin. We anticipate that for this year, we'll be at the bottom end of our new target range, still leaving room for further margin improvement over the last -- over the next 5 years. And then the last piece I want to point out is our operating cash flow. Very healthy growth here as well. You see that for the last 4 quarters, operating cash flow has dipped a little bit compared to where we were in 2024. That's simply a reflection of our decision to rebuild our nest run inventory, meaning the eggs that come off the farm. If we have better nest run inventory, ECS can operate more efficiently. And so this was a conscious decision by us to rebuild that inventory. As I just mentioned, gross margin is already at the level where we think we are in the right smart. So we don't see a whole lot of further upside to gross margin, partially because pretty much all of our cost of goods sold is variable. As we grow, our cost of goods sold growth in tandem. And given that we are already at the 35-plus percent level, don't put too much gross margin expansion into your models. Operating expense is a different story. About 60% of our operating expenses are fixed. So over time, we should be able to get economies of scale there. And we have mentioned this before, we need to continue to reinvest in the business. There are capabilities that we need to build out. There are functions that we need to build out. So not all of the economies of scale that we anticipate to get will flow to the bottom line, but there is certainly an opportunity to further expand EBITDA margin over the next 5 years. And then the last piece of the financial summary I want to give is this terrible eye chart. I'm not going to talk about every number here. I just want to highlight a few. The first one is, at the end of Q3, we had $145 million of cash, cash equivalents and securities on the balance sheet. And just importantly, we had no debt on the balance sheet. In fact, we haven't had any debt on the balance sheet since the IPO. When you look at the PP&E line here, you can see the growth that we have had in our assets, that is all capacity investments that we have made without having to go to the markets. This was all self-funded out of operating cash flow, and we have been able to increase our cash balance in the process. And I think that speaks to the return on invested capital that we are driving. This is an asset-light business model. We had almost 20% ROIC so far this year. It's bit of a reduction from last year given the investments that we are now making about our Vital Crossroads. But I think this puts us in the upper echelon in the consumer product space with this kind of return on invested capital. Talking about assets. I just want to remind you what our capital allocation priorities are. Most important priority, obviously, is to keep the business running. We anticipate over the next 12 months, we'll put about $7 million in just operating necessity. The biggest bucket that we have on here is scaling the business. Over the next 12 months, we'll put $140 million into Vital Crossroads and into the accelerator farms that we are building out. And that's our capital spending outlook. There isn't any money earmarked right now to pay dividends or to pay -- to buy back shares. We see so many growth opportunities ahead of us. That is where we want to put our money. So that's a quick rundown of the financials. I know there's a lot of interest in Q&A, but let me just summarize why I think Vital Farms is a great investment. First, it's a differentiated consumer brand that generates really strong consumer loyalty. Kathryn took you through all the work that we are doing to accomplish this. With the marketing that she and her team are doing, we're attracting more households while we are driving buy rate. That's a rare combination. And we win with consumers independent of market dynamics. Those are all the case studies that Pete took us through. To support the demand that we are building, we're scaling our supply chain. Pete talked about the ample availability of farmers and farmland in the U.S. or in the pasture belt, in particular. And with the investments that we are making in Vital Crossroads in Indiana, by 2027, we'll have $2 billion of revenue -- over $2 billion of revenue capacity. That now allows us to have strong relationships with retailers. Pete talked about the virtuous cycle that we have there and the ability to drive distribution while we drive velocity on the shelf. Again, really rare combination to have both at the same time. Underlying all of this is the strong culture and the purpose and the values that we have that Russell talked about, the leadership that is leading this company. And all that translates into an attractive business model, strong financials, very robust performance track record. I wasn't going to go through all these bullet points. They will be in the deck that you'll find on our Investor Relations website. But that really concludes the prepared remarks that we had for this morning. So I want to ask Russell up here to join me in Q&A. We have plenty of time for that.

Thank you, Thilo. [Operator Instructions] Matt?

Matt Smith with Stifel. I think you talked a little bit about targeting a new consumer group going forward. Can you remind us of what the existing consumer group is. I think I have 30 million households in my head. And what the learnings were to look at an expanded consumer group, given the economic conditions we're in today. And I think one of the factors that stood out on the slides was an increasing buy rate across different income demographics, if you can talk about what you're seeing there, both on the high end of the consumer as well as the low end.

Thanks, Matt. I think it's safe to say. I should call out Kathryn to help out with that one.

Thanks, Matt. I think there's three parts of an answer to your question. Let's start with our current group of $34 million, Bridget and Ben. I talked about that being the bulls-eye of where we're focused. About half of our consumers are coming from that group. I feel great about that. That we got a bull's eye. That's not our only group. We appeal to a much broader group. Part two is where will we go? It will be an expanded group of consumers. We're working on that now. I don't have the number for you yet. It will be an expanded group. And what will that group look like? We're learning. So it's really a best practice and certainly something we want to do to go out and talk to consumers what's motivating their purchases, how are they choosing what they choose, what's meaningful for them. And as you point out, a lot of changes around us, a lot happening in our categories. And so we're staying smart. We're staying evolving with the consumer. The great news here is, frankly, if we did nothing, our consumer target would grow because who we are fundamentally what we have always been is where consumers are moving. And so we can grow very naturally. We'll also make some really intentional choices about what that will be. And next year, we'll talk about that group and how we chose them and what's true about them, too.

So Matt, just to reinforce what Kathryn just said, right? This decision to redefine our consumer target consumer. It's not a reaction to economic environment to the consumer potentially being weaker. It's an exercise that we do every 3 to 4 years. As our brand grows, the target consumer that we appeal to really keeps evolving. And so we need to make sure that we study ahead of the consumer so that we capture the consumers as the consumers are evolving, right? When you think about generational change in the U.S., when you think about gen where are we now, Z and millennials now becoming a much bigger power of the consumer environment. That is what Kathryn's work is about. It's not a -- "Oh my God the consumer is weakening." It's the opposite of that. The consumer is evolving and we want to stay ahead of that.

We've got one right here, Scott.

Scott Marks at Jefferies. Question for you is around the competitive dynamic. So there was a chart that I think Pete showed, showing market share relative to price gaps over the past 5 years. And no doubt, your business has been the category leaders. But as we look toward the current year, we saw the price gap continuing to widen a little bit, but the share dipped a little bit. And I know there's a lot of investor questions around competitors pushing into pasture-raised along with some of the price gap dynamics relative to the economic backdrop. So just wondering if you can kind of help us understand what's going on with the competitive dynamic and how you're feeling about positioning relative to those folks?

I'll offer a couple of high-level observations about that slide. And then I'm going to ask Pete to come talk about the competitive dynamic because he's clearly the expert in the room. So first of all, I want to remind everybody that chart was a volume chart, not a dollar chart. So all of that growth in share was volume driven. It wasn't just a benefit of our price gap increasing. . Second thing to keep in mind is, up until just a few months ago, we had a really strong constraint on our supply, and we were really struggling to fill our orders. And so unfortunately, one way that shows up is in our ability to continue growing volume share. We had a real constraint on our ability to ship, and I think you saw that impact in volume share growth flattening. I have no reason to believe that that's a permanent condition nor based on history, do I believe that's a reflection of the price gap. But Pete, do you want to talk a little bit more about the competitive dynamics you're seeing out in the field and what these apparent entrants are... .

Sure. Thank you for the question. I think the -- look, I have a healthy respect for all of our competitors. But I don't have a concern if that makes sense. The reality is we've got competitors that are consistently nipping at our heels and continue to try to take shots at us through price, because that's the weapon that they know, and that's what they try to use. And I think what you've seen is that, that is probably the one weapon that we are resistant to. We're not going to -- our consumers do not react nor do they leave us for price. We stand for something more than price. So if our competitors want to continue to try to encroach on our success utilizing promotions and utilizing price. I think they're fishing in the wrong pond quite honestly. Our approach and the aligned approach that we have with retailers is that, that strategy is a great strategy for the retailer if they want to use those manufacturers to drive traffic, to build a different approach for the category. It's not something that we particularly are concerned by. We're watching. And I'm always concerned about price gaps as I am about absolute price points. I think today, on average, we're probably in that [ $7.99 to $8.99 ] price point, which I think is appropriate given where the market is today. And price gaps, full transparency, 343, what you showed there, probably on the high end of where we should be. But we use that example to just demonstrate the fact that even at the highest point, we're still expanding our share position, and we're resistant and resilient. So we're going to continue to see manufacturers try to take space, try to take share. I think that we've been able to demonstrate that in face -- in the face of that competition, we continue to perform very, very well, and I anticipate that we will continue to perform very, very well. I hope that answers your question.

I would actually add something to that. I think I'm correct in saying that we're not seeing other brands or private label versions of pasture-raised eggs, pull consumers away from our brand. We've carved this brand out of private label 15 years ago. And I think what we are seeing is that where we're seeing growth in other versions of this thing called pasture-raised, which we love because we think it's better for the animals, we're seeing trading up within brands. We're seeing private label pasture-raised offerings, trading consumers up from other versions of our private label product. We're seeing other branded premium pasture-raised eggs, trading consumers of that brand up from lower price point items within that portfolio. We're seeing very little cross-shop between our consumers and consumers of other versions of the commodity egg that we produce.

I think another good example of that, and I'll sit down, is we saw a large national branded competitor introduced a pasture-raised item this year, and they've quickly withdrawn that product from the market. It just hasn't resonated with the brand. And I think that kind of speaks to the stickiness of the brand itself. When you have a brand that resonates with a consumer or stands with -- for something with a consumer and try to take that brand and then ask for it to play as something else. It's very, very difficult. And it hasn't worked for them. And subsequently, that line extension has now exited the market.

Okay. Next question from Jon.

Jon Andersen, William Blair. So I have two questions. I'll just state them both. You talked a lot about some of the innovative ways you're looking to make enhancements to the farmer network and further differentiate the brand, I guess, one was accelerator farms and the other was a greater involvement in pullet production. Are there -- can you talk a little bit about what you've learned so far to the -- on either the time frame you think is associated with implementing some of the learnings from those programs? And if you're able to kind of quantify the benefits, I suppose there could be quality benefits, productivity benefits, cost benefits. But just some more color around that, I think, would be helpful. And then maybe for Thilo, on the long-term outlook, are there -- is there any detail you can provide around maybe cadence of things like gross margin and EBITDA. There are a lot of puts and takes between now and 2030, including the startup of a second facility. What are we calling it Crossroads, yes. And just trying to understand if there's going to be a year where you -- as you're starting something new up or that will impact margins and trying to get a better sense of how that gets kind of parsed out year by year.

Jon, I know you love Pete. We all do. I'm going to steal a little bit of the thunder and give a start to the answer to the first part of your questions, and let Pete chime in with some of the details. So the headline for accelerator farms, which is really something that's near and dear to my heart, we're finally at a scale where we can invest in improving outcomes for all of our farms. But those insights are going to come over a multiyear cycle because we're seeing the outcomes over the course of 1.5 years long flock within a laying house. So some of the insights we expect, we hope to see over time are how do the birds behave differently when you arrange the outdoor environment differently, more doors versus less because we want to encourage more outdoor access. And then when the birds go outside more frequently for longer periods of time, what kind of impact does that have on things like their stress levels, which can then improve when their stress is reduced, improve things like their lay rate, how much they eat, their feed conversion. Stress eating isn't just a human thing. It's a bird thing. And we're all about reducing the stress on the birds by helping them exhibit their natural behaviors with the theory at least, and there is some science behind it, that will actually get better outcomes, not just for the health of the birds, but for the economics of the farm as well. We want to prove that out in an environment that we control. And that's like that's one big example. How does different staffing models, how do different -- showing up on that farm at different times of day and doing different activities both for the care of the birds, but also, say, the preventative maintenance in the barn. How does that affect bird outcomes? There are so many design choices. You heard the farmer in the video say we don't micromanage the farms. That's really important to our independent farms, and we never want to take away that sense of ownership. But with 575 of them, there are some best practices that start to emerge, and we want to be able to more confidently assert some of the things that we think are kind of no regrets choices for them to make. We want to be able to quantify them in our farm. We need at least the first flock to really have some documented results that we can then bring with the courage of our convictions to our -- back to our farmers. The pullet program is one that has been on my sort of wish list probably since 2015 when we first started working with small family farms directly because the pullets have such an impact on their success. A pullet -- we have standards for how we want those pullets to be raised, but there are so many variables in that -- on those pullet farms that can impact the health of those birds, the behaviors of those birds, a small example. We have -- on our accelerator farms, we can now observe it directly. We've had one flock delivered from a farm that's under our span of care, a pullet farm that we organize and that we're working directly with. And we've had two delivered from third-party pullet farms. And what's interesting is that the first one that we got from a Vital Farms managed house or at least a supported house had a much lower incidence of what are called floor eggs. It's nerdy details, but basically, it was much easier to train the birds to find their -- the nesting boxes where we want them to lay their eggs, which improves quality, reduces the labor for the farmer. And it has everything to do with whether they got shown that part of the barn proactively when they were being raised as pullets. It's a huge benefit to the farmer. It doesn't make a difference to the pullet farmer. So our ability to help influence those activities just have such an impact on those small family farms. Those would just be a couple of examples of our motivation here. What are you saying? What are you hoping [indiscernible]

What he said. Yes. No, I think that's exactly right. I think at the end of the day, what we're trying to influence is yield, right? We're trying to help that farmer make sure that, that hen can produce as many eggs per hen housed as possible. And all of this investment is intended to help that farmer understand how we can help them optimize that production. And I'm a little bit closer to the pullet program than I am the accelerator program. But that's exactly right. That pullet program is doing just what Russell said. I mean the learning that we're getting from different equipment, the training of that bird and how they behave in that equipment and what it means then to the lay farmer as they're building new barns and that utilization of Aviary versus Nest Flat, some of that -- the inside baseball type of distinctions that are happening inside the barn gives us such an advantage that we can help consult with that independent farmer as they're thinking through just as that one farmer said, I don't know anything about chickens. So as we can come in and help them from ground zero, this is the best way to run a business, gives us such a great advantage to help them get started and then to be productive moving forward. Ideally, we have a great team, fantastic team. But ideally, what we want to do is stand up independent farmers -- to be independent farmers. I don't want to be their everyday handholding, nor do they want me there every day handholding. That's not what they want. They want us to help them stand up a business and then let them run a business. That's exactly what they want. That's why they're getting into business to be independent business people. And this is all part of that journey. We're going to support them. We're going to equip them. We're going to help them be as smart about this as they can. This is just 2 steps in where we can help them do that.

One thing Peter shared with me is that one of the most frequent bits of feedback we get from our farmers is that our pullets are a point of differentiation. They all want pullets from our farms as soon as they can get them. And we've had some say that's why they joined us was because they hear how high quality those pullets are.

It's kind of funny that we're spending way too much time on this, and I'm sorry, but...

We're excited.

Yes, it is. It's actually kind of funny because you see the excitement I talked about earlier. It's funny because when we first started, most of our farmers just thought, I don't care. I mean I got three options that you've approved your own and two other suppliers. I'll just -- whichever. That's fine. Just send me a pullet. And now they're starting to see the difference. Now they're starting to see the difference in the behavior of the birds and the yield of the birds and the health of the birds, the consistency of that bird and its weight, in its coat, in its feathers, in its walking. So there is a difference. There's no question that there is a difference. And I'm so proud of this team that in 18 months' time that since we started, maybe a little closer to 24 months' time, by the end of 2026, we'll be close to being able to provide just about all of our needs internally. And they've done some fantastic job, and we continue to learn. We're doing a great job.

Margin cadence. I can't give you a concrete answer on that one. I think what I can point out to you is you alluded to setting up a new facility and impact that might have on margin. As I showed on the page, 90% of our cost of goods sold is variable. It's really the expenses for getting the eggs of the farm, putting eggs in the carton, shipping the cartons and so on. Well, shipping is SG&A. But -- so the vast majority of our cost of goods sold is variable. So the investments that we're making in Seymour right now, opening up Seymour will have a little bit of an impact on gross margin as we add the depreciation, but it's going to be negligible. So really, the margin cadence, it comes down to how much of the economies of scale that we're getting in operating expenses. How much of that do we decide to reinvest back into growth and into the business in any 1 year? I don't think there is a straight-line answer for you there. It really will depend year-by-year. Right now, I think we're at a point where if I had to choose, I would choose to reinvest in the business to ensure that we continue to deliver this 25% plus growth that we are talking about, 20% growth over the next 5 years. But not every year, there will be enough opportunity for reinvestment, right? And so I don't try to sound evasive, John, but it will really depend year-by-year what the opportunities are that we have.

Next question is from Brian Holland, D.A. Davidson.

Near-term question and long-term question. First, on the near term, maintaining the EBITDA while bringing the net revenue down for the year. How much, if any, of that is tied to maybe pulling back promo against the ERP disruption? And if indeed, that's -- what's behind that? Have we been able to turn that back on here now with that disruption behind us?

Yes. Promotions in the fourth quarter are running exactly the way we have planned them at the beginning of the quarter. So the -- maintaining the EBITDA guidance, I would call it prudent cost management. There were some things that we pushed into first quarter next year, not promotions, just general spending overall. We're not cutting promotions because of this plan. We've talked about all year that by Q4, we wanted to promote again to convert the brand awareness that Kathryn had built into actual household penetration. We have the supply. We have the production capacity now. So we're not sacrificing the long term just for the short-term benefit. It's just cost management and operating expenses for the most part.

And then looking out to 2030, can you just maybe talk a little bit about the levers that have been built into your long-term outlook to account for any changes in the backdrop versus what we've seen over the last 5 years? I think the market's general perception is that there has been some tailwinds for the business, pull forward and adoption trial, et cetera, maybe on influenza. Obviously, we don't know what that looks like year-to-year. But I think the market bias, generally speaking, has been -- and I think you had a slide here earlier showing that egg supply was increasing off of a trough level. So if we have more egg supply, if price gaps widen, just talk about the levers that you have to maintain that 20% growth algorithm at the margin profile that you're describing.

First, I want to offer -- there was a chart in there, which I think is worth reminding everybody about. And that was the portion of our business that's driven by those repeat and increasingly loyal consumers. The business growth is driven by the existing consumer much more so than the new one. We're constantly adding, but that growth is driven on an outsized basis by maturing consumer relationships. And those exist against the backdrop of high and low prices, plentiful and tight supply. We've had year, after year, after year of disruption. The backdrop has not been consistent. But what has been consistent is the way that a consumer ramps consumption year, after year, after year, there was that chart and the way in which our mix of consumers, it remains very consistent in terms of heavy users versus light, which is a reflection of the way that this brand builds on a consumer relationship irrespective of that backdrop. So let's start there.

In terms of levers?

Yes. Brian, we've had, to Russell's point, right, we have had avian flu disruptions the last several years. This guidance doesn't assume that avian flu will continue into perpetuity. Frankly, I think we want avian flu not to continue because it's better for the birds if they don't get sick. I think that's pretty obvious. The levers that we have, it's really -- it's about everything that you've heard today. It's about we will continue to build the brand. We will continue to scale the supply chain. When avian flu hits, there's always the assumption, oh, yes, Vital Farms benefits because of that. Reality is when avian flu hits, yes, we dial back on promotions because we will be subsidizing existing sales. But when avian flu hits, it's not like we can jump on the volume opportunity. The reality is, given the lead time that we have to increase our egg supply that takes 12 to 18 months. So whatever eggs, additional eggs that I sell today because there's an egg shortage in the countries, those are eggs that I won't be able to sell 9 months from now. The number of eggs I can sell over the next 12 months is a fixed number. And we have to decide how many of those do we sell this month versus next month versus the month after that. And so the algorithm that we put out here is an algorithm that's built on where we see consumer demand going. It's built on what Kathryn talked about, continue to expand our definition of a target consumer. It's built on where we see the distribution and velocity opportunities with retailers.

Okay. Our next question is from Ben.

Ben Klieve with Benchmark Stone. A question around the dynamics here within the fourth quarter. Curious, Thilo, if you can elaborate a bit on kind of the reasoning for that kind of a 6-week lag in retailers getting back to the kind of normal order patterns. Was that a function of those retailers having to kind of work through supply that they source from other providers while you were operating at subnormal levels or something else? And then a follow-up question is, can you confirm that the volume that ordinarily would have gone through your system was just sitting in cold storage and is going to be recognized in 2026. There's no inventory lost in that period.

Yes. So the -- I would have to speculate why it took longer for retail sales to recover relative to our production. Obviously, there is a component of inventory build of consumer shifting temporarily, right? When you have to bake your Thanksgiving pie and you need eggs for that, you're not going to wait for Vital Farms to be on the shelf again the week after Thanksgiving, right? The pie opportunity is gone. And so we might have lost consumers for a week or two. But I think the numbers -- the scanner data numbers also show you those consumers are back now, right? The retail takeaway is now higher than where we were pre-ERP go-live. The growth rates are back to where we wanted them to be. We've lost sales for 6 weeks because at times, we had stock outs and those were sales that we won't be able to recover. But the consumer demand continues to be strong. And now we are back in the situation where we can supply the demand. The eggs you talked about cold storage. The guidance change, it implies that we lost about a week of sales in Q4 compared to what we had planned. Those are eggs that are now sitting in Cold Zone on and those are eggs that we can sell in 2026, and that's part of their growth algorithm for next year.

Okay. Next question from Megan.

Megan Clapp, Morgan Stanley. So more of a long-term question. Kathryn, you talked about how your goal is to expand both household penetration and buy rate, and that's key to getting that $2 billion in revenue. You admitted it yourself a bit that often food brands can perhaps see buy rates compress as penetration broadens to that more occasional user. So can you just maybe anyone who wants to take it kind of walk us through what's structurally different about Vital Farms, where you are in the household penetration and buy rate journey that gives you confidence that you can expand both simultaneously?

I think you got it right. Let's have Kathryn come up and take that one.

Thanks, Megan. Proof is in the data, right? So what I was always taught was it was one or the other that you just had to pick that the way it was taught to me it was impossible to do both. And it feels pretty good to prove that it is totally possible and not just for a moment in time, year, after year, after year. And so my answer to you really is we've been doing it. I see no reason to slow. We're bringing in new households while the loyal households get so much more loyal that the buy rate can keep growing. The traditional thinking is if you bring in a bunch of new people, they only buy one in their first year, that dilutes. We just have so many loyal households and arguably, that just keeps building that the math shifts for us. And I don't see any reason that's slowing down. We're seeing -- we're doing the right things to bring people in. We're seeing it through with the right product experience so they stay. And it doesn't show signs of slowing. I'm confident.

Megan, I would add to that. Kathryn had this page in her section that showed consumer cohorts going back 5 years and how their purchase behavior evolved over 8 quarters, very consistently, whether it was consumer who bought us first in 2020 or consumer who bought us first in ’24, the growth of consumption was very consistent. And so I think that tells you that the consumer that we are acquiring today is still very much the high engagement, really future loyal consumer. We're not at the marginal consumer yet. The work that Kathryn is doing goes back to an earlier question. The work that Kathryn is doing to understand, who is our target consumer, what motivates them, what drives them, what's the connection to the brand that we have. That work -- that allows us to grow household penetration and environment at the same time, right? So there's a lot of consumer insights work behind this to make sure that we're capturing the right consumer.

And what I would add to that, I'm thinking back to that page because that's -- I think that's a really cool page is, think about all the different macro backdrops across those 4 years represented on that slide. We got a slug of trial during the stock-up weeks of 2020. And the people that joined us then had the same likelihood of getting to the same place on average 5 years later as the people who joined us in 2022 or 2023 for some totally different reason. Whether you joined us because we were the only egg on the shelf or whether you joined us because of word of mouth, the pattern is very similar and arguably creates some preloading of that future growth because a lot of the consumers that will drive the next 5 years are already in-house. So I think that's an important one to keep in mind as well. This notion that, well, there's a shortage on the shelf, and so we can just sell a lot more eggs and didn't we get lucky. Thilo said, we don't have a lot of extra eggs sitting around. And Kathryn showed you how the real lever for growth is the ones who have already tried us, not the ones that just came in opportunistically.

Okay. We have a question here.

Joe Feldman from Telsey Advisory Group. I wanted to ask another related question of that because what are those tactics though to kind of drive that repeat? If I've tried the eggs every once in a while, I'll buy 2, 3 times a year. How do you get me to buy 5, 6x? Like what are the marketing tactics you're using, I guess, is what my question is. And then sort of an unrelated question. You didn't talk much about new categories today like butter and other areas. Maybe you could share some thoughts on that.

I'm going to try that repeat to loyalty question because it's one I asked when I first got here, how -- my MBA non-marketing expert head thought, well, all the action, your best customer is your existing customer, we should be focused on driving everybody a heavy user. That's where the action is. And the answer I kept getting back was actually, there's so much opportunity to focus on the top of the funnel. And interestingly, as you saw in that chart, once we get you aware and to try, the journey is actually pretty consistent without a lot of specific focus on pushing you along. There's no loyalty program. There's no frequent buyer card. It's I want you to understand who we are and what we're about, make your own choice to try us out. And then there are all these built-in aspects of the brand and the product that help educate you and bring you in even more tightly. For example, you pick up the carton, there's some learning to be had just on the carton. Kathryn mentioned the traceability that's on the end of that carton. Hey, look at this, this is -- you don't see this every day. I can actually see the farm where the eggs came from. There's a newsletter, which is both humorous and educational and might direct you if you're so inclined to come to our website to learn more. So there are lots of ways in which you can continue down that consumer journey once you've tried us. The real proof is in the eating experience. There's nothing like cracking into our egg compared to the one you tried last time and saying holy smokes. This is different. This is better. That's perhaps the most powerful lever that we've got. So it all adds up, but it's much less about an active effort and more about letting the brand promise come to life for you on that journey once you've tried it. Did I do a decent job? Okay, Kathryn says I did it. Okay. In terms of next category, we get this question occasionally, and I appreciate you asking it. Our mission is to create America's most trusted food company. We very purposely didn't say most trusted egg company, although I think most trusted egg company precedes most trusted food company just given where we are today. And we are in butter. We didn't talk a lot about butter today. It's still a pretty small piece of what we do. And just as with eggs back when it was a relatively small business, there's lots of evolving our approach, especially on the supply side. The demand is there. We've got great butter. Consumers love it. It shows up in a different part of that refrigerator set. But it's actually a little hard to find really great butter that meets our high standards in the U.S. dairy system just because of the way it's structured. We actually had to pivot last year to Ireland to go find enough of the good stuff. And it's -- consumers have really embraced it. The quality is great. But we're still kind of learning a little bit about how to reliably and profitably deliver that high-quality butter to the consumers who love it so much. That's a key part of, I think, demonstrating that, one, we're not just a single category player. That many of the consumers who love our butter, actually, they're not coming in as egg consumers first. In fact, I believe half our butter consumers don't buy our eggs. The butter stands on its own. That said, the reality is that there's so much runway in front of us at an 8% dollar share at retail of eggs, but only a 3% volume share today, right? We're a very small share of eggs and the growth rate ahead of us, that opportunity to get to $2 billion, that's high return to labor, high return to management capacity, high return to capital growth in front of us in those existing categories. And shame on us if we don't really put some more fuel into that fire first before we get too spread apart. But I think there are plenty of opportunities ahead of us beyond eggs.

There's a question from the back of the room.

Eric Des Lauriers with Craig-Hallum. Thanks for having us today. So you mentioned that for the most part, Pete, you're in the doors that you want to be in. Path forward for growth is really velocities, new SKUs and expanded shelf space, a lot of opportunity around expanded shelf space. What are the hurdles there to increasing shelf space? What kind of pushback do you get from retailers? And then given you're sort of towards the high end of the appropriate range on price gaps, how should we think about potential responses if the price of conventional eggs decreases and gaps widen?

Come on up, Pete?

Yes. So Russell mentioned earlier, the barrier, quite honestly, is us. We've been challenged from a supply standpoint when we had capacity. And then when we had supply, we didn't have capacity. For the first time in probably 4 years, 3 or 4 years, we have both supply and capacity. And as Thilo just mentioned, for the past 4, 5 weeks, we've actually started to really see a nice ramp-up in consumption to where we really feel confident in our ability to continue that moving forward. The challenge that we've had with retailers is we've been filling orders in some instances at 50% to 60%, and we've been allocating our orders. So it's very difficult for my sales organization to go to a retailer to say, hey, look at all these great velocities, we really need more space on the shelf. Our retailers immediate response is, I don't disagree with you, but you can't fill what you already have. So now with our ability to fill orders, we have to demonstrate a consistency in our ability to fill orders first and foremost. Once we can do that, then my team has a little bit of a firmer foundation to stand under by which we can now say to them, okay, we've answered your question about the consistency in our ability to fill. Now we can start to talk about the expansion of SKUs that we've all wanted to take advantage of, let's start to put that into motion. So that's number one. Number two, from a price standpoint, you're absolutely right. There is this potential risk in the potential whipsaw if Avian influenza does not materialize to the degree that it has in the past, I suppose there's this risk that the market is flooded with eggs. And if the market gets flooded with eggs, theoretically, we'll have a glut and there'll be a -- in the commodity side of the business. And there'll be $0.99 dozens eggs that's kind of what we talked about before. And I think what you saw here, and that's one of the reasons that we use this example is the brand performs very, very well in light of that dynamic. So the immediate reaction might be we've got to start to take action to become competitive. That is an easy button type of response. Not something that we're inclined to do. The brand does not need to do that. We constantly are monitoring. I don't want you to believe that we're so arrogant that we just believe we'll -- we can price at $8.99 and just leave it be. When I first got here, we were priced at $5.99 a dozen. That's what our price point was for 5 years ago. And we thought at $5.99, weren't sure if we really had much room to move. But as the market has risen, we've continued to rise with it, and consumers have continued to grow, and retailers have been surprised along with that. And we've been able to say consumers will move. Consumers are loyal. They're going to move with the brand, and we've demonstrated that. I believe, as this moves, retailers are going to be reluctant to see us take pricing down because of the role that we play. They don't want us to move down with commodities. Again, it's really important to understand the role that we play. Retailers value what we bring and the consumer that we bring to this category for them.

The other thing I would add to this is we've seen this movie before, coming out of avian influenza 2015 to '16 and then again with a slight resumption to full supply '21 into '22. And you see those hot deals on the commodity eggs. One interesting aspect of this industry, like any commodity industry, those cheap white eggs is that you don't live in the glut for very long. What happens is they just start killing chickens, right? It's not hard to reduce supply. If you're not making your marginal cost, you reduce your supply. That's not an issue we have faced in the recent sort of fluctuations in and out of avian influenza over the last couple of years. But the reality is that there is not a history of enduring ruinous low prices in this industry. The operators are, I think, much too sophisticated to let that last for very long. It's just -- I don't think it's the enduring issue that people are making it out to be.

Another question in the back of the room.

Andrew Strelzik, BMO. A related question to the last one. Can you help us think about or can you frame the SKU opportunity where you are today? You had a metric, I think it was up 50% or 70% over the last 5 years. Where are you today? How does that compare across retail channels and maybe as you think about kind of those incremental SKUs, the receptivity of some of those relative to the base.

If you take out Whole Foods, which is our largest customer, with whom we've been partnering the longest, not unlike those consumer charts, we've added SKUs over the years, and we're now at an average of 9 egg SKUs per door at Whole Foods. That's an outlier. Interestingly, we've grown even in recent years, to about half the dollar value of egg sales at Whole Foods, which is a remarkable achievement. At the IPO, we were about 1/3 of their egg sales, and I'm not sure I would have predicted getting to half. So the upside continues to be there. If you take those out, we're at just under 2 items per door in all the other channels and all the other retailers. And there's some variability there, but it comes out to just under 2. 80-plus percent of our revenue comes from our top 4 SKUs. It's conventional and organic 12 and 18 count, top 4, high-volume, long-run time SKUs, SKUs that are well in our supply chain planning. And so there's a ton of upside simply in continuing to add both space for existing SKUs and to get to those top 4 in more and more and more of those doors over time. So much of our growth is spring loaded with those existing items that are well honed in our supply chain and don't require new product innovation, new portfolio planning. Pete, do you want to add some color to that?

Yes, I was just going to say, I mean, you can see that -- you can see the data in Nielsen, Circana. So -- if you look at average ACV of our top-selling SKUs, you'll see that we're very, very underpenetrated outside of our top 12 count item. And part of that is the reason I just explained. We've been challenged from a supply -- I'll just call it a supply standpoint, be it either having eggs or having capacity. And this is going to be really the first year that we're coming into it knowing that we will have a full year of unconstrained supply. Yes, I'm not -- yes, knock on wood, God forbid, something happens. So I'm incredibly optimistic, incredibly optimistic. Now when you look at Circana and MULO or MULOl+, you're going to get into a lot of noise because that MULO+ is going to start to talk about a universe that is much, much larger. right? They'll start to -- start about drug stores and convenience and channels of business that, quite honestly, we don't play in nor will we ever probably be playing in, at least in the portfolio as it exists today. So if you really think about food, if you think about natural and if you think about mass, specifically Walmart, Target, however you want to describe Meijer and even in Club, to some degree, Club we just have not -- we purposely have not played in Club. We just haven't had the capacity to do so. Those are the spaces that are really a sweet spot for us. And that's where I'd ask you to really think about the upside opportunity of where we want to go.

Okay. Do we have any more questions? Matt, we have a follow-up question.

Matt Smith, Stifel. Maybe Pete and Thilo question for you. As you move out of a period of being capacity constrained and towards certainly a level of incremental capacity in 2026. As you think about the growth in 2026, we've been tethered to projecting volume growth based on farm additions over time. And you have a nice farm count increase that rolls into 2026. Are your expectations for volumes to keep pace with that? Or is there more flexibility in the supply chain as you go forward to adjust the level of eggs coming off of the existing base to help absorb some of the phasing of consumption growth?

Yes. Obviously, the number of farms, the number of chickens that we have that lay eggs, that is the upper limit of how much volume growth we can get. We have the opportunity to store eggs for a certain amount of time. We have mentioned our partners at Cold Zone a few times. That allows us to smooth out peaks and troughs over the course of the year. There is a bit of a seasonality to the business. And we have the opportunity to accelerate or slow down how quickly we renew flocks on the farm, right? When you think about a flock on the farm, they lay eggs for about year and a quarter something like that. And then there's a break in between 2 flocks. The barn gets cleaned out, gets sanitized and new flock comes in. Just by extending or shortening the gap between 2 flocks, we can manage within the year how many eggs we're getting off the farm. Reality is, once the chicken starts laying eggs, they don't stop, right? They lay eggs the next, call it, 60 weeks. So once the chicken start laying, those eggs are coming off the farm, and that's when we want to find a home for them in a carton. But we can influence a little bit how many eggs we get off the farm month by month. But longer term, the farm growth that we have, the hens and the contract, as we call them, that is the leading indicator for where the growth is going.

Another question in the middle of the room here.

Jose Perez from Agave Holdings. I guess a question for Kathryn and Thilo. But on marketing investments specifically. So I think this year, we started providing deep in the notes, just a little more segment reporting. And one of the items there is marketing investments, where it seems that there is a pattern, maybe it's -- we only have 2 years' worth of data, I guess, but they start lower kind of in 1Q and then they kind of step up in 2Q and 3Q. Just wanted to understand a little bit better. Is that a pattern? Or is that simply -- is that how the business works? Or is that simply we have 2 years of data and just happen -- to happen that way? And then related to that, if you could talk about whether -- are those mostly lower funnel performance marketing investments? Or is this really the -- where we're seeing the awareness investment? Or is it a mix?

It's your shot.

Yes, [indiscernible] about marketing. There is a pattern there, Jose. The -- I think in Q1, everybody is so focused on other things that talking a whole lot about how great our eggs are, it's a message that gets lost over the summer and into Q3, and to back-to-school, I think consumers are a bit more receptive to that. As you get into Q4, you start to get drowned out again by all the other food ads around the holidays. And so that's why we'd like to focus the marketing spend more on the middle of the year. I think that I got that right? Okay. On where does the spend go? I think Kathryn laid it out pretty well, right? There is an always-on component to our marketing spend. There are campaigns, TV and social media, we advertise on -- if you play on the New York Times website, Wordle that kind of thing. Our ad can pop up. So that's the always-on part. And then we support that with additional spending around particular events over the course of the year. So you think back third quarter, we have talked about these dog treats that we created. There was a marketing spend that was entirely focused on Q3. It was an opportunity to highlight that a lot of our farmers have dogs on the farm that actually sounds odd, but they are working dogs that protect their chickens. And so we want to highlight that this happens. And so we created this limited edition of dog treats. So those are the more experimental, not always on parts of the marketing spend that happen over the course of the year. And we try to pick the parts of the year where we think consumers are more receptive to those and more open to hearing about those. Marketing spend overall for us, I think last year, we were at about 5.3% of net sales. This year, we've said we would be in a similar range. It might go up a little bit further from here as a percent of net sales. But as the business grows, right, when you have net revenue growth, 25%, 30%, and you keep your marketing spend as a percent of net sales constant, there's a very healthy growth in our marketing budget. And the whole point of the marketing spend is that we drive awareness, that we fill the top of the funnel that Kathryn talked about. So the marketing spend is driving awareness for the brand. It's not even explaining to consumers what is different about pasture-raised, right? I think when you have 30 seconds in a spot, it's really hard to explain all the different decisions that we make. It's simply about making consumers aware that there is a brand out there that does eggs differently. If the consumer really wants to understand all the different details, we have it all on our website, right? We are not trying to hide any of this. I think we are extremely transparent around that. And then we capture the consumer that is now aware of the product and of the brand, we capture the consumer with promotions on the shelf. That is the moment of truth where a consumer makes the actual purchase decision. And having that yellow or orange tag on the shelf, that's a visual disruption that consumer needs to then grab the carton for the first time. And given the capacity supply constraints that we talked about, we have had periods in the last 2, 3 years where for several quarters in a row, we didn't run a whole lot of promotions because we simply didn't have the supply to support it. Now that we are in a much better supply and capacity situation, the plan is to run promotions for the entire year next year and convert this awareness that Kathryn has created, convert into household penetration.

Yes. I would just again, bring us back to the role that marketing plays. It's all about driving awareness, and that's a relatively long lead time translation into sales. So we're at the opposite extreme of, say, a direct-to-consumer model where you're using marketing spend to drive revenue, to drive volume immediately. It's not what we're doing. And that's a great example of why while during this time of having fewer eggs, we pulled back on promotions. We didn't pull back on marketing because marketing isn't driving current revenue. Marketing is driving awareness, which will eventually be translated into trial and then repeat and get the consumers on that journey toward being heavy users. And we never want to go dark there, one because it's super inefficient to turn the lights back on; and two, because we -- our long-term algorithm requires us to continue spreading the word and attracting that next generation of trial in the future.

Any -- we have one more question and a follow-up from Jon.

Another quick 2-parter. So I guess the dollar increase in your sales the past couple of years, you've added, I think, $150 million or so per year. And the forecast going forward calls for closer to $250 million per year to hit your $2 billion target by 2030. And I'm just trying to understand what kind of accelerates there. Is it this average items going from somewhat less than 2 to 4, so 100% increase over the next 5 years versus, I think, what you projected as a 50% increase in items, the prior 5. Because just trying to understand the -- some of the drivers underpinning that acceleration in the dollar add as you look out relative to prior years. And then, Thilo, you mentioned that the '26 sales that you provided this morning isn't guidance. What's the difference? And how much is the margin for error at this point with respect to guidance?

So a couple of thoughts on this question about how you accelerate the dollar volume. First, so much of what we put up in terms of numbers over the last 5 years was driven by choices we made about how quickly to scale the business. Choices we made about striking the right balance between judicious use of growth capital and executing at a really high -- at a high level, adding farms but not so fast that you compromise quality, growing the organization but not so fast you compromise quality. So part of it is we have shifted the sort of the slope of our growth planning. It starts there. We are enabling us to capture more of the growth that was underpinning the business and the category that we simply weren't capturing because of the pace at which we decide to grow. We're better at scaling farms, as Pete showed. Frankly, Pete has helped unlock a lot of wonderful on-farm performance. He's just a very capable general manager in that sense beyond being a great sales leader. So that's one. We're just -- we've chosen to expand at a faster pace. Second thing I'd point to is the base of households on which we're planning that growth. As we've shown, those households are sticky. They grow demand over time. We're working with a bigger base. So those would be 2 kind of high-level observations about why we're confident that, that growth is there. But maybe Thilo can get into some more of the detail.

To put that differently, John, right? Pete talked about the flywheel that we have, right? We got consumer demand in response, retailers expand our shelf space, which creates more awareness, creates more consumer demand and so on. This flywheel has been stuttering in the last 3 years because we didn't have the supply or the capacity to always fully supply it. So Russell is fine, right? We have consciously decided to accelerate our growth for egg supply and processing capacity. So it's fine, we can really start flying now. And so I think that is part of why we are so confident that we can accelerate the dollar addition of revenue per year. On your question about why do we differentiate between the initial outlook versus guidance? Look, we're all creatures of habit. I don't want to create the habit that we provide guidance for next year in December. I thought it would be prudent given how we talk about guidance for this year to put it in the right context. I don't want you to expect that next year in December, we put out guidance for the following year. I want to maintain the pattern of we do guidance on the fourth quarter call. That's why I make that distinction in the semantics.

Any final questions? All right. Just a couple of quick logistical items before I turn it back to Russell to say thank you. We've got -- we're a little ahead of schedule, 12 minutes, I'd say. So we're going to have a quick 12-minute break. Lunch will open at 11:30. We're ready. We're ready for lunch. So if you're hungry, dig in. You've got till 12:30, and then the buses will pick everyone up at 12:30 to go start the tours. All right. So thank you. Russell?

Thanks, Brian. I just want to take a quick second again to thank you sincerely for making the trip. Your time is valuable. Travel isn't so easy, especially this time of year. So thankful we have the opportunity to share this story with you and some of the magic that happens behind the scenes today. I think it really helps bring the story to life, and I'm thankful you could see it today. Thanks again.