Deverl Maserang
Analyst · ROTH Capital. Your line is now open
Thank you, Rachel. Good afternoon everyone and thanks for joining us. We hope you and your families are safe and healthy. Scott and I are together in our Farmer Brothers support center and are practicing social distancing with safety in mind. On our call today, I'll discuss our response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how we are managing our business through the crisis. And then, Scott will discuss our third quarter results in detail and provide an update on how we're managing our liquidity and capital during this time. Then we will take your questions. First, on behalf of our team here at Farmer Brothers, I'd like to express our deepest sympathies for those affected by COVID-19. We appreciate the work being done by first responders, healthcare workers and others on the frontlines fighting this global pandemic. I also want to take this opportunity to recognize the efforts of our team members who are ensuring we continue to supply coffee and other products to our customers and consumers. This is a challenging time and we appreciate their dedication. As the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a global pandemic in March and state and local government here in the US began to issue stay-at-home orders and mandate closure of non-essential businesses, we move rapidly to address challenges and adapt out operations to new ways of working. Our response to this crisis has been focused on three priorities; first, protecting the health and safety of our employees and our customers; second, taking actions to preserve liquidity and support the long-term sustainability of our businesses and third, managing our business through this time which is meant supporting some of our customers who have faced unprecedented demand, as well as accelerating strategies that will enable us to quickly take advantage of new sales opportunities. When there is a crisis like COVID-19, the power of our team working together under the absolute pressure that we must do something trumps change, management and culture. We have had to make some tough decisions, but our team has come together as needed. And I believe we will emerge as a stronger company once the country fully reopens and we see our DSD volumes start to return to pre-COVID levels. The safety and health of our Farmer Brothers team members is our top priority. In operating our business through the pandemic, we have followed guidelines issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as state and local health authorities. Our team members working in manufacturing, distribution and other areas that require them to report to work on-site are following enhanced safety guidelines. As appropriate by facility, these guidelines include a combination of facility cleaning, temperature checks, personal protection equipment, social distancing, staggered shifts to reduce the number of associates on-site at any given time, and self-quarantine if an associate or family member is sick. In addition, we implemented remote work for team members able to do so and suspended in-person meetings and visitors to our headquarters in other sites. We've now become very good at video conferences and utilizing technology to communicate to all of our team members across the country. Before I discuss the actions, we're taking to support the long-term sustainability of our business and how we are managing our business through this time, I'd like to touch on our financial results for the third quarter. We ended the quarter with our turnaround strategy in five key initiatives, continuing to show results. Based on the results, we have achieved through January, February and early March, across both DSD and direct ship, we are on track to exceed our expectations and delivered adjusted EBITDA in excess of prior quarters, demonstrating that our key initiatives are working. This quarter would have reflected our best adjusted EBITDA performance since the new leadership team and I took the helm at Farmer Brothers. In mid-March however, COVID-19 pandemic began to significantly impact our DSD sales network, as our customer base had limited their operations or had closed their doors entirely in compliance with various federal state and local government restrictions. As a result, we saw DSD sales volume decline very quickly by the end of March with a single day peak of down 70% compared to pre-pandemic sales run rates. The largest declines were from restaurants, hotels and casino channels, while demands from health care and convenience stores were less impacted. As for our direct ship business, we experienced an increase in sales within our ecommerce and resell grocery channels, along with a favorable customer mix shift during the third quarter. However, our direct ship sales declined in the quarter compared to the prior year period, due to lower coffee volume and impact of coffee prices from cost plus customer. Given the significant decline in sales, we took swift action to reduce expenses and preserve cash in an effort to help us navigate the current environment. As announced at the end of March, we eliminated or reduced all discretionary expense as possible, including marketing, travel and entertainment, supplies of materials. We reduced our workforce by 44% or over 600 positions across the organization, through a combination a furlough program and the elimination of certain roles. We temporarily reduced the base salary of management team members and suspended our 401(k) matching cash contributions. Our executive leadership team members and I have taken a 15% reduction in base salary and the Board will forego its cash compensation for the quarter. In addition, we are closely managing inventory and have reduced capital expenditures. Scott will discuss this in more detail later. On a combined basis, we expect all of our cost savings actions will reduce our monthly expenses by approximately $6.5 million per month, starting in April and beyond. Of course, we will continue to closely monitor our expense structure and our sales levels going forward and make adjustments as needed. At the same time, we are working to preserve cash. We've also taken bold steps to accelerate strategies that will enable us to quickly take advantage of new sales opportunities presented in this process, while positioning Farmer Brothers to emerge as a better and stronger business. We've been able to pivot extremely quickly making decisions and executing in days and weeks that would normally take 12 to 18 months. Clearly, this has been amazing to witness and something I've not seen in my 33 years in business. Importantly, we have accelerated our ecommerce initiative and expanded our grocery direct services via new digital platform. As online and grocery sellers are prospering, we are exploring ways to offer our products to more consumer facing retail methods. We are actively working on systems to allow ecommerce sales both direct from Farmer Brothers and through marketplace sites and we are marketing and messaging more directly to consumers to build this business. We will be enhancing our offering and capabilities with these newly acquired consumers, given the reality of the current and expected post-COVID environments. We are also leveraging our coffee brewing equipment capabilities. We currently operate the largest coffee and tea equipment service business in the country. We continue to improve our service capability and build upon our competitive advantage and we are focused on stepping up capabilities in our branches and service center. We're also planning to test non-branded trucks in order to service equipment for all businesses, regardless of whether they purchase our coffee and allied products. Another area we are focused on is augmenting the Pre-sale and Telcel approach in our DSD business. We have enhanced our business development strategy to build new customers through Pre-sale and to call ahead to establish order needs through Telcel. This new approach allows us for rehiring of a dedicated selling team, early delivery drivers and related warehouse support that we anticipate being a higher selling and less costly structure than today. As a country reopens and as we see sales opportunities, we look forward to bringing back team members who are furloughed or those former positions were eliminated to fill these roles. Further, we are testing ways to serve consumers directly that are giving us insights into potential new sales channels once we are beyond the pandemic. For example, we have established sales capability for branches and route pop-up direct sales to consumers. Through last week, we have generated over 330,000 in sales since we began the project and continue to see sales rise each week, as we have all the models. It is clear that we are tapping into consumers that have never known our brand and are excited to purchase our great selection of quality coffee, tea, spices and other culinary products. In addition to these ways that we have pivoted our business, we're continuing our efforts to execute the key initiatives I've outlined on past earning calls. Let me walk through a couple of our major initiatives. For example, we continue to de-risk Houston by rebalancing volumes across our manufacturing network, with the goal of optimizing our production capability and assets. During the pandemic, we have fully operationalized a new retail packaging line and we'll soon have an additional three lines up and running in DFW with an additional 13 million pounds of packaging capability. We have also utilized the time to begin the installation of an additional roaster and three lines to further enhance the build out of the DFW roasting facility. We've also completed the full analysis of opening of a West Coast distribution facility. As we have previously reported, 40% of all of our customers are located in the Western US and we believe major transportation and distribution savings can be obtained by opening a West Coast distribution facility. We also remain focused on enhancing our demand planning and sales forecasting with the goal of improving our inventory levels and scrap expense. A new branch ordering tool has been developed as a result of the project. These initiatives as discussed before, will allow us to enhance our operational efficiency and cost structure of the business on an ongoing basis. We look forward to telling you more about them and savings we believe can be achieved in the coming quarters. While it is difficult to forecast the future given the uncertainty presented by COVID-19 and we're not in a position to provide guidance, I'd like to provide some color on what we've seen in our business to date in the fourth quarter. As I mentioned, demand deteriorated DSD in March at point that was 70% below pre-COVID level. However, last week we saw improvements for the first time in daily and weekly sales results since the outbreak began. The first few days of this week, we have seen a DSD system sales decline of 59% and 57%, with markets that have just recently opened only experiencing a 50% decline. These are the best numbers we have seen since the peak of the pandemic. We fully expect these numbers to dramatically improve as the country reopens in the coming months. Additionally, direct ship for ecommerce is seven to eight times normal volume with retail grocery achieving four to five times normal volume. We have yet to see the return of normal volumes for convenience stores and quick service restaurants to pre-COVID levels. I look forward to being able to provide updates on our performance and continued progress in our initiatives on future earnings calls. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Scott for a more detailed review of financial results. As you know, Scott joined Farmer Brothers as Chief Financial Officer on March 23. He has hit the ground running as we have addressed the COVID-19 related challenges. We are pleased to have him join Farmer Brothers and bring his financial expertise and knowledge of the food and beverage and retail industries. He is already making strong contribution to our team and business. Scott?