Jason Vieth
Analyst · Canaccord. Please proceed
Thanks, Reed. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As usual, I will start today with an overview of our third quarter results and an update on our key strategic initiatives, and then I'll turn it over to Andy Judd, our Chief Commercial Officer, for a deeper dive into sales, products and channels. Then Anya Hamil, our CFO, will cover the third quarter financials in detail, and we'll finish by opening up the call to your questions. This is now my third time providing you with a quarterly update on our business. On my first call as CEO, I was still coming to understand the Laird Superfood brand and business. At that time, I was intently listening to our analysts and investor communities in assessing various options for our path forward. On my second call, I reaffirmed our focus on getting our costs under control and fixing the middle of our P&L. This was the period in which it became clear to me that we were giving away our cash through inefficient marketing spend and weak gross margin and that we were not on a path to achieve scale benefits before we would run out of cash. During that call, I reiterated that a key area of focus for us going forward would be to improve our gross margin. Since that time, our leadership team has been focused on making the pivotal and strategic changes required to stabilize operations and put us on a path to profitability. The scope of the actions necessary to transform Laird Superfood has turned out to be much broader than was expected when I came on board, touching nearly every aspect of the business. Today, I'm pleased to be able to report that we've been making significant progress and I want to take a few minutes to recap and talk about the positive changes underway on this business and why our team is so energized as we look to next year and beyond. On the commercial side, we have been actively reshaping our portfolio, aligning the core focus by channel and discontinuing items that do not fit. We took a nearly 10% price increase on our business across all channels, which just recently rippled into the wholesale channel. Our DTC marketing engine and ecosystem has been completely overhauled, reducing our tax by more than $20 versus the last three quarters' run rate and on pace for further reduction as we go forward. In our DTC business, we removed free shipping and have, in fact, increased the price of our shipping to pass through holiday costs imposed by our carriers. We are actively shifting our business to our most profitable channels and attacking the cost challenges of particular parts of our business, such as our liquid creamers. And we have completed our brand redesign, reformulating nearly 25% of our portfolio to improve taste and/or increase our functional benefits. On the supply chain side, we recently announced that we have made the decision to close our sisters Oregon manufacturing facility. While this was not an easy decision, it is one that will provide a significant lift to our gross margin once we have worked through the transition. We've entered into a partnership with a co-manufacturer to produce the entire line of powder products, replacing everything that was previously made in our own facility. In doing so, we have added new capabilities and flexibility to our business, including the ability to produce single-serve products for the first time. I am also excited to announce that we have just completed an agreement with a third-party logistics provider that will handle all of our distribution and logistics for Laird Superfood. This was the final step in enabling our variable cost supply chain model, which as a small CPG business, will allow us to scale up and down without being burdened by high levels of overhead that have clouded our financial visibility and decision-making in the past. We have also created and tested a new liquid creamer formulation that can be run at scale, which will allow us to transform that from a significantly unprofitable piece of business to a product that we can beneficially expand in the future. And finally, on the people and organization side, we have completely rebuilt our teams, including nearly the entire Executive team, adding decades of experience and expertise in consumer goods and food across all disciplines. As you can see, we have made a lot of progress over the past quarters and expect to complete this turnaround in the middle of 2023, after which Laird Superfood will look like a completely different business. Meanwhile, the demand for healthy and nutritious whole food products like Laird Superfood has never been greater, and we are excited to be putting ourselves into a position to be able to capitalize on these trends. Now, let's talk some of the specifics from our third quarter. During prior calls, we outlined margin improvement as the top initiative for this team, and I'm happy to report that we continue to make headway on cost reduction initiatives during the third quarter, particularly as it relates to consumers in the macro environment. In our online business, we reduced our Q3 DTC marketing spend by nearly 60% versus last year, and these changes are driving lower and more efficient marketing spend and lower customer acquisition costs. We repurposed a portion of that spend to the Amazon platform, driving 27% growth in that business during the quarter. As I mentioned earlier, we also raised our shipping costs during Q3, and we did so without seeing a significant loss of consumer acquisition or conversion. This means that during 2022, we have been able to increase the price of most of our online portfolio by around 10% and to pass on many of the shipping costs that had previously burdened us. The decline in wholesale revenue during the third quarter was largely attributable to the club channel, where we did not repeat a regional rotational program from the prior year. As Andy will share in a moment, we also experienced some unexpected challenges in the grocery channel during Q3, stemming from product moving from distributor warehouses to the retailer shelf. We have largely fixed these issues and are working with our customers to ensure a smoother path from distributor warehouses to their shelves, including examining order patterns and auditing to ensure that the product makes it to the shelf. In the third quarter, gross margin showed solid sequential improvement, reaching 23.4%, a 520 basis point increase versus the second quarter, driven by lower discounts and labor costs. However, on a year-over-year basis, gross margin was down 5.9 points as our highlighted focus on drawing down inventories continued to deleverage our fixed manufacturing costs. But as I mentioned a moment ago, subsequent to the end of Q3, we announced a co-packing partnership that will quickly alleviate these pressures during 2023. This strategic pivot to an outsourced manufacturing model will significantly improve our financial profile by reducing fixed overhead and simplifying our business, enabling us to focus on maximizing our commercial growth potential. This is an important step towards our committed long-term target of 35% gross margin, which in 2023 will also incorporate product and ingredient optimization and harmonization. The new co-packing partnership covers all of our powdered creamers and hydration products, which represent nearly half of our overall product sales mix today. We expect that moving these products to a co-packing model will add between six and eight points to our gross margins, which we expect to realize over the next several quarters as the transition is fully implemented. It is worth noting that we expect to see certain one-time charges in Q4 related to the co-packer transition, specifically impairment of fixed assets, leasehold improvements, and inventories, as well as cash charges for the sisters lease exit and restructuring costs. I'm pleased to be able to share that we have agreed in principle to our exit from the sister's facility, and we're working through those estimates now. The shift to third-party manufacturing will also enable us to be more responsive to our customer demand, while fully aligning our cost structure with the current state of the business. While the operating environment remains very challenging, the changes we are making to our business model are significantly improving the underlying economics and strengthening our competitive position, creating a more experienced and more nimble organization focused on maximizing our most profitable commercial growth opportunities. As we go forward, we will maintain a strict focus on improving our profitability and maintaining our cash position to support our future operations and other opportunities that may emerge. With that, I will hand it over to our Chief Commercial Officer, Andy Judd.