Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Flow Beverage Corp.'s third quarter 2022 financial results conference call. I'd like to remind everyone that today's call is being recorded, September 15, 2022. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for research analysts to queue up. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Nicholas Reichenbach, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Flow Beverage Corp. Mr. Reichenbach, please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Flow's third quarter 2022 financial results were released last night. The press release, financial statements, and MD&A are available on SEDAR as well as the company's website investors.flowhydration.com. Before I begin, I'll refer to slide two of the presentation, which contains our caution regarding forward-looking statements. I'm joined on the call today by Trent MacDonald, Flow's newly appointed Chief Financial Officer. I'll start off today's presentation by reviewing recent operational milestones that Flow's team has achieved by increasing distribution, customer acquisition, and customer awareness. I will then introduce three new members of the Flow team before I turn the call over to Trent for a detailed review of our financial results.
Before we open the call to questions, I'll review our new distribution agreements with Primo Water and provide an overview on our activation of the New York Marathon and some other upcoming innovation launches and activations. We have had a very active year to date at Flow. Growth through new doors, innovation, and new distribution channels has been the, our recipe to maintain the number one market share in format carton water. We're able to over-index on the growth compared to the premium and functional water categories. We have successfully launched vitamin infused water over our e-com platform in the United States of America, and we've made our retail launch at Fred Meyer, a division of Kroger's, the largest grocery chain in the United States.
We currently expect vitamin water to be permanent, a permanent SKU in the functional water set to over 200 Fred Meyer locations in 2023. Flow has also launched a new 1-liter flavored SKU of blueberry peach and strawberry rose, two of our top selling flavors in over 1,000 locations. We announced the launch of these SKUs with Sprouts, one of our leading natural retailers in the United States in June, and we've had several new retailers pick up the new SKU as well. We are very pleased with the new results. In Q3, we also launched our first off shelf variety pack with 4 delicious Flow flavors, and we also saw Erewhon Organic Grocery in Southern California add our core SKUs to their shelves.
We have also signed significant distribution agreements that will propel Flow into the food service sector and add new avenues of growth on top of our retail and e-com. We have made significant headway in our food service business, launching across all Norwegian Cruise Line ships and beginning to roll out across 71 luxury hotels in North America with the Accor Group. Turning to slide four. You can see that Flow has now reached over 36,000 points of distribution in North America. Since the second quarter, we have added 800 stores. One notable win was securing over 200 ShopRite grocery locations. ShopRite is a part of the largest supermarket cooperative in the United States, and its stores are located across the northeast coast of the United States in New Jersey, New York State, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland.
We've also added our distribution agreement into the direct to consumer sector with Primo, a leading and global pure play water solutions provider, are not included in our points of distribution. That growth adds to the stores that we've secured in the North American retail channel. On slide five, you can see that we've maintained our leadership in the United States and Canada in the carton water format. We secured the leadership position in the second quarter of 2022 and maintained it throughout the third quarter. We believe we can maintain this leadership position by securing new retail partners, accelerating the uptake of our infused vitamin water products and new product formats, and by staying true to our roots of providing a delicious beverage and functional benefits that is produced in best in class, sustainable way.
Now, I'd like to review our incredible successful sponsorship in the National Bank Open. Recall that last year we introduced a more focused marketing strategy. This new strategy is meant to allocate our resources towards activation and consumer trials, as well as partnerships in sporting events like the National Bank Open, where we became the official still water of the events both in Toronto and Montreal. It was a huge success. Not only was Flow available at every concession stand, allowing for over 160,000 consumers to buy and try Flow water. Our logo, our water were featured predominantly in the stadiums and on international television. If you tuned in to watch Serena Williams play her last match in Toronto, you certainly saw her and other tennis stars hydrating with Flow.
All told, the sponsorship of the National Bank Open generated over 300 million consumer impressions. Boom. It was a very high ROI event for Flow, as it generated hundreds of millions of impressions in a partnership that was very in line with our core strategy. Before I turn it over to our financial results, I would like to welcome a few new members of the Flow team. First, we appointed Trent MacDonald as the Chief Financial Officer of the company in July. Not only does Trent add valuable experience in the capital markets, he also knows how to roll up his sleeves to effect the change with a proven track record and domain expertise in food, drug, and mass retail. We also appointed Andrea Hunt as Interim Head of Marketing.
Andrea has a proven success of building brands profitably and has the experience in food and beverage industry with world-class organizations such as Constellation Brands, Mondelēz, and Kraft. Last, we announced back in July that Michael Samoszewski has been appointed as a part of the board of directors and chairs our GHRC committee. Michael spent most of his career at Coca-Cola, and we expect his intimate knowledge in the beverage industry to be a tremendous value to Flow's strategic direction. Trent, Andrea, Michael, welcome to the Flow family. We look forward to achieving profitable growth for the Flow brand with all of you. With that, I will pass it over to Trent.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for that introduction, Nicholas. I'm proud to be a member of the Flow team and have been a huge fan of both the brand and the company for some time now. In the short time I've been with Flow, I've seen firsthand the commitment to excellence and the opportunity for tremendous growth and value creation. Turning to Flow's financial results. In the third quarter, Flow brand revenue increased 36% over the prior year and 21% on a year-to-date basis. The primary factors driving this growth are new stores, e-commerce growth, and smaller impacts from the new distribution channels, such as food service and contribution from the new product innovations Nicholas mentioned earlier. Flow reached CAD 12.7 million in consolidated revenue in the third quarter and CAD 33.6 million for the year to date.
The growth in Flow brand net revenue has been offset by lower demand for co-packing service from our co-packing partners. We have said before, we are focused on growing the Flow brand profitably as a primary value driver for shareholders. Margins improved in the third quarter as compared to the prior year, principally from improved capacity utilization. We've experienced lower relative contribution from the co-packing business, we are realizing improved margins due to the sales mix with favor, which favors the Flow brand. We continue to make significant headway and have improved EBITDA losses by over CAD 5 million as compared to the prior year, and have also improved adjusted EBITDA to CAD 5.1 million. The improvement is due to improved operational efficiency, a continued focus on cost discipline, and reduced share-based compensation.
Turning to slide nine, we illustrate more detail with respect to growth in net revenues. Looking at growth revenue, the growth as it relates to the Flow brand was fairly broad-based in the third quarter in our three primary segments of U.S. retail, Canadian retail, and e-commerce. In short, we are adding more retail locations and points of distribution, which continues to have a positive impact on the top line. We've also made improvements in trade spend. This is attributable to more discipline, and it relates to trade allocation and improved economics from new distribution partners. Lastly, co-packing remains below prior year levels. As we've said before, Flow is our core business, and we use co-packing opportunistically to improve utilization if it can be done profitably.
Turning to our income statement, we have increased gross margin and gross profit as compared to the third quarter of 2021. The 36% growth in Flow brand net revenue easily offset the reduced co-packing revenue while also carrying higher contribution margins. On a year-to-date basis, we have realized 23% gross margins as compared to 28% last year due to two additional lines that we added in our Virginia facility in Q4 of 2021, which were underutilized in the H1 of this current fiscal year. Looking at operating expenses, we are making a lot of headway.
Sales and marketing is driving most of the decrease in cash operating expenses as we have been very disciplined with trade marketing and we have allocated our resources to more regional market campaigns as opposed to the prior year where we invested in national marketing initiatives in advance of our IPO. We continue to invest in sales and marketing as a percentage of net revenue as we believe this will be the primary driver of growth. Turning to G&A, we have realized price escalation in insurance costs, warehousing, professional fees, and software licenses and support. Our salaries and benefits expenses are also trending lower as we focus on improving operational efficiency and internal automation. With respect to our strategic framework and financial targets, we are maintaining our target to improve EBITDA by 45%-50% for the entire fiscal year.
We have lowered our H2 net revenue target to between 35%-45%, given the net revenue growth we realized in the third quarter of 36%. We believe the new stores and distribution channels we've secured will be big drivers in achieving these growth targets that are well above industry growth rates. Before I pass the call back to Nicholas, I would like to address our cash position. As of July 2022, Flow had over CAD 23 million in the bank, and there are a number of initiatives we are working on to bolster our balance sheet. This includes the possibility of non-dilutive financing options that can unlock value in our fixed assets, and we're also considering a number of alternatives in our operational cost structure to further optimize operations while reducing cash outflows.
We will continue allocating our resources with prudence, focusing on higher ROI activities as we create a foundation for future profitable growth. I will now pass the call back to Nicholas.
Thank you, Trent. A few weeks ago, we announced a distribution agreement with Primo Water. Many of you have probably seen Primo Water dispensers in your offices, and you may also have seen them in your home. Primo operates in 21 countries and generates over $2 billion in revenues last year. On August 23, Flow announced that Flow original alkaline spring water will be made available to over 1.8 million Primo subscribers, customers in the United States. The distribution agreement is a major win for Flow as we get access to a large number of consumers over an established distribution infrastructure. Primo and Flow have shared core principles as they relate to ESG, and we look forward to a long-term partnership with their team. Turning to our upcoming milestones.
We still are very active with our product launches, establishing new distribution channels, and investing in on-strategy activations. As mentioned at the beginning of our presentation, we expect Fred Meyer will roll out our vitamin water in over 200 locations in the coming months, and we also expect to announce significant additional purchase orders from new retailers in the near term, including Flow's vitamin launch with our Canadian retailers. In addition, we continue to roll out our core with Norwegian Cruise Line and Primo, we expect to be on the shelf in over 300 Winn-Dixie locations in the fourth quarter of 2022, and we'll be adding our core SKUs in Erewhon's markets in the coming months. For those that don't know, Erewhon is a highly influential chain of seven premium, independently owned organic grocery retail locations located in California.
R1's customer demographics lines up very well with our current and potential Flow customers, and their values are in line as well with Flow, as Erewhon is also a B Corp certified operator. Before opening up to questions, I'd like to provide you with a preview of the upcoming New York Marathon. The marathon takes place in New York City on November sixth, and we expect this event to be as successful of a sponsorship as the National Bank Open. As a reminder, Flow is the official water partner of the marathon. Flow Water will be available at 17 branded hydration stations across the marathon course and will be in over 800 Flow signs along the course as well. Co-branded Flow water will also be available in thousands of retail locations along the course route.
We expect significant awareness from the event too. With over 50,000 running participants in the marathon, over one million spectators supporting the participants, and international television coverage, we expect Flow will generate billions of impressions from the folks watching the marathon. Just like the National Bank Open, the marathon is a strategic marketing and awareness event that aligns very well with our consumer profile values and will help people live happier and healthier lives. With that being said, I'd like to pass the call over to the operator.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by the number two. Please stand by for your first question. Your first question will come from Martin Landry of Stifel. Please go ahead, sir.
Hi. Good morning, Nick and Trent.
Good morning, Martin.
Morning.
My first question is with regards to your Flow Vitamin-Infused Water launch. I'm just trying to understand a little bit better your retail penetration, and I was wondering, was your strategy to give exclusivity to one retailer at the onset? I'm just trying to understand a little bit why your other retail partners don't list the product yet.
That's a great question, Martin. Kroger, as you know, is a very strategic account for Flow. We are not currently in all divisions. There's 13 different banners over 3,600 locations. Although technically we didn't give Fred Meyer an exclusive on our Vitaminwater, we wanted them to be our launch partner in this so we could go through the initial first production of the product, understand a little bit more about the velocities that we were going to receive, and how the product was going to be received by the consumer. It was a high touch point activation for us that we had POS in all of their locations with our trade marketing experts on the ground activating the brand with the consumers.
We got a lot of data back from that launch, and as I said just briefly, we're very excited about the potential of the Flow vitamin-infused water both in the United States and Canada. With that being said, Q4, you're gonna see Flow vitamin-infused water start to hit the rest of our distribution channels as it gets rolled out over category resets in 2022 and 2023. With that being said, we're also working very hard at getting our Flow vitamin-infused water here in Canada, where we also have a more mature distribution network, and we've already got a lot of our retail listings committed to for 2023.
Okay. You know, when you list your new Vitaminwater, is this an incremental shelf space for you or you got to remove some of your existing products?
That's also a very good question. It's definitely incremental shelf space across the board. I don't think I've heard of one that we've had to lose a SKU. Maybe some optimization done on Flow's part. A general kind of strategy is we're deploying a portfolio brand block at retail where we want all our products listed together so that we get a lot of our branding work done for us on shelf. If you look at operators that are currently selling our products like Collagen Infused Water, we've got listed across all of our different SKUs in the same area, which is the enhanced water section, and we'll continue to do so as a core brand blocking merchandising strategy.
Okay. Just to wrap this discussion on Vitaminwater. If we would have to look at a sales curve, given that you talked about like planogram resets that are usually happening in the spring, what would you advise us in terms of, you know, modeling for sales growth? Is this gonna be more of a calendar 2023 growth for you guys? Or how should we think about that?
Exactly. Martin, as we spoke about earlier in the year, we have not projected any Vitamin-Infused Water revenue in 2022, and that will continue to be our guidance. Very, you know, small amount of revenue. However, when we talk and on our Q4 earnings call, I think we'll be in a really good position to provide more data for you as you analyze how large the Vitamin-Infused Water will be within our portfolio for 2023.
Okay. Switching gears to the Primo agreement.
Yes.
I'm wondering if there's anything you can talk about with regards to the economics of the agreement. You know, is this gonna be margin neutral, margin dilutive or margin accretive versus your current levels?
No, it's absolutely a margin accretive exercise for us. Just like our innovation, some of our premium retail and off retail channels are all margin accretive exercises. You know, our goal is to build our gross margin up every quarter. So doing deals like Primo will help us build our margins up. But I'm actually more excited, Martin, about the potential of getting Flow into the hands of 1.8 million consumers across the US that get direct to consumer or direct to home, is another way of saying it. Deliveries of the Primo product lines, including their jugs, but they also have a lot of other beautiful products that are complementary to the Flow brand.
We're very excited to get our products in the hands of all those consumers in a relatively brand new channel strategy that's called direct to consumer or direct to home, which is run off of their own premium e-com website. I believe it's water.com is the website that houses all of those transactions. We're super excited about that building on our direct consumer strategy with one of the largest players in the world.
When does that start?
It has already started.
Okay.
We're very pleased to have them on as a partner.
Okay. Last question is with regards to your cash balance. I think it was around CAD 23 million at quarter end. I think after the quarter, you reimbursed your debentures. That was a cash out of around CAD 7.5 million. So that brings your cash balance around CAD 15.5 million, if I'm correct. So it's obviously the lowest it's been since you've been public. Just wondering if you could touch a little bit about it. What's your confidence about being able to to find non-dilutive financing options in the near future?
Yeah. This is Trent talking. We're very confident. We've been working at this quite diligently over the past several months. We know that we need to do something to, you know, give investors confidence and to set ourselves up for success and for future growth. As we said before, we are reviewing more than just, you know, non-dilutive financing options to unlock the value of our, you know, our financial assets. We're also looking at our operational cost structure, our SG&A, and other things that we know we want to do some things to optimize it, not only internally so that, you know, you have a better foundation for scale, but also from a cash flow perspective. We've already made some inroads.
As you know, our cash flow used in operations was down slightly in Q3 from the average of Q1 and Q2. We did have much improved EBITDA, which in a normal course would have translated into better operational cash flows, but there were some timing issues around non-cash working capital items. You know, overall, I think we're in a really good position to go forward. In the end, you know, anything we do is gonna make the balance sheet much more flexible for other instruments down the road.
Okay. That's it for me. Thank you.
Thank you, Martin.
Your next question comes from Chip Moore of EF Hutton. Please go ahead, sir.
Morning, thanks. Hey, everybody.
Morning, Chip.
Wondering, maybe we can talk about food service a little bit, the rollout with Norwegian and at the hotels with Accor, maybe a little more color on how that's going, and then prospects for additional penetration in that food service channel.
Yes. Thank you, Chip. I had the honor of launching our Norwegian Cruise Line partnership two weeks ago on one of their new cruise lines called the Prima, sorry. It's one of their new fleets totaling, I believe, 28 ships around the world. This is one of the more premium experiences that they've launched. They also launched the intent and deployment of many more of these ships in the years to come. They're an incredible partner as it relates to their sustainability platform, which is called Sail & Sustain, which makes the Flow product a natural product for their consumers.
What gets me super excited about this partnership being on the actual cruise line was seeing that there was over 3,000 customers on one cruise for, let's say three or four days. This is a mid-size cruise ship. There's much larger ones. Seeing them have a Flow in their room every day as a trial and sampling exercise and having it for sale on the premium beverage subscription that you can get is just such a great experience, not only for the consumers, but for the recycling programs that they do, the way that the package interacts with their current infrastructure. It's a really great partnership.
We're gonna sample out with their help millions of consumers every year, but also from an economic standpoint, this is sold as a premium beverage across all of their premium subscriptions when you buy your ticket, which is a really good complementary brand fit for us. You know, on a much smaller note, seeing Katy Perry and about 3,000 people inside the cruise line all at one time drinking Flow for their launch event was just really a great experience to see the power of this sampling program and getting liquid to lips on such an international brand and cruise line and experience. Do you want? I'll speak to Accor now.
Yeah. Perfect. Thanks.
Yeah. Accor is equally exciting, being the third largest luxury hotel chain in the world. We've now seen it in their premium locations like the Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Sofitel, SLS, 21c, where they're already sampling two units per room per night. Where they're hydrating their customers with premium and sustainability. I see this as being the first of many hotel chains that are gonna convert over into the carton format as their sustainable package of choice, as well as position our product as a premium hydration experience for a guest that's expecting to have more sustainability around their hotel stay, as well as being able to hydrate themselves throughout their adventures in their cities and countries that they're traveling in.
Yeah, absolutely. Makes a lot of sense. Okay.
You mentioned prospects ahead?
What's that?
You want me to talk about the prospects ahead?
Definitely, yeah.
Yeah. Just to answer your third question. As we mentioned before, with the fall of COVID or the COVID experience, and our food service starting to return back to normal, we're starting to see, and the data shows it very clearly that sustainable packaging is going into triple-digit growth over 100%. It's starting to drive the consumer intent to purchase. Where they're experiencing these brands at food service, and that's a highly influential touch point for our consumer acquisition strategy.
We're putting a lot of effort right now and in the future to build out a robust food service platform with the highest level of distribution from companies like US Foods, which is one of our partners, Sysco, which is one of our partners, Gordon Food Service, which is one of our partners, to be able to get this product out to not only hotels, but also quick serve and other like-minded brands and restaurants in salad bars and even going into the active space with food service and cafes and gyms, where we already have successful partnerships that we've announced previously.
We are putting a big effort on this in Q4 and next year to really build this channel out as not only a revenue-driving margin accretive activity, but also as our front line to consumer acquisition. Getting those liquid to lips and getting them to buy our product in the grocery store and online afterwards is one of our chief strategies moving forward.
Yep, absolutely. Just to follow up there, should we think about sort of more under the radar penetration with the Syscos of the world, or could we? Is this something where you could maybe see a partnership with a QSR chain or something like that?
I would say that it's inevitable that we'll be continuing to announce larger scale partnerships within the food service. If you guys have been paying attention or if anyone's been paying attention, our IR and releases in our cadence, as I mentioned first when I rejoined Flow as the CEO, we will be rapidly communicating, and I think we've been doing that almost weekly at this stage, and bi-weekly, and we continue to see that our progression and focus on signing new deals and distribution will continue at that pace.
Great. Okay. Nice job on profitability improvement this quarter. Maybe you can expand a little bit on contribution margins for Flow-branded product. Any way there to help us there think about, you know, utilization near term, co-packing, you know, how that outlook is. Just any insight you can give us into sort of some of the near-term dynamics on the margin front.
Sure. Let me answer that one. Look, the Flow brand of product, where we have most of our trade spend, trade marketing, we've been very diligent in our endeavors to decrease that spend as a percentage of the gross revenue it creates. The team led by our Chief Revenue Officer, Tim Dwyer, has done an amazing job of doing that. Also, you know, e-commerce is where we sell a lot of our Flow brand of product, and it itself carries a much higher margin as a mix, overall. You know, our utilization, capacity utilization in Verona and Aurora, as we have that throughput for Flow brand, it you know, the overhead allocations that go towards each unit of production are lowered as a percent of the gross revenue.
These things are all positive trends and the you know you can tell from what Nick is saying with regards to new distribution partners, new channels of distribution, that we continue to see you know aggressive growth in the Flow brand, and that's gonna consistently allow us to have better margins as we go forward. Without giving any guidance on what we anticipate to see, you know, from a gross margin percentage or sales growth in general, you know, past the fourth quarter, you know, things are looking good and we're very optimistic. As well, you were asking about co-pack. Co-pack has always been opportunistic, you know, as a part of using our capacity. As Flow brand has picked up more and more, it becomes a lesser important strategy overall.
Not that we're moving away from co-pack. I think there's still room for us to continue with some of those partnerships and look for even new partnerships where they are accretive to our top line and of course our path to profitability. But it's not the primary focus of the organization.
Got it. Okay, that's helpful. Just on G&A specifically, I think you called out some escalations in price. I mean, you know, like everybody's seeing, but any more color there and on the outlook for G&A?
Just prior to our last quarter or this quarter results, we did mention that we did a modest price increase. I think it was, I think less than 5% or 10% of that. I don't know the specifics or can't remember the specifics because it was a marginal one. It mainly dealt with maybe the increased cost of logistics shipping in the United States and Canada. Just to remind everybody on the call, Flow is a vertically integrated company, but we also have a vertically integrated partner named Tetra Pak.
They allow us for long-term view on our cost of goods sold around the package and the actual package that we put Flow in, where they're vertically integrated, and they take a very long-term view on cost of goods sold. Historically, over the last 50 years, their costs have been coming down all the time. We don't see any major changes or any major price increases in the future. We've already taken a modest one. Given the current economic position, that would be our position right now.
Okay, thanks.
You were talking about SG&A?
Yeah.
Our operational expenses in SG&A. Yeah, look, that is something I can say, you know, regardless of the trend over the last quarter to two or three quarters, our goal is to optimize cash flow and optimize the operational structure of our organization, both at our facilities and within all of our, you know, functional divisions. You know, we're looking at all of it. You know, our IT ecosystem and what that means for licenses and support agreements, our insurance program, external consultants, whatever it might be. We believe that there's a lot of room to improve our SG&A, not just as a number, specifically, but certainly as a percentage of what we are spending, in relation to the net revenue.
We are putting a lot of emphasis on that in the coming quarter. You know, hopefully we have some more news around things that we're doing that are going to improve cash flow going forward.
Got it. Okay. Sorry, just one last one for me on Primo. Great to see. Great organization. Just curious, is this the whole portfolio that that'll be available, you know, flavored vitamin and collagen, or how should we think about that?
It's our core SKUs. Our non-flavored liter and 500 ml in multi-pack cases. That's where we're gonna put the focus. I imagine that over time we'll be expanding into our innovation.
Got it. All right. Thanks very much.
Excellent. Thanks, Chip.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, research analysts who would like to ask a question may press star one at this time. Your next question will come from Sean McGowan of Roth Capital Partners. Please go ahead, sir.
Hey, guys, how are you? Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, Sean, how are you, sir?
I'm good. How you doing? Nice to use my phone, Trent. Let us start with some follow-ups on the previous questions there on some of the spending lines. Let's start with G&A. You know, I've been listening to you guys talk about reducing the EBITDA burn, and I thought there would be more progress on that line. Was there anything in that line that you know, you would say is kind of unusual or already taken care of so that we would expect to see more progress in the next quarter?
Look, there are a few things for sure as we clean up our, you know, old accounts receivable and some, you know, provisions that we may have taken, some of which are non-cash. You can see that in our cash flow that there non-cash working capital items weren't really in line with our EBITDA improvements because of some of the timing that went with, you know, the payment of payables and other things. Look, inevitably, you know, you're looking at the P&L, and, you know, we aren't satisfied with where we are on SG&A. We believe there's a lot of room for improvement, and I'm telling you right now that we're gonna be making some of those improvements in a very accelerated way.
We want to set ourselves up to be quite clean, going into the next fiscal year, and have everyone be able to see the past profitability which we continue to talk about. There are some things that we're going to do, internally, and we're already working on that very diligently, and aggressively.
Okay. Similarly, on share-based compensation, you know, I would have thought given the price performance that at least it would be in line with, if not maybe a little lower than the second quarter. I know it's greatly improved versus the third quarter of last year. Is there anything there that, you know, is kind of preventing that from being held down?
I mean, that again is a. That's an accounting exercise. It's not truly indicative of all of the sort of share-based compensation that would have been provided to individuals on a new, you know, in a new grant within the quarter. It's the amortization of share-based compensation that had been previously provided to executives and board members and others within the organization and related parties. That is really more of an accounting exercise. You know, we don't have a lot of control over that as quarters go by. What we do have is more control over what happens in our quarters as we, you know, look to what is a fair and reasonable amount of share-based compensation to provide to executives.
Look, to be honest though, we always are going to believe that share-based compensation is a great non-cash way of incenting executives and other to grow shareholder value. That's what this is all about, growing shareholder value. You know, if I can tell you in deciding between giving somebody a bunch of cash compensation versus share-based compensation, I'm gonna go on the share-based compensation all day long because they both hit the P&L, one's non-cash, and aligns people around shareholder value creation, which is a great way to do it, which is why a lot of growth companies like ourselves have share-based compensation as a, you know, over-indexing on their P&L.
Okay. Yeah, I hear you. Thank you. Last question is, maybe for Nick. Can you talk a little bit about velocity? I mean, that's always been one of the chief goals for fueling growth. Can you talk about what kind of velocity you saw in the quarter versus last year?
Yeah. That's a great question, Sean. We saw a bit of a decline in velocity in the natural channel, driven by an overall decline in premium water in retailers, national retailers like Sprouts. The retailers face challenges in the overall premium water category. We saw brands like Evian decline 57% in velocity, Fiji 44%, and our declines were less than 10% in velocity. I don't think it's a concerning decline in our core channel, the natural channel, which is derived by SPINS data.
That pretty much is the decline in the velocity in food, drug, and mass in the United States was only recently contributed to the Dollar General launch, which basically is a new channel. It's a more discount channel in its nature, but it has a lot more stores, so 11,000 stores. Our velocity was about six units per week per store, which is below our average. That kinda dragged it down. However, with that being said, it's been a very successful launch at Dollar General, and we're gonna continue to drive value for their customers, but also drive incremental revenue for Flow.
Although it looked like our velocities may have declined slightly in that channel, it's contributed to more scale, and a different type of channel profile. For those on the call, you know, not all channels have the same velocity. You know, natural grocery has a much larger velocity than even food, drug, and mass, for our product. Gas and convenience has a much lower velocity. We're starting to see, I would see Dollar General as a velocity driver similar to gas and convenience, which is just slightly and certain drug channels. It's nothing to be alarming. We're doing very successful, or have a successful launch in Dollar General, and it's got a lot of revenue in the company, with a lot of stores, 11,000 stores.
Outside of those two things, our velocity maintains its course at our core retailers, and we don't see or foresee any issues with velocity.
Okay. Two follow-ups on those answers. One, in the Dollar General, is the pricing there comparable to, you know, what you'd see at other retailers, or is there some kind of, you know, lower margin profile on that revenue?
I think that you would probably be able to group that into mass similar to Walmart. They have a value consumer, but it's margin. It's a standard margin for us.
Well, they have a value consumer, but they're also picking up some Target defectors.
Yeah.
Concerned about inflation. Back to your comments on the industry. What do you think is going on there in the natural channel? Those are some pretty big declines among your competitors.
The natural channel declines. I would say that, you know, the post-COVID natural channel has been dealing with the declines that they've had during COVID. I think just, you know, an overall comment to probably a lot of their categories are, and this is to the benefit of Flow, you're starting to see their consumer migrate into conventional a lot more post-COVID and continue to do so, as they kinda drive a more value basket from our other retailers like Walmart, Target, and our grocery chains like Publix. Availability and convenience also is driving that as well.
I think it's just probably an overall trend that the consumers are getting products that are in natural grocery stores in conventional items and aisles now, which is a really positive effect for brands like Flow, but overall the health and wellness of the consumer that's actually grocery shopping.
Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Yep. Thanks, Sean McGowan.
Ladies and gentlemen, hosts and speakers, there are no further questions. This will conclude today's conference call. We would like to thank you all for participating, and you may now disconnect your lines.