Earnings Labs

Reed's, Inc. (REED)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, May 12, 2016

$3.72

-0.61%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+1.28%

1 Week

-1.54%

1 Month

-36.92%

vs S&P

-37.64%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to Reed's first quarter earnings conference call for the period ending March 31, 2016. My name is Scott and I will be the conference call operator today. Participating in today's call, we have Chris Reed, the CEO and Founder of Reed's Incorporated, Dan Miles, Reed's Chief Financial Officer and Mark Beaton, Reed's Chief Operating Officer. Following management's remarks, they will take your questions. And before we begin today's call, I have a Safe Harbor statement to read to our listeners. I would like to remind our listeners that during this call, management's remarks may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, that our management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. Therefore, the company claims protection of the Safe Harbor for forward-looking statements that are contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ from those discussed today due to such risks, but not limited to risks relating to demand for the company's products, dependence on third-party distributors, changes in the competitive environment, access to capital and other information detailed from time-to-time in the company's filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, any projections as to the company's future performance represent management's estimates as of today, May 11, 2016. Reed's Incorporated assumes no obligations to update these projections in the future as market conditions change. And now I will now turn the call over to Mr. Miles, who will begin with his prepared remarks. Please go ahead.

Dan Miles

Management

Thank you Scott and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for your interest in Reed's Inc. and thank you for joining us today for Reed's Inc. first quarter 2016 earnings call. My name is Daniel Miles, CFO of Reed's Inc. In addition to the press release issued today, we have also filed our 10-Q for the 2016 fiscal year with regulatory agencies. As in the past, I will start with a recap of our results. Then turn over to Chris Reed, the CEO and Founder of Reed's Inc. for more explanation of our results. 2016 results first quarter. The company was fully engaged in regaining the growth of Reed's products. We believe that the company has corrected the supply chain troubles from Q3 2015 as out of stock conditions in Q1 were substantially limited to our candy sales. Gross sales fell by 5%, while net sales at 6.3% over 2015. Reed's branded products grew by 5.3% in 8-ounce servings and 5.6% in gross sales. Other categories were decreased by our customer's slower reinstallation of our full line of offerings on the shelf again. Specifically the Virgil's brand decreased 11% and Kombucha's 17%. Other Reed's branded products declined 31%, candies 30% while private label brands manufactured by Reed's increased 2%. At year-end 2015, the company implemented the beverage industry standard 8-ounce serving metric as our standard for measuring volume. The 8-ounce standard more accurately reflects the wide packaging diversity that Reed's offers. During this call, I will be referring to 8-ounce equivalents when discussing volume unless specifically addressed otherwise. In Q1 2016, gross sales per 8-ounce was unchanged, while net sales decreased 2%, reflecting the fixed costs slotting fees on lower volume. Promotions and allowances for beverage products increased 14% to $774,000 from $679,000 in gross sales from the prior year. Non-beverage…

Chris Reed

Management

Thank you Dan. Welcome and thank you for joining us today at the Reed's Inc. first quarter 2016 results. I am going to try to keep this short because I believe we have already gone pretty long here. So I have got a timer going. Sales disruption of the third quarter, at a time to explain it, we were down to one plant from two plants. That after 24 years of running a co-packing on East Coast with this plant, it was the first time they actually for all of August couldn't produce a case for us and our West Coast plant which is now getting a relatively large revamp, a $5 million revamp, to be able to run three times faster was not up and running. So, we are running our slow line at full pace. So the first thing that happened during that time is that we preferentially produced for the Reed's line. So we didn't completely shut off production for every other SKU, but we produced more Reed's than on a percentage basis, because it was our number one line and our fastest growing line of products. The second preferential treatment was for the Virgil's soda line and the third preferential treatment was for the Kombucha line. The effect of the preferential production was that Reed's products were out of stock for three or four weeks during that period of time. Virgil's was out six to eight weeks and the Kombucha was out for about 12 weeks. Also during that time, we had to stop all promotional activity which hurt momentum and some of our distributors like UNFI slowly allowed our products to come back. Our largest customer UNFI slowly let our products come back in with some of the smaller items in the Virgil's line, for…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question is from Anthony Vendetti from Maxim Group. Please proceed.

Anthony Vendetti

Analyst

Thanks guys. How are you? Just in terms of the plant improvement at the headquarters, did you mentioned that the total cost for these improvements would be $5 million? And then if you could just talk about where you are with the second phase of that? I may have missed that.

Chris Reed

Management

Yes. It's a good question and I don't think I addressed it to the degree that I can now. And I am not sure on the $5 million. I believe equipment was somewhere between $3.5 million and $4 million and soft costs are running somewhere closer to $0.75 million to $1 million. And if anyone else knows better, feel free to chirp in. That's my best understanding. In terms of where I think the utilities associated with the new plant, such as increased steam production, increased electricity, plant air, water, gas, all of that are in the process or finishing the process of being installed. The equipment has been purchased and it's staged around the plant perimeter or in the warehouses that we control around where we are located in Los Angeles. There is a full plan and implementation and I would say that we would have this done in two to three months from now. But one of the more recent issues that have come up is that a number of our private label customers and we tend to do a bunch of third and fourth quarter private label business, have doubled down or tripled down their business for the year. So we are having a stronger private label third and fourth quarter than ever before and it is also the only place we can run it is in LA. So if we can squeeze in a little bit of this, we will try but the fact remains we probably need two two-week periods where we shut the plant down to fully implement the new lined high-speed automated line. So it will probably get pushed back because of orders and business till the end of the year.

Anthony Vendetti

Analyst

Okay. So that's because the orders that you have, you don't want to completely shut it down before then so it will get pushed back a little bit. But everything's been purchased and ready to go and you will stage it according to demand and when you can bring it down at low demand. Is that right?

Chris Reed

Management

Right. So there are efficiencies obviously coming in. But most of it's not from the new plant, it's just Mark Beaton and the management of the existing facilities. But there are some of the packaging line, et cetera that are kind of on the peripheral that won't interrupt the current line that we will be able to implement it and that will have some effect on the efficiencies of the plant here. I think the real, the big boost in production quantities which allows us to stop the transshipment and save $80,000 a month, that won't happen until we can shut the line down and actually implement this. So the big savings will have to wait.

Anthony Vendetti

Analyst

Okay. So $80,000 a month is from the new plant. But the $400,000 that, I don’t know it's Chris, you talked about that or Dan you mentioned that, the $400,000 per quarter in improvements are just from efficiencies that Dan and Mark have put in place prior to these plant improvement, right?

Chris Reed

Management

Right. Yes. And it surprises everyone. But yes, there is new management, new personnel are in there, new contracts with contract laborers and just a lot more efficient general management of the people out there running the products. It's just running a whole lot better.

Anthony Vendetti

Analyst

Okay. And should we expect as these efficiencies start playing out and as the new plant comes on on-stream, the $80,000 a month, how much should we see overall in terms of gross margin improvement on the corporate line?

Chris Reed

Management

I envision and Dan will correct me on it, some of it's freight, which is below the line, but there is approximate in freight from the West Coast facility because we are transshipping 40,000 or 50,000 cases a month to the West Coast. And Dan's analysis, we save about $80,000 a month for freight by getting this plant up and running and running everything the West Coast needs from this plant. They have not put in the efficiencies of running the plant three times as fast with less labor, because it's automated. And they said, well, you know, but we are going to have more equipment, we will have more depreciation and amortization against that. So they are kind of holding that there. But a lot of that is non-cash-ish and I am okay with the actual cash that we are going to be saving off of labor there. So there will be savings beyond the freight in the West Coast, is what I am trying to say. The East Coast is not in sync yet. And what we have done is that we have three facilities making sure that we don't miss another order, but what we do have is a situation where were paying $1 case more than we should be and we know what the contract rates are going for right now. We have a contract we are staring at. We know how to do it. We have to implement it. So we are going to trying to implement that over the next three or four months. And that's a big saving. That's a significant saving somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 cases a month. So between the two of them and it's not all gross profit, I am expecting to save 5% to 6% on expenses. Some of it's going to show up, particularly the toll fee on the East Coast will show up in the gross profit margin and then reduction of freight will show up below the line.

Anthony Vendetti

Analyst

Okay. And then lastly on some of the customers that you may have lost during these interruptions and you said UNFI, most of them have come back slowly. Would you say you have regained at this point, 80% of the customers? Or 90%

Chris Reed

Management

I think fair analysis is that we lost somewhere less than 10% of the customers during that period of time or 10% of the placements during that time and it was severe. But there is a lot of love here. So it's just coming back. And of course, some of lees strong SKUs, like maybe Virgil's Root Beer, when that's back in stock, you are obligated to bring it back. But Black Cherry Cream may not have had customer base and it might have been out for four months or three months and someone found something else to stick on the shelf. So there is less brand pressure to put that back in. But it will help that first time we have been able to since September of last year to run any kind of marketing or promotion with UNFI has been in May. And for the first time, they are going to announce to 60,000 customers, hey, Reed's is fully back in stock. And Virgil's, the Kombucha was hit the hardest because it out the longest. Virgil's Root Beer is already back into growth. So I think that a lot of the supermarkets are more difficult because they have long period scheduling of changes on their aisle. Their planograms come up for review once or twice a year and when you go to Wegmans and say, hey, you know that Kombucha we were doing their, they are like, well, look the next time the review is July. And Kombucha didn't really fully come on till early part of this year after being out practically since August. So it's actually pretty impressive, but we had such a head of steam going into the third quarter, we missed $5 million worth of sales, and that $5 million worth of sales would have put us about 30% that quarter. So, we really pulled a lot of wind out of our sale and I think that -- but we are still looking forward to getting that back. We are doing all the right stuff, some of this might take up to a year to do. I know Harris Teeter dropped us, and you go in there to customers like -- the big supermarket chains don't really have a lot of tolerance for people who can't keep their SKUs in stock, but our ACV, our percentage of stores we are in in large format supermarkets mainstream is still high. I think we are back to where we were with Reed's and we are down 2% or 3% from 23% to 21% or something like that with Virgil. So, there is still reaching out and re-getting that in keeping and getting that relationship reinvigorated. But it's going very well. In the meantime, we have got new customers coming on. So, we expect to get a lot of it back.

Anthony Vendetti

Analyst

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Mitch Pinheiro with Wunderlich Securities. Please proceed.

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

Hi. Good afternoon guys. First, Dan, thanks for putting all that product data, the 8-ounce case volume data. It's very helpful, and to the degree of your detail was even more helpful. So thank you for that. A question about, just sort of following up with some of those other questions. So when I look back, I was a little surprised when we last spoke on the conference call that this quarter was going to be flattish. It turns out it was down 6% with last first quarter. If I go back and look at the six-month period to six months, so fourth quarter plus this quarter compared with the same periods a year ago, you are up about 5% in revenue. And so, is that sort of -- I mean, I realize that you had a tough comp year-over-year, and I realize that maybe you have got this big windfall in the fourth quarter when your sales were up 13%, sort of like getting back your channel fill maybe from being out of stock. Is 5%, is that kind of rate if I look at it six months over six months, and I am seeing what you have given us in the sales of Reed's, and is that like the right type of level mid-single-digit growth for the next quarter or is there anything – How should I --?

Dan Miles

Management

The way I would think about that, Mitch, is that normally the warehouses and distribution companies that we are partnered with have a full warehouse, and there is not a period of time -- it is not a big one-time selling to get them their inventory, they are working inventory. So fourth quarter benefited from a working inventory, restocking on a lot of the items, so it might have been flat per se, if you took, let's say, I don't know what you would say the working inventory is, but if you are selling $3 million, $4 million a month, most of your people are going to have at least a week or two supply. It could have been $1 million or $2 million just to get back into -- not everything was out of stock completely, but so the figure was like $1 million, $1.5 million of sales from that period. So you might have had a flat fourth quarter, and a 5%, 6% down first quarter, so you are running below where you were last year. If you are trying to look forward, you have got to remember that the third quarter was a horrendous thing last year, so we should be in growth over the third quarter in this year for certain. And in the fourth quarter, as I have mentioned, we have had a number of clients double down on their private label for their favorite new private label stock that we have been doing for the last couple of years, and the plant is booked up. We have already laid out every day through the end of November, and it's just complete 100% operation for these customers. So we kind of know we were booking a little bit more than last year there, and we were trending in the third quarter against it. So we expect to be up some, but we also -- this bag-in-a-box, we are moving forward in very -- we are past second base [ph], and I think we are past third base and this is like a $30 million to $35 million gig that throws off a significant amount, so that's also partly what's driving our excitement, but also getting back into that growth mode here again like we were right before the third quarter last year.

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

So in the near term, so UNFI is just starting to promote you, but everybody knows that you are back in stock and feel good about putting it back on the shelf. So are we talking just like modest growth in the second quarter here or I mean like flattish kind of thing?

Dan Miles

Management

Yes. It's really hard to tell what's going to happen in May and June from what UNFI is doing, and all of the reclaiming stuff, but I can't really say. I think, again, we gave our projection that it will be flat for the first quarter and we were down 5%, 6%. If I say we going to have modest growth, I may be off on that. So I would say short-term, it's kind of hard to tell. We thought after the fourth quarter, we were probably not thinking as factoring in as much the results or the effect of restocking the warehouses, but we thought that things have been really gone right back into the swing of things. And so, I would say that the second quarter could be flat. It could be up a little, it could to be down a little bit. We are not certain right now.

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

Okay. And then just your thought process on the private label like delaying, wanting to fill orders for private label. When I look at private label being [indiscernible] in this quarter, less than $0.5 million dollars, and the lowest of your gross profits, why would you want to delay the ability to save $250,000 a quarter, why would you want to delay that for a low-margin private label business? Is there something beyond that? Obviously relationships are going to grow, is there something more than just the dollars here?

Chris Reed

Management

You are making, Dan CFO, so happy with your question. All right. Just a little bit of clarification on that. The East Coast is not a private label thing. It's just an implementation, and we are not slowing it up for private label at all, so most of the cost savings can come from the East Coast. The West Coast plant, there is a lot of relationship with these customers, and the orders had already been agreed to, and then when someone says, I am going to double it, you are right, you could say no because I really want to get that plant onboard, and these savings we are talking about $80,000 a month that we would be saving from doing that, but then there is the best gross profits being generated per month by running private label instead. So let's say those four weeks you give up, you can run 80,000 cases with a gross profit about $4. So it is about $320,000 versus what you would save during that four-month, $320,000. So it's a wash, and given a wash and being a bigger company with better relationships and more business in the future, I will always take more business with an economic wash.

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

Okay. No. That's fair. Just wanted to make sure I understood that. And what sort of a timing of your East Coast, the savings, you know getting the toll charges down, et cetera? Is that something that's going to be phased in, in the back half or how should we look at that?

Chris Reed

Management

We have had our issues with this facility, and this is a facility we went into in 2014 at the end of the year knowing quite well we needed them up and running well before the summer of 2015, seeing that in 2014 we were already maxed out on two plants and even a little short in 2014 too. So, we finally goosed it by putting a $0.5 million into plant improvements there and putting in the conveyor and buying a labeler and scheduling those up. So it was then scheduled for February and then April and then June and hiccupped all the way up to September. And the new COO said, damn it, I am going to bring on a fourth facility. I don't trust these guys. So we finally have worked out things enough to move forward, because we’ve partnered in a different way now. We finally figured out the magic soup and we are going to have a real go at it here over the next couple months. So my answer would be, we expect in the next two or three months to be fully operational and have this place doing some really good stuff for us. But if not, then we will be looking to figure out another way of doing it. The reason I have a lot of confidence that we can save money over what we are currently paying is when I first renegotiated the contract in 2007, 2008, I had three bids that I was working off of, and the current facility had the low bid. And since then they have raised prices significantly, and we have new contracts at the low bid again. But it's just, if it was a real smooth partner, it would be easier. We just can't afford another hiccup. It's more important for us to stay in stock and not have a hiccup, than have a hiccup and save money on some cases. So now we have a backup to the East Coast so that we can run and work through the remaining what we call bugs. But we have a clear vision on it, and we hope to do it and phase it in over two or three or four months-ish.

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

Okay. So in the back half.

Chris Reed

Management

The back half, yes. Right.

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

And then I guess just final question and then actually one -- just a clarification. Dan, you mentioned slotting. You gave a number, I think, in the quarter. I didn't hear what that was or I missed it. Sorry. Did I hear that correctly?

Dan Miles

Management

Yes. We have -- slotting fees are fixed. You pay them one-time. And unfortunately, the sales volume that it was attached to didn't materialize as much as we expected. We do believe that as the sales continues to grow, the slotting fees will drop back into the mix. What happened is, as we picked up a couple of additional distribution houses that require slotting fees. We are going to be looking to minimize those in the future.

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

Yes. Okay. And then I guess finally just on your fountain. Will there be revenue at all this year just from testing in fountain?

Chris Reed

Management

I believe there has to be, and I can tell you my salespeople are out on the West Coast meeting with national retailers there asking for dates and sourcing and buying equipment, so it's kind of moving fast and there is a lot of pressure, particularly since we took it to the Expo West, and now we are putting even more pressure on it by taking it to the National Restaurant Show. So it's a very -- there is no doubt -- I know this is me doing the politician thing, there is no doubt the world needs a new soda fountain product out there. That should just be clear as a bell. Everybody is dying for it. Every new concept restaurant chain is better, natural and more trendy and more foodie and crafty, and just there is no real room for Coke or Pepsi except it costs nothing and they mark it up 10 times, and they are making a fortune of it. So that's the main reason Coke or Pepsi, which show up in a new account, because you just can't live without it. So, there is a desperation for what we are doing out there. And that's why we didn't start bag-in-the-box. Bag-in-the-box came to us. We didn't even have a clue or a thought on it. We didn't believe we could do it with a brewed soda and the natural ingredients, but when someone waves $30 million or $40 million worth of business in front of your face, you go okay, I think we can try this. So there is just this thing will -- it's not like just -- we have already done the worst thing we could have done for ourselves by putting it out in front of 70,000 trade people. Because it's like oh, so I get Reed's and Virgil's and all – and Orange Passion Mango and Hibiscus Grapefruit Sodas and all those cool stuff you develop, Mr. Reed, I get that at 20% of what I have been paying for your stuff Where do I sign. So I am not saying it's a problem, it’s a lot of pressure. And we are just going to heap it on here. So, will we sell bag-in-the-box this year? Absolutely. What will the economic impact be? I have no clue, baby. I don't really go there [ph].

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

Yes. Okay. And that's fair. And what about, so you have so much on your plate including this massive, your efficiency upgrade here in LA, who is going to handle this massive project for you? Are you able to handle that internally? Do you need to hire somebody? I mean, it sounds like you have your hands full as is and you can't mess this one up. This is like your first and only chance? So how do you think about that?

Chris Reed

Management

I don't feel like it's the first and only chance, but I will say I think the evidence of how things are playing at Reed's from an operational standpoint are the four facilities, before the plant came onboard $400,000 a quarter, which is more than we projected we would save bringing the plant on after it was on to the freight savings, just what you are looking at is a new level. Mark Beaton came as the Senior VP of Operations from Dr. Pepper. So right now today, we are in an SQF audit to go to Level 3, which is our third-party independent audit, just a little anecdotal. The description from the guy is, what was it? It wasn't like bedazzled, some crazy adjective he used of blown away. I mean this a guy who was here earlier a month just to go to tell us what things he needed fixed, but just absolutely floored with the transformation of this facility. So behind-the-scenes and the same things happening with Dan Miles, the new CFO. The IT, the software, the infrastructure, all the peripheral to the CFO position, he has just done unbelievable stuff. So I think I kind of lost the train, actual train of your question there. What did you ask about?

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

Do you have the manpower and internal expertise to handle this very important potential development?

Chris Reed

Management

But we have targeted a person, an employee that we will be hiring to liaison with the facility on East Coast, so that we’ve determined we need a person on the street at all times to make this thing run real smooth. We also determined that we need an absolute at all times ready to flip the switch back up while we are saving money for every case that runs through the place, and we are willing as a group to work within those constraints, but I think you are looking at a group here that is showing more capability than we would have imagined, so we are really thrilled with just the level of management that's here. So do I feel comfortable being able to implement these things? Not only do we hire [indiscernible] East Coast is going to be a liaison for the company 24/7 at the facility. This facility here is coming onboard because Mark Beaton has built facilities with this group called Concept to Reality. So this engineering firm has fully vetted the installation, so this isn't Chris Reed buying equipment and installing the first plant, running at 100 bottles a minute. This is a fully automated, fully vetted, come visit the plant, that is what I would say to you, Mitch, here in Southern California. It's just a beauty right now. It's really at another level.

Mitch Pinheiro

Analyst

Okay. All right. Well, listen thank you for taking the questions. Much appreciated.

Chris Reed

Management

Sure.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from Kevin Dede with Rodman. Please proceed.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

Hi Chris, Dan. Thanks for taking the question. Listen, back to sort of what Mitch was alluding to, would the decision to hold off on the plant upgrade in LA, can you just give us sort of a bird's eye view of your floor plan and whether or not you think that push jeopardizes the opportunity in bag-in-the-box?

Chris Reed

Management

Wow, that's an interesting questions. Bag-in-the-box, we currently produce around 30,000 cases a week in LA, which is about 60,000 gallons of finished goods. This particular bag-in-the-box project that we are bidding comes on next year and is running somewhere around 40,000 gallons a week of concentrate. So in terms of volume of liquids, it's pretty simple. The equipment is a small footprint and the bag-in-the-box filler is in a line of packaging line. The whole thing is semi-automatic that can run significantly beyond what we will need to for this client. It is about a $0.25 million. So it's a small footprint, relatively easy to do. I think we have most of the peripheral auxiliary equipment we need to do it. I have been doing the R&D around this. This has been very dear to my heart, so Mark Beaton is kind of running the revamp here, and I am kind of running R&D in bag-in-the-box. So I think that when I gave up the COO position to Mark, I put it in good hands and things are moving really, really well there. But that freed me up to do a little bit of what I consider the biggest opportunities for the company right now, moving into this whole new arena.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

Okay. I guess the takeaway is that, yes number one, the production for bag-in-the-box will be conducted there in the brewery in LA, number two you are not concerned that you won't have the floor space to meet production demands?

Chris Reed

Management

Right now, the current line is in about 3000 square feet and we have expanded the new line to 13,000 square feet, but it's not a big deal. God. I tell you what. Getting your product into bottles, getting it labeled, getting it pasteurized, carbonated, all that stuff and putting it into boxes, palletized, I mean that is a whole lot of work, and putting your syrup together and batching this up is just -- it's about one-tenth of the effort of a fully bottled packaged product, so it's a cakewalk for operations relatively speaking.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

Yes. It just seemed to me that you might need more space to brew, right, given the amount of volume?

Chris Reed

Management

It is. If you are talking about 40,000 gallons a week, you are talking about an hour per batch at a thousand gallon tank sitting there, yes, just in filling, having a filler, you have got three people running a square foot somewhere around the 20 x 30 space in the plant, 600 square feet or less and you are filling $30 million plus worth of business out of that 600 square feet. I think it's some of the best square footage you will ever spend. But it's very simple. It's not what's going to be the barrier to entry to that. The barrier to entry will be brewing up concentrates that are able to go into these bags and the flavors we have done and the development and not doing it with chemicals. That's where the barrier to entry on this baby will be, but we don't see this as an operational challenge, but we do want to control it 100% for at least the first six months. There are people who do this for a living. But we are not going to let anyone touch it. I will personally be involved. But there will be a high level of, practically a sea level, person overseeing this to make sure that even though it's a relatively simple thing, it's a very big deal and we don't want any hiccups of any kind. And quite frankly, the client is asking for redundancy. So while LA will be the place it's all being made. I think probably you are right, within a month of the West Coast plant, we will need to have the East Coast facility, at least a backup facility, ready to rock and roll on the drop of a hat in case there is an earthquake or anything. So this is too big a deal to leave it to non-redundancy.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

Fair enough. You talked to the rebound and promo spending at UNFI. Can you speak to that, I guess, across to your full customer base? Do you see that turn back full breadth and could you specifically speak to perhaps what you have done in April versus say March?

Chris Reed

Management

Yes. So getting back into, we have stopped all promotions effectively everywhere for a long period of time, and we were quite frankly -- the second you say, okay we have got all of our promotional, we are able to promote again, and we were in some way back in stock on Virgil's by October, Reed's maybe late September-ish to October, and then over to through the end of the year and the beginning of this year, we started getting fully in stock on stuff. Generally, every one of these people, everyone of these distributors that we work with were three or four months out on any kind of promotion, because they are like, okay, fine, so you are ready to promote, it's January, good I can give you April, I can give you May. In the case of UNFI, I think yes, February that finally bought on – they went from seven or eight of our SKUs back to the 20 SKUs and they started bringing them on and they started talking to us and letting us to get back into a promotional thing. And now, we have got big promotion on Stronger starting up and reintroduction promotions going on at the distributorships, and I think the second quarter right now is running flat to slightly below last year, but we kind of see that the promotions are kicking in and kind of hoping for a pretty significant end of May and hopefully June will be a lot healthier with all the reclaiming of stuff going on.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

I know that there was some thinking about repacking Kombucha line and I was kind of wondering where you were with that, and whether or not that's still something you consider and whether or not that sort of factors into promoting that line again here coming off of this downturn?

Chris Reed

Management

Well, you know, my sales manager loves you for that comment. So there is a big debate about the packaging on it. Now the new line is able to put the label on. I designed a bottle, that’s a custom bottle that's a first unique bottle package, and it has kind of a concave side which makes it extremely challenging to put a label on. So, Avery developed a special label that could be bent into that reverse curve, and the new machines we are buying can do that. So it will look a lot better than it has, but the problem is the product looks fantastic out in sunlight out in the street, but it looks kind of in a poorly lit supermarket shelf, it can get pretty dark and kind of get lost there. So there is somewhat of a big debate on a relaunch that would include a repackaging. We surely have the capability we have been producing Kombucha for private label customers like, I don't know if we have announced who it is, so I won't say. So we have a different bottle. It's more traditional Kombucha edition. There has been a push here to do it, so you’ve just pushed it a little bit more.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

Well, don't take me wrong, Chris. I mean think I appreciate the uniqueness of the original bottle. I just know that there were some issues with the label. And I think you solved that, maybe you solved some of the point-of-sale attractiveness.

Chris Reed

Management

Right. We still make the best Kombucha on the market. And Kombucha is still a very fast moving category, but I will say that Kombucha, there has been a lot of funding of Kombucha companies for first beverage, put a bunch of money to help aid Kombucha, but you taste these things side-by-side, Reed's just blows away the other Kombucha's out there in terms of flavor. And you hear rumors, I know Hain Celestial, I think they are putting their high HPP juice, they are going to put out a Kombucha line on that. They have a Celestial Seasonings Kombucha that hadn't done very well for them over a bunch of years. But there is a lot more attention to that category, and yet we are not walking away from it. I think though we may end up doing what you are asking about, but there is still a long runway for us to play with it. We have a lot of confidence in the customer, loving what's the best. So, ultimately that wins new customers and that's what we have seen over all the years we have been in business.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

Okay. So you also mentioned a couple of times, Chris, the 5% to 6% decline in costs and I am just kind of wondering from which base you are referring?

Chris Reed

Management

All right. Let's say you are running about 80,000 a month off of the West Coast, and let's put it at 200,000 on the East Coast or maybe 150,000, a dollar a case on 150,000 to 200,000 cases, you are running roughly $0.25 million a month or $3 million a year. I am going to pull out my calculator here and you divide that by $50 million, so that would be 3/50 is about 6%. So we have talking about 5% to 6% improvement by bringing these facilities fully onboard.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

Okay. So when we look at the June quarter and obviously you’re not going to be all the way there yet, would you compare that -- yes, I am sorry, go ahead.

Chris Reed

Management

We are not going to be there much at all. To be honest with you, the surprise and wonderful significant increase of private label in the fourth quarter has eaten up and we have plotted out every date through the end of November, and it doesn't look possible for us to do anything but run almost full out. I think we have slotted six days a week and we are arguing about the seventh right now from July 1 all the way to November 30 so that it is going to preclude us from doing the benefit on the West Coast, but the East Coast benefit can be implemented as fast as we can move in theory, and probably it will happen over two to four months. At least, we are going to do our damnedest to that. How's that? Because we are motivated. That's probably the bigger part of the cash savings that are open or opportunities for us. And they are not just pie in the sky, we think we believe. It's like negotiated contracts.

Kevin Dede

Analyst

Great. Okay. Fair enough. Thanks for that. I also wanted to extend my thanks Dan for that schedule in the 10-Q. But my question regarding it is, granted we have a nice comparison for March-to-March, what about the balance of the three quarters of 2015? Would you expect to just offer those as you report those quarters or is there a chance you might be able to offer that data prior to that?

Dan Miles

Management

That's a good request. I put it together with the sales manager here and we looked at it from the perspective of what information should be included and things like that. I thought for quarter-to-quarter would be a good view. Annually, I think if you go back to the 10-K, it's in there, but going forward, I was planning to do each Q as they came up. I believe in the next quarter, I will be doing a cumulative year-to-date, which would be day one through the end of the second quarter, but I will also break out the second quarter of itself as well, and with the same comparison and same timeframes for the prior year. It really does help to know it and I am looking at that as in terms of 8-ounce servings, because we have so many different packages. The problems that you will get into next as we get to the Q3 is the interruption in the sales activity, and it will be interesting to see how the mix of what was actually produced and sold, how it plays against the actual margins of those items, so yes, I will do it for each quarter and I will accumulate it moving forward as well.

Chris Reed

Management

Guys, can I just say, we are 40 minutes, 45 minutes into the questions. I don't want to torture the people who are following us. Let's take other question, we are available, you can reach out to us through our IR site, and I would like to at this point close down the questions for sanity sake unless you really have a burning one, Kevin, give us a call and we would be happy to go through stuff with anyone. So I want to thank everyone for their time today in following the company, and we are still live and kicking and extremely enthusiastic and hoping to be as disruptive as possible in the beverage industry and in the upcoming years. Thank you very much for your time.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for participation and ask that you please disconnect your line.