Welcome, everyone, to our 2025 First Quarter Conference Call. With me here today is our CFO, Will Kalutycz. Our presentation today will follow the deck that was posted on our website this morning. You can also access it by clicking on the link of our press release issued this morning. Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to call out that 2025 represents our 25th year of existence as Premium Brands Holdings Corporation. As you know, our CFO, Will Kalutycz and I, were there from the very beginning when our vision was to invest in smaller, more local businesses producing great food with clean and natural ingredients and to help them scale and grow. We began in Western Canada, and as our business model and strategies were proven out, we expanded across Canada and later on into the U.S.
Today, we're a resilient and diversified ecosystem of best-in-class specialty food companies run by passionate entrepreneurs that are focused on growing their footprints in North America and, in some cases, even globally. Although we have had tremendous growth and success in the U.S., we're still in the early innings in this market, and we see many more opportunities to continue to grow organically and by acquisition. As you know, our strategy is to look for white space opportunities driven by identifying enduring and emerging consumer trends and investing in them well before everyone else. We have done this successfully in frozen sandwiches, cooked and raw skewers, dry-cured meats, meat snacks, protein distribution, value-added lobster, and specialty bakery. In each of these growing categories, we have established ourselves as a leading player either in the Canadian or U.S. markets or both, and have scaled them substantially.
Looking forward, we have many more irons in the fire. We're now on slide three, which outlines certain key highlights for the quarter. First quarter revenue came in at CAD 1.68 billion, representing a 14.9% or a CAD 217.4 million increase for the quarter. In general terms, our Canadian specialty food businesses were relatively stable but also showed slight sequential improvement for the quarter. We believe that demand patterns in Canada during the quarter were impacted negatively by a volatile macroeconomic environment caused by tariffs and election noise and related uncertainties, but we saw signs that this sentiment was beginning to subside by the end of the quarter. Our specialty foods' core U.S. growth initiatives outperformed during the quarter, delivering 9.9% organic volume growth driven by sandwich, protein, and specialty bakery groups leveraging newly acquired or newly built capacities.
Including acquisitions, specialty foods' total U.S. sales grew by CAD 176.6 million to CAD 804.4 million for the quarter, representing 68.6% of its total sales. Overall, and despite the recent tariff-related volatility and uncertainty, we remain on plan to achieve or exceed our five-year plan of CAD 10 billion in sales and CAD 1 billion of EBITDA by the end of 2027. Our CFO, Will Kalutycz, will give you more color on the quarter later on in the presentation. We are now on slide four. As you can see, our acquisition pipeline remains very active, and we expect to complete many more transactions in the months and years to come. We are aware that there have been concerns expressed about our relatively high debt levels.
We are, however, very confident that our current capital program has added substantially to our earnings and cash flow capacity and that this will play a major part in addressing our leverage levels. In addition, we're also focused on completing other initiatives that will help reduce our debt levels without materially impacting our growth plans or our overall profitability. We're now on slide five. The AGM deck posted on our website yesterday includes a video of our Cleveland, Tennessee sandwich facility, which is close to completion. When completed later this quarter, it will be a world-class facility featuring best-in-class scale, food safety, and automation for the assembly of sandwiches. The map on slide five shows the locations of our various operations in North America. Our U.S.-based manufacturing footprint continues to grow.
The red dots on the map are facilities that have been constructed, added to, or were acquired in the past couple of years. We're now on slides six to eight. Although our three key U.S. growth initiatives, protein, sandwiches, and bakery, showed growth during the quarter, the star of the show was our bakery group, whose sales volumes grew by 33.6%, driven mainly by the onboarding of two new programs with two key customers. As we have stated in the past, given the nature and size of our U.S. customers, our growth in this market will be lumpy, and our bakery group's substantial growth this quarter is a good example of this. The pictures below show you our state-of-the-art new baking capacity in Canada and the U.S. and some of the amazing new products they're bringing to market.
I will now pass the presentation to our CFO, Will Kalutycz, who will update you on our financial results for the quarter. Will.
Thanks, George. Before I begin, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made on today's call may constitute forward-looking information, and our future results may differ materially from what we discuss. Please refer to our MD&A for the 13 and 52 weeks ended December 28, 2024, as well as other information on our website for a broader description of the risk factors that could affect our performance. Turning to slide ten. As George mentioned earlier, our sales for the quarter were a record CAD 1.68 billion, up CAD 217 million or 14.9% as compared to the first quarter of 2024.
This increase was driven by four factors: acquisitions, which accounted for CAD 76 million of the increase; organic volume growth of CAD 58 million, representing an organic volume growth rate of 4%; CAD 45 million in selling price increases, which were primarily in response to higher beef, chicken, and lobster costs; and a currency translation benefit of CAD 38 million, resulting from year-over-year weakness in the Canadian dollar. Our organic volume growth in the quarter was driven by the continued success of our U.S. market-focused initiatives in protein, sandwiches, and bakery, which generated CAD 58 million in volume growth, representing, as George mentioned earlier, an organic volume growth rate of 9.9%. Our Canadian distribution businesses were also a major contributor, generating CAD 22 million of organic growth, representing a 9% organic volume growth rate. These positives were partially offset by a CAD 23 million volume contraction in our seafood group.
This was largely due to lower lobster sales resulting from demand impacts associated with high selling prices and reduced exports to China caused by the tariff dispute between the U.S. and China. Slide 11 shows a breakdown of our core U.S. growth sales initiatives. As George mentioned, our bakery group generated an amazing 33.6% organic volume growth rate. Our sandwich group returned to high single-digit organic volume growth rates, and our protein group maintained a steady organic volume growth rate of 10%. Turning to slide 12, our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was CAD 136.5 million, representing an increase of CAD 15.5 million or 12.8% as compared to the first quarter of 2024. The major drivers of this improvement were our organic sales volume growth and improved production efficiencies across a number of plants.
These were partially offset by the impact of rising raw material costs, particularly for certain chicken and beef commodities on our protein group, and to a much lesser extent, wage inflation across most of our businesses. Our adjusted EBITDA margin for the quarter fell by 20 basis points to 8.1%, primarily due to two factors. The most significant of these is the impact of rising raw material costs, which reduced our adjusted EBITDA margin by approximately 80 basis points. We are addressing this through selling price increases; however, these can take as long as 90 days or more to be implemented. The second factor is recent acquisitions, which are expected to generate margins that are below our average margins for the next couple of quarters as various sales and operational initiatives are implemented.
Partially offsetting these factors is the benefit of sales leveraging coming from our organic growth and improved plant efficiencies. Turning to slide 13, our adjusted earnings and earnings per share for the quarter were CAD 30.5 million and CAD 0.68 per share, respectively, representing increases of 27.1% and 25.9%, respectively, as compared to the first quarter of 2024. The improvement in our profitability is due to the solid growth in our adjusted EBITDA and lower interest rates, partially offset by higher depreciation, interest, and lease costs associated with the major investments we have been making in new production capacity to support our US market growth initiatives. Turning to slide 14, for the quarter, we spent CAD 66.2 million on capital expenditures, consisting of CAD 38.3 million on major project CapEx, CAD 13.6 million on smaller project CapEx, and CAD 14.3 million on maintenance CapEx.
We define project CapEx as investments that are expected to generate an unlevered after-tax internal rate of return of 15% or greater. All other capital expenditures are classified as maintenance CapEx. Primarily, all of our major project CapEx expenditures in the quarter were on investments to increase the production capacities and, in many cases, operating efficiencies of our protein and sandwich groups' businesses. Looking forward, we expect to spend over the next four quarters another CAD 112 million on these projects. This will bring our total investment since 2022 in production capacity and efficiencies to largely support our protein, sandwich, and bakery groups' US sales initiatives to nearly CAD 1 billion. Correspondingly, this will provide us with approximately CAD 1.7 billion of incremental sales capacity based on our 2024 annual sales of CAD 6.5 billion. Slide 15 shows some of the key metrics we use to assess our financial position.
Our senior debt leverage decreased as compared to the fourth quarter of 2024 from 3.5:1 to 3.4:1 due to a convertible debenture issue we completed in the quarter and the growth in our adjusted EBITDA. These factors were partially offset by continued investment in positioning our businesses for growth, a temporary advance to our Clearwater business, and higher working capital levels. As George mentioned earlier, over the course of 2025, we expect to make solid progress in reducing our debt leverage, driven by the expected growth in our adjusted EBITDA, the sale and leaseback of real property associated with certain recent project CapEx, and ongoing efforts to reduce the amount of inventory held by our businesses. In terms of liquidity, we finished the quarter in a strong position with CAD 624 million in unused credit capacity.
The next and final slide shows a variety of our free cash flow and dividend metrics over the last 10 years. For the quarter, we generated CAD 46.7 million in free cash flow, up 18.5% as compared to the first quarter of 2024. Similarly, our free cash flow per share for the quarter increased by 18% as compared to the first quarter of 2024. These increases largely reflect the early stages of us starting to generate returns on the investments we have been making in new production capacity. In terms of dividends, subsequent to the quarter, we declared a dividend of CAD 0.85 per share for the second quarter of 2025. That concludes our presentation. Please join us on our Q&A conference call later today at 10:30 A.M. Vancouver time, 1:30 P.M. Toronto time. Thank you.