Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Goodfood Q4 and fiscal 2025 earnings call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. As a courtesy to others, we ask that each participant limit themselves to one question and one follow-up. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up for questions. Please note that questions will be taken for financial analysts only. If anyone has any difficulties hearing the conference, please press star followed by zero for the operator assistance at any time. I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded today, November 27, at 8:00 A.M. Eastern Time.
Furthermore, I would like to remind you that today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements about Goodfood's current and future plans, expectations and intentions, results, level of activity, performance, goals or achievements, or other future events or developments. As such, please take a moment to read the disclaimer and forward-looking statements on slide two of the presentation. Please be aware that during the call, presenters will refer to certain metrics and non-IFRS measures. Where possible, these measures are identified and reconciled to the most comparable IFRS measures in our MD&A. Finally, let me remind you that all figures expressed on today's call are in CAD unless otherwise stated. I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today's call, Mr. Neil Cuggy, President and COO. Mr. Cuggy, you may proceed.
Thank you. [Foreign language] Bonjour tout le monde. Bienvenue à l'appel conférence de marché Goodfood pour présenter nos résultats financiers du quatrième trimestre qui se clôt ce 6 septembre. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Goodfood earnings call, in which we will present our results for the fourth quarter ended September 6. Ross Aouameur, our Chief Financial Officer, is with me today. You can find our press release, presentation, and other filings on our website and SEDAR+ , and all figures on this call are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Let's begin with slide three. fiscal 2025 was a challenging year for us and the overall industry. Yet, we continued to demonstrate resilience and delivered positive Adjusted EBITDA for the full year and now 11 consecutive quarters, along with positive adjusted free cash flow.
For fiscal 2025, Adjusted EBITDA was CAD 6 million, representing a 5% margin compared to CAD 9 million or a 6% margin the previous year. While the Adjusted EBITDA is lower year-over-year, in the tough environment faced this year, it underscores the flexibility and resilience of our cost structure and the disciplined execution our teams demonstrated. In fiscal 2025, we prioritized investments that strengthen the overall business and our customers' experience. Beyond the traditional meal kit, we introduced new features to help customers manage their deliveries better and customize their orders more easily, and also introduced new products like our heat-and-knead trays in Quebec. These customer-driven innovations have helped drive record basket sizes, as more members are choosing to build out their orders with a wider variety of meals and grocery add-ons. Our investments in fiscal 2025 also went beyond our platform.
Our acquisition of Genuine Tea is proving to be both growth and margin accretive. The brand is growing sales at over 30% annually while delivering consistent and healthy EBITDA. Genuine Tea's growth, supported by strong secular tailwinds, has helped offset meal kit top-line weakness. Beyond financial performance, it has provided the blueprint for our M&A strategy, acquiring growing cash flow-generating businesses with strong leadership that could benefit from our platform and marketing, human resources, finance, and logistics networks. While we continue to remain prudent on capital allocation, given our limitations, we are looking to accelerate our M&A strategy. With those highlights in mind, I will now turn it over to Ross for a closer look at the financials.
Thank you, Neil. Let's move to slide four to discuss your top-line metrics. Net sales for the fourth quarter were CAD 25 million, down CAD 9 million year-over-year. The year-over-year decline reflects a lower active customer base, 66,000 this quarter versus 101,000 last year. The lower active customers, which are customers who place an order during the quarter, are in part driven by lower order rates, but also result in reduced marketing and incentive-led promotions. Overall, the headwinds in meal kit demand persisted in this quarter and in the last three quarters of fiscal 2025. With that said, net sales per active customer did increase 12% year-over-year to CAD 379 this quarter, driven by higher basket sizes and lower incentives.
This was also the result of our expanded product offering, like heat-and-knead, which we launched in late fiscal 2025, as well as our strategy to drive higher quality cohorts through lower incentive promotions. Overall, our lifetime value curves have moved up as lower incentives bring in better customers and, compounded with higher basket sizes, have improved the economics per customer. We'll now turn to slide five to discuss margins and profitability. Gross profit came in at CAD 10 million in the fourth quarter, with gross margin at 40.3% for the quarter, up 220 basis points from last year. The margin improvement was mainly the result of reduced incentive promotions. Adjusted EBITDA was CAD 0.4 million for the fourth quarter, or 1.7% of sales, relatively flat compared to the CAD 0.5 million or 1.5% of sales last year, despite fixed costs being amortized on a lower order and sales basis.
Our consistent SG&A discipline helped the stability or even minor improvement in margin. As Neil mentioned, this continued discipline in our efforts to bring flexibility to our cost structure has helped achieve this 11th consecutive quarter of positive Adjusted EBITDA. Moving now to slide six, cash flow from operations was a positive CAD 0.3 million this quarter compared to CAD -0.9 million last year. Adjusted free cash flow came in at CAD 1.7 million, a CAD 2.8 million improvement year-over-year, or CAD 1.5 million improvement over Q3. Capital expenditures were CAD 0.2 million, largely related to maintenance and the kitchen relaunch at our Montreal facility. Overall, we generated positive adjusted free cash flow in six of the past eight quarters, reinforcing a more stable financial foundation even as we adjust to current market dynamics driving a lower customer base. Turning to slide seven, which summarizes our key financial metrics this year.
In fiscal 2025, we worked very hard to maintain and, in some instances, improve our profitability core metrics. In the face of sales declining 21%, we were able to bring gross margin to 41.7%, a 50 basis point improvement compared to fiscal 2024, and Adjusted EBITDA margin to 5%, down only 90 basis points, and adjusted free cash flow to CAD 2.2 million, a second year with positive adjusted free cash flow. The results cement our discipline in managing our cost structure and the discipline our teams have displayed over the year. With that, I will now pass it back to Neil to walk through our outlook.
Thank you, Ross. Let's now turn to slide eight. fiscal 2025 had its fair share of obstacles. As we look forward, we can expect a meaningful evolution of the company in the coming months, quarters, and years. In August, we welcomed our new Chairman, Selim Bassoul , and began an operational review focused on product evolution, customer experience, and acquisitions. While the review remains ongoing, its conclusions will focus on ensuring the Goodfood Meal Solutions, both meal kits and heat-and-knead meals, provide customers with the experience and value that stabilizes the top line and brings delicious excitement to our members. Our digital platform also needs to provide the flexibility that enables customers to order our product with limited friction. Beyond Goodfood Meal Solutions, we will also focus on acquisitions to leverage the platform Goodfood built over the past 11 years.
With Genuine Tea as a great case study, we can build a portfolio of businesses that can benefit from the expertise and infrastructure built over the years. This will require continued discipline and prudence in deploying limited capital. In the near term, we do expect to maintain cost structure resilience as we continue to see demand challenges in the meal kit market. This trend is affecting Goodfood and is also present across the competitors around the world. Heat-and-knead is progressing well and nearing CAD 4 million of annualized sales, and Genuine Tea is continuing to grow profitably, helping partially offset meal kit performance. In closing, we have a strong belief that we can maintain capital allocation and cost structure discipline to build shareholder value through internal initiatives like the encouraging heat-and-knead launch and external initiatives like the Genuine Tea acquisition.
With that, I will now turn it over to the operator for the Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star followed by the number two. One moment, please, for your first question. Your first question comes from [[Etienne] Labuschagne] with [Adriandon]. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. First off, in your comments on the operating review, you mentioned a focus on product evolution and a desire to refine your offering. I was wondering if you could please share an example or two on what type of changes you're looking to make on that front.
Hi, Edwin. Thanks for the question. Like we said, I think it's still early days. Selim has been in the business for just under 90 days, I believe, and has spent a lot of time with the management team and myself starting to really understand the levers that the business has while the kind of macro landscape and competitor headwinds still exist. I think at a high level, it continues to be lean into heat-and-knead, focus on convenience, and try to deliver as much value as possible. Things that our team has been executing well over the past couple of years and many quarters. High level, it would be around that. You will disclose more as we come through the next earnings calls.
Okay, got it. Thank you. You mentioned that talking M&A like Genuine Tea is something you're still interested in going forward. Can you please share an update on how's the M&A pipeline looking right now and perhaps just give us a reminder on what type and size of targets you're looking at?
Yeah, thanks, [Etienne]. I think that the pipeline is healthy. I think at the size we're looking at, which Genuine Tea was around CAD 5 million sales, we're probably looking slightly higher up in the sales category, so call it CAD 10 million plus. I think the pipeline is healthy, but the deals do take time in the sense that the businesses tend to be smaller, sometimes a little less structured from an information perspective. I think we've had LOIs and diligence. It doesn't always convert, but I think we're continuing to not only explore but advance some specific situations. We have targets on what we're looking for. The execution is sometimes a little longer at the size we're looking at.
Okay, that's helpful. Maybe a last one from me. Active customers were down to 6,000 this quarter. I was wondering if you could maybe guide us on how active customers should track over the next two quarters. Do you have some sort of visibility on meal kit demand stabilization in North America in the near future, or is it still too early?
Yeah, I think the stabilization across North America isn't quite here yet. That said, I think Q4, as you know, has seasonality embedded in it. It is the summer months where people travel and spend more time outside than necessarily in their kitchen cooking. With that said, yeah, we're pretty realistic in seeing headwinds from a meal kit demand perspective. Hence, one of the pieces of the operating review being how do we bring the value and make sure that the customers see that and what kind of meal solutions, what kind of convenience they're looking for, and then make sure to execute on delivering that. I think over the next few quarters, we are expecting the headwinds not to fully abate, but to definitely be near their peak. With that said, there are all structural challenges to the market that we're fighting through.
Maybe, [Etienne], if I can add to that. I think the other thing that's exciting right now is the heat-and-knead portfolio. We're able to sell as a separate subscription now. If you go to the website and try to sign up, you have our classic meal kit weekly subscription, and then you also have our heat-and-knead subscription. That is actually providing us two different sales options to customers. The heat-and-knead on-sub subscription is growing quite well and makes up a small portion of the CAD 4 million annualized run rate, but a very fast-growing portion. We are able to kind of tackle that market. As we said in the prepared remarks as well, we have been very, very focused on acquiring more profitable customers.
Our 12-month lifetime value or 24-month lifetime value are up substantially over the past couple of years and are tracking really well on a quarter basis.
Okay, that's good color. Thank you for your comments. That's all I had.
Thanks, [Etienne].
I am hearing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn it back to Neil Cuggy for closing remarks.
Merci tout le monde. Thank you for joining us on this call. We look forward to speaking with you again in the near future on our next call. Have a great day.
Thank you, presenters and ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.