Hi everyone. Your hosts today are Ghassan Halazon, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and myself, Kyle Burt-Gerrans, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I am required to provide the following statement respecting forward-looking information, which is made on behalf of EMERGE Commerce and all of its representatives on this call. Certain statements made on this call will contain forward-looking information. These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the use of words such as intend, believe, could, expect, estimate, forecast, may, and other words of similar meaning. This forward-looking information is based on our opinions, estimates, and assumptions in light of our experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions, and expected future developments, as well as other factors that we currently believe are appropriate and reasonable in the circumstances. Actual results could differ materially from a conclusion, forecast, expectation, belief, or projection in the forward-looking information.
Certain material factors and assumptions were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection as reflected in the forward-looking information. We caution investors not to rely on the forward-looking information, additional information about the material factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the conclusion, forecast, or projection in the forward-looking information, and material factors or assumptions that were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection as reflected in the forward-looking information are considered in EMERGE Commerce's filings with Canadian provincial securities regulators. During today's call, all figures are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. I'd now like to turn it over to Ghassan Halazon.
Thank you very much, Kyle. Great to be with you, everyone. It's been a little while since we did our last webcast. As many of you know, we've been really heads down over the last year, year and a half, zoning in on restructuring the company, restructuring our debt, paying it down. And now that we're ready to get going on growth and in the business again and really focusing in on optimizing our brands, we're really excited to come out here, catch up with a lot of familiar faces but also quite a few fresh faces. So this is exciting to get back and do what we do best, which is communicate with our investors, build value, and really start focusing, again, inwards on the business. With that, I'm going to jump into the corporate update presentation, and then we'll take Q&A on the back end from everyone.
There are some features here, as you can all see, where you can submit your questions. I'll try to get to as many as possible. Okay, so jumping in, I just wanted to first start off level setting, kind of where the business is at in the now after some of the news we've announced. We will be covering some of our recent updates, but I wanted to sort of just start us off for some of the folks that haven't been following our journey and our story to this point, and also for some folks that haven't watched us in a little while with everything going on in the markets. So firstly, just sort of on a baseline level, we are, as of today, pretty much a grocery and golf e-commerce brand portfolio across Canada and the U.S.
We're based here in Toronto, but we have businesses and operations across the country and in select regions in the U.S. as of now. So the combined portfolio, as of today, processes north of CAD 30 million in gross merchandise sales, or GMS for short, as we call it. That's sort of the transactional value that our consumers, our members, pay on our platforms. Obviously, depending on different models, we take either a cut under our marketplace model, we take a commission, essentially, or under subscription. We count whatever we sell as revenue because we are a Merchant of Record. So today, actually, as sort of the streamlined view, we have about 50 employees. That is inclusive of part-time folks as well as consultants in the company.
Our overhead, our full-time sort of staff overhead, is probably in the 40 range now, even 35-40 range if you remove some part-timers. So that is a significantly tighter team. A large part of those reductions have either taken place through recent sale of assets, as we've mentioned, to pay down debt, but also because we've streamlined our HQ operation, given we have a much more focused business and less need for additional team members to service these brands. So that's also been a positive on the HQ overhead side of things. We'll talk about that shortly. Our four brands, two verticals across Canada and the U.S., we'll be talking in detail about a few of sort of our key brands from here. So starting off with our largest business by revenue and profit going forward, that would be truLOCAL, T-R-U-L-O-C-A-L.ca.
A bit of a primer for those of you who haven't really zoned in on this business. It is worth your while, certainly worth our while, to spend more and more time on this opportunity, and you'll hopefully see why by the end of this presentation. Just at a high level, for those of you who have not tried truLOCAL, it is the market leader here in Canada for premium meat subscription delivery. Basically, what we do is we connect a healthy, digital-savvy audience to local farmers and suppliers for things like grass-fed beef, organic chicken, seafood, and even bacon. You get your meat delivery once a month or so to your doorsteps, delivered in dry ice, in a box, curated by the team with our facilities across Ontario, BC, Alberta, shipping nationwide.
Certainly, I encourage those of you who have not tried it, who would like to, to reach out to me. We're happy to give sort of a primer on the business, support you in your first purchase if this is something you haven't tried. We strongly encourage you to do, especially if you want to better understand kind of our largest revenue business. I think it's worth experiencing it firsthand and seeing what the amazing reviews are all about. We have a terrific, loyal community here in the business, and the reviews speak for themselves. Check out our reviews on Google, check out our overall ratings online. You will be very impressed as we are continuing to be with the community that this business has built, this foundational member community that really thrives and tremendous word-of-mouth impacts that we're seeing overall and continue to see.
But if we zone in on the mechanics of the business and really what gets me going and what gets me excited about this opportunity is the terrific unit economics. A lot of times in e-commerce and in retail at large, margins are difficult. Repeat business is tricky. Not so much the case at truLOCAL, thankfully. We have a tremendous sort of what we look at as a tremendously favorable customer lifetime value, or CLTV to CAC ratio, Customer Acquisition cost, that is. And if you look at the right-hand side with our KPI summary over here, which we're sharing in more detail than we have before, you'll notice that our customer lifetime value is north of CAD 1,700, implying basically that the average member ends up ordering eight boxes at an average order value of CAD 220.
Why we say this is favorable from a CLTV to CAC ratio is you look at the CAC, we're kind of averaging in that under CAD 150 bucks, right? And so what that means is if you apply a gross margin in the low- to mid-30s, which is what we see in this business, really, it only takes us about two boxes to break even when we're buying these customers, but the average customer is sticking around for at least eight boxes, right? That is a very powerful CLTV to CAC ratio in our space. And we've looked at a lot of e-commerce companies and look at our ratios as evolving and really best in class from that perspective here at truLOCAL, 90% repeat customers. We've done an NPS score a little while ago that was, again, best in class from what we could see.
We're going to be sharing more of that as we go. You can expect to hear more specifically about this truLOCAL opportunity, which we view as a major strategic opportunity of growth for EMERGE Commerce. We've been, in many ways, looking to our counterparts in the U.S. There's a company called ButcherBox, for those of you that aren't familiar, butcherbox.com in the U.S., which is actually quite public these days, although they're a private company. They've been quite, quite public about their terrific success in this particular segment, in the meat subscription space. This is a business with between $500-$600 million in annual revenue in the U.S. alone. They have not made their way outside of the U.S. We know them quite well. We've learned quite a bit about how they think about the business.
We really sort of, in a way, opened our eyes to the possibilities of what truLOCAL can be here for Canada and really sort of even beyond our borders over time. We really think this is a strategic opportunity that deserves a lot more attention. Thankfully, with our streamlined approach, it's starting to get that attention, not only from the truLOCAL team, but from myself personally, as well as the EMERGE Commerce HQ team, spending a tremendous amount of time on the data, on the analytics, organizing our various opportunities with truLOCAL. Carnivore Club is our smaller sort of little brother to truLOCAL or little sister, if you will. It is an artisanal cured meat subscription business. We've actually taken out the fat out of that business and really cut even what I would call loss-making revenue and really zoned in on making it break-even/profitable ASAP.
It's not a big business, but where it gets interesting is how we can optimize it for synergies with truLOCAL, how we can build a second brand in the meat space and potentially extend or expand what we're doing with it right now. We think these are all great possibilities, and that's what you get with more focus and with a streamlined operation. We now have the time to actually zone in on these highly exciting opportunities, especially with truLOCAL. But Carnivore Club, we do think, could have potential under truLOCAL that we really haven't seen in the last year and a half. We wanted to do it. With everything else going on, we never got to it. We're finally starting to scratch the surface of what can be done with two synergistic brands in this meat space and in this strategic opportunity.
I did also want to take a moment for any Amex cardholders, including Scotia members. Amex, we have partnerships for both truLOCAL and Carnivore Club on Amex Offers in Canada. They're tremendous exclusive offerings that we have out there, but they're also great customer acquisition and branding exercises for us to be affiliated with a terrific brand like Amex. And we're proud to say that out of the 15-20 offers on Amex Canada for cardholders, EMERGE Commerce brands comprise three of the 15-20 offers at any given time, the third one being JustGolfStuff, which we'll get to here momentarily. So this is sort of the meat, or we call it the grocery opportunity today. It's still the meat subscription opportunity.
We think this opportunity is one we're going to be zoned in on, not only because of the unit economics, not only because of the great U.S. comp that we've been inspired by, but also because of the vast potential of the meat market and ultimately the grocery market online. We are still in the very early innings here, and the pandemic kind of gave us some glimpses for a little while, gave us a bit of a tease on the opportunity. This is a business that jumped from about CAD 8 million in revenue to CAD 19 million in one shot at peak pandemic. Fortunately, till today, despite us coming down from those artificial highs, truLOCAL is still about 70% higher than it was in 2019 and now primed for organic growth, which we'll be talking about as a key priority here shortly.
We're starting to see some very positive early signs. Next up, we have the golf vertical. We'll zone in a little bit more here. As you can see, we have two brands. Our sort of original business or foray into golf was through UnderPar, which is our discount hub for golf experiences. It's a marketplace across Ontario, California, and other key golf states in the U.S. We like having both markets. There's some seasonality counterbalancing. Canada and January and February, generally, obviously, in the freezing weather, isn't all that exciting, whereas California golf season in Q1 is very active, right? So these are examples of how it's nice to build this sort of counterbalance.
UnderPar, as those who have followed the story know, was a tremendous business, actually was founded last recession, the Great Recession, 2008, on the back of golf courses, really looking for new ways to bring people through the door to fill up their utilization. Rates were kind of in the 40%-50% ranges when they really wanted them to be closer to 80% or 90%. And so they were using UnderPar like clockwork, building their businesses on the back of UnderPar, driving users through the door, and not just new users, also repeat users and different demographics and so forth. When the pandemic hit, interestingly, as you all may know, golf surged as a sport. It made a huge comeback. It was extremely exciting, except for UnderPar, with our discount marketplace. That meant that golf courses needed us less during that time.
They were offering less discounts, in some cases, jumping off the platform and taking time off from UnderPar and from our customers because they didn't need the help. They were getting all this influx. As the world has started to not only open up, not only other activities available, travel is at an all-time high, but also now with the weakening economy, what we're starting to see is murmurs and whispers from golf courses that, yes, some of these numbers that they were expecting to continue when things were extremely hot have come down. And therefore, now we're starting to see some of these great merchants, these VIP merchants, as we call them internally, return to the platform, offer different discounts. We've seen really nice early encouraging signs in Q4, as we've mentioned in a previous PR. But even through January, we saw continued momentum year-over-year.
So we're excited about the UnderPar opportunity. I think a lot of people might say or not really factor in the fact that UnderPar was once an extremely lucrative, profitable business, and most of that was wiped out during the pandemic. It's not like we just dropped a little bit with this business. It actually had the reverse effect. So whereas you heard me say truLOCAL jumped from CAD 8 million-CAD 19 million in revenue, you kind of saw that reverse impact on golf. It really took away our profit. And this has been for years. This isn't anything new. We've lost out on the UnderPar gem that we had acquired at its peak. It was extremely profitable, north of CAD 2 million in EBITDA. And we have still a shadow of those levels.
But what I can say is, in recent months and even recent quarters, we've come back at a much higher level than the low of UnderPar, still significantly lower than the peak of the business pre-pandemic, but certainly starting to see those signs. So we think of UnderPar as a bit of an interesting option, if you will, in that if things do continue to weaken economically, as some expect, that this business will gain from it. It's countercyclical. And we also think there are other things we're building into the platform. We're not just going to rely and wait on the economy. There's other things and fees and advertising partnerships that we're doing that we think are going to make this business perhaps not as big as it once was overnight, but certainly continue to progress it into a bigger and bigger profit center for the company.
Its sister site, JustGolfStuff, is actually a fascinating development and story. This is a business, when we acquired it, was just shy of CAD 5.6 million in sales. So it's really a small business. We've actively announced and shared its progress in that it is the fastest growing business across EMERGE Commerce . Of course, it's easier to grow when you are younger. But frankly, if you keep growing at high double digits for years, which it has, you're obviously going to start seeing sizable business. And today, we don't really break out the business, but needless to say, it is many times over what it was when we acquired it.
And I think this is really one of those rare, kind of really clear case studies where I can demonstrate that the HQ team came in, took this business, took the situation with UnderPar, which one would argue was an adverse effect, clearly numbers-wise, but just a negative situation. And when we were able to, through the HQ team and our leadership team led by Maurice Finn on the JGS side, really sort of take this vision of JustGolfStuff and turn it into a big positive, of gap-filling what we've lost on the UnderPar side with JustGolfStuff. And we're now in Canada, but we've expanded in the U.S. We're seeing good growth there. We're expecting double-digit growth overall to continue.
Of course, as I said, we tied in with Amex as well, which came via the truLOCAL relationship, another example of how the brands can collaborate and gain from our relationships on the partnership side. Then most importantly, JGS, while it was growing such big growth over the last couple of years, really, we weren't too zoned in on it making money, but we're now starting to do that. And in recent months, we have been seeing those positive signs. And we do think this can be a meaningfully profitable business, even as it grows double digits. So that's sort of a little bit of the background on the golf business and the golf opportunity. So a couple of updates and sort of just zoning in on the key stuff here, because I'm sure some of you or many of you have probably come across these.
There's a couple of key things that we started the year off with to really establish sort of this newfound momentum, as we're calling it internally. Firstly, the announcement of selling the wholesale pet business and really sort of in line with our primary objective. All I've really been talking about for the last 12 months, 15 months, is relentlessly going after that debt, paying down that debt as a primary focus, and really considering or exploring all strategic opportunities available to the company to zone in on that debt paydown, right? And the wholesale pet business, which we thought was an excellent business in many regards, and we were happy with our pick. We liked purchasing it. We thought it was an excellent cash flow business.
At the end of the day, there was no bigger priority than paying down that debt, saving on interest, and allowing us to focus and double down where we're starting to see great wins, as I've outlined, with grocery and golf. So this was really sort of the biggest dent we could make when we explored all the different choices. With WholesalePet, we ended up selling it for about CAD 12.5 million, so $9.25 million U.S., to be exact, to Tiny, which is also sort of a public fund. They're not necessarily an e-commerce consumer as we are, but they're sort of a sub-$500 million business. So it was good to see that some of these bigger strategic-type companies are interested in our assets.
It actually shows, I think we've demonstrated over the last year or so, that we've been able to sell north of $20 million in asset value to pay down that debt or in and around that, at least. And when we kind of think about that dynamic from a pure cash perspective, WSP, over the couple of years that we owned it, made about $5 million in operating income. And so when you add that to the purchase price in USD, we kind of made a little bit of money on it from a cash basis. Obviously, we were down when you include the shares we gave, but from a pure cash basis, we actually made out.
Okay, we actually made sub-$500,000 in cash if you look at it in that regard, which, again, cash at the end of the day is an important consideration for us. But really, the big win is in the interest savings, bringing the debt down from $15.85 million to $5.85 million. We ended or we fully satisfied the deferred payment to WholesalePet. We actually struck a deal there. So we didn't actually pay the full amount. We got them to take a discount, and we saved at least another $300,000 or so there. So we're very happy with kind of how this all laid out and cleared up. And then now, with the interest savings, with the reduced debt, allow us to focus not only on our businesses, but also on cutting costs and saving money associated with a much more streamlined structure.
Speaking of debt, we also, shortly after, some of you may have actually missed this, hopefully not, because I thought it was an excellent development. Alongside the debt paydown, we actually entered into an up-to-24-month facility with our existing lender. This is a lender that we've worked with since 2019 when we did the UnderPar deal. So they know us well. We've worked with them for years. They were pleased with our ability to take the debt down in about a year from CAD 25 million to CAD 5.85 million. And so with that, we got their support for sort of a longer-term-than-usual facility. Normally, we'll do these sort of 12-month renewals. And even though we're on good standing, we like to get more visibility. We're able to sort of get that this time with this 18-month term plus an additional 6 months. And so we're thankful for that opportunity.
And given, as I said, the fact that we have delivered for them and delivered overall on our plan to streamline, to clean up, to reduce debt, they were supportive and offered us revised and relaxed covenants while our interest rate remains unchanged. Obviously, with the expected interest rate cuts coming in 2024 and 2025, we expect to get some meaningful savings. So to the extent that you believe that the interest rate environment is going to be favorable moving forward, much like it hurt us for doing nothing on the way up, hopefully, these interest rates coming down should result in meaningful savings for us and ultimately drive better cash flow from that perspective. So let's talk 2024. There's only a couple of slides left before we take Q&A, so I should be able to wrap up here in the next few minutes.
Firstly, on our progress, we came out with an announcement basically earlier this week that this moment in time is the moment we're switching our focus, our priorities to growth. And January served as a terrific start, not only did we complete the WholesaleP et deal, pay down the debt by CAD 10 million, restructure the debt note favorably with longer visibility, but here we're coming out saying this go-forward business, this grocery and golf sort of strategy, this refresh, if you will, is starting off on the right foot. We saw organic growth in January. It's our return to growth here. Obviously, as I mentioned, EMERGE Commerce has organically seen multi-year declines given the peak pandemic. So mostly in e-commerce, you'll see the pre-pandemic, which is 2019.
You got the peak pandemic when the world went crazy and e-commerce shot up, and not just EMERGE Commerce , but the Shopifys of the world, the Amazons, the Wayfair, everything shot up and then sort of came back down to earth. I think the fact that our brands, like I mentioned, truLOCAL, was still 70% higher than the pre-pandemic today, demonstrates that these are above-average brands, if you will. But the great news is, as we start zoning in on growth this year, January started off on the right foot. It wasn't just sort of one business. We hit on all cylinders with our main brands, truLOCAL, UnderPar, and JustGolfStuff. As I mentioned, Carnivore Club is a smaller business. We're kind of cleaning out kind of what I would call empty calorie revenue, so wouldn't look at that necessarily.
But these key businesses that make up the vast majority of our overall GMS and revenue, we were very, very pleased with. And then just to zone in a little bit and double-click on truLOCAL, we saw our largest influx of net new subscribers since peak pandemic, Q2, I think it was May 2020. And if you think of subscription businesses, today, we drive, for example, north of 5,000 boxes a month for truLOCAL, for example. We do that at around CAD 220 per box on average, right? If this business starts seeing an influx of new subscribers and those boxes start looking like 6,000 or 7,000 or 8,000 boxes or 9,000 or 10,000 boxes, you can do the math pretty quickly on what that's going to mean for potential growth opportunities.
Listen, assuming, of course, that the churn dynamics of the business remain intact and stable as we've seen for quite some time now, then these large influx of subscribers could mean tremendous things for our business. So we're really zoned in on it, really want to keep watching that and driving it. We have 5,000 boxes today. We think it'd be a lot more down the line. And then lastly, the other update that we gave was that we ended January with about CAD 3 million in cash.
Obviously, that's a mix of both pocketing some cash from the WholesalePet transaction because we did pick up about CAD 12.5 million purchase price, CAD 10 million went to the debt, a certain amount went to clearing the deferred payment with WholesalePet, but we were able to pocket close to CAD 1 million or so of proceeds from the transaction as well, so beefed up our cash position as well, despite us actually having a tighter business. That was also very favorable and positive for us. But of course, that's also indicative of our Q4 high season. Normally, cash is higher during post-Q4 and then kind of normally comes down in Q1. That's sort of standard aspects of our business. But I did want to mention that we were able to actually benefit ourselves beyond just paying down debt.
We actually got a decent chunk of cash for our operations and for our growth plans. Lastly, just to kind of double-click on the sort of bigger picture of 2024, which sets the stage for the go-forward vision, for the go-forward plan. First and foremost, January is one month. We want to continue to build on this habit of growth. We want to return the business, especially the key businesses, meaning truLOCAL and golf. We really want to make sure these businesses start growing again year-over-year. And I think we're seeing those signs.
But a lot of what this is about now is our ability to focus, the time we've afforded ourselves with this tighter-focused approach to spend time thinking of revenue, thinking of margins, thinking of the balance of growth and profitability, and hopefully, again, getting those tailwinds from reduced interest rates over time, but also giving us the room over 18 to 24 months that the lender has afforded us. Streamlining operations is a bit of a work in progress. Most of it's done, but there are still some opportunities. So I do think this HQ team and operation is much, much tighter than it once was. And it's working because a lot of the HQ folks that are here - and again, it is a tighter team - are directly involved in operating these businesses and brands, less so in administering and managing the holdco.
We're kind of essentially collapsing that structure straight into these brands, working with them directly, helping add value directly, giving them data insights, giving them support, opening doors for partnerships in a much more involved way. And so that's allowing us to find additional savings. And then, of course, the synergies that JustGolfStuff and UnderPar have directly. You got truLOCAL and Carnivore Club. There's some more synergies to extract there. And then there's overall partnerships for the whole business, like Amex partnership, and we now have three of our brands on there. And these are very productive types of partnerships. Lastly, we will continue to be opportunistic, right? We've proven that we have a very valuable set of businesses. We like our set of businesses today. We like the feedback that we've been receiving directly and indirectly from investors and from partners.
We think our priority is to focus inwards, build a very valuable business, continue to drive decisions that will improve growth, our expense lines, our balance sheet, our debt, and we'll continue to be opportunistic to find ways to drive shareholder value. I know on a short-term basis, sometimes these moves may not be as clear early on. They're actually quite painful in the short term, as we saw last year with share price. But hopefully, some of these moves that are long-term-minded are going to start paying off. We're seeing some early signs. We're hearing some positive feedback. We love hearing from you, good and bad. We're always humble enough to know we can learn. We can listen. And so I do that, obviously, directly, as many of you know.
I take my time to spend time to learn how you guys think of the business, how you're seeing it, what ideas you have for us. But rest assured, we are heads down. We and I am highly motivated to make this work. I'm very excited. I'm as excited about 2024 as I have been since any other year starting this business, and so is the team. We think we have a tremendous opportunity ahead of us, still a lot of hard work. But I do think the worst is over, as I see it. I do think we can now really zone in on the business, talk growth, and talk opportunities, and build shareholder value over the long term. With that, I'm going to open us up for some questions and try to address as many as I can here in the next little while.
So, I see a few things on here that I will attempt to. So, question: where is your office and do most staff work from home? Did staff reduction allow to reduce expenses related to premises? You can tell I haven't done a webcast in a while. I need to drink a sip of water every other sentence. So it's been a while. I'm a little rusty, I must say, but good to be back, as I said. And great showing, by the way. Great to see you all. I saw about 65-plus people have tuned in, and we have north of 50-something right now. So that's awesome. So just to answer your question on office, yes, this was one of the big savings that we did last year, actually, midway through last year.
We moved our Canadian, our Toronto-based offices that we had had for four or five years into a much smaller HQ office that's about one-third of the price overall. So this HQ office services ourselves, UnderPar, and JGS, the JustGolfStuff, and occasionally truLOCAL folks pop in. truLOCAL itself is also quite remote, so they don't have they were based out of Kitchener, but they are remote, with the exception of popping by HQ, as I said. We do have a small hub. As I said, it's about one-third of the price of what we had. It is what I would say is great cost. The building is supposed to be torn down in a couple of years. We were very in EMERGE style, very opportunistic to grab a deal on pricing. Everyone else is remote.
Just to give you a quantum, we're talking about kind of a CAD 5,000 to CAD 6,000 a year, a month, rather, in rent for a space like this. So we're really kind of a tight-focused space. Everything else is remote, as you said. Once a week, we bring everyone in and get people to spend some time together, strategize, cross-pollinate. But we don't have any big overheads. We used to have hundreds of thousands of CAD of rent a couple of years ago. We have none of that. So that's all gone. In terms of other facilities, truLOCAL's facility is out of Milton, and it's an important one. It's how we do our business. We have decent pricing. There may be some additional savings out of BC and Alberta for their facilities. We're looking into what we can do there.
Overall, I would say nothing stands out from that perspective. Another question, sounds like truLOCAL is a strategic growth opportunity. How large do you think this opportunity is? Are there some good tuck-in opportunities here over time? So I kind of gave the ButcherBox U.S. example, and really, it's a shining light. And I thought it was quite fitting that pretty much one of the few really great, profitable, at-scale e-commerce companies is ButcherBox, which is a direct-to-consumer meat subscription business. So this is highly favorable. It shows that the model can be sticky at scale. It shows it can be profitable. We know this from public sources. You can look them up on TechCrunch and on Forbes. There's many places to read up on butcherbox.com. Great story. For truLOCAL, we look at this opportunity as something of a major opportunity.
I mean, there's 5,000-plus boxes today in Canada. There's somewhere around 40 million people. Obviously, premium meat isn't for everyone, or meat, for that matter, these days. But if you really sort of zone in, can 5,000 boxes get to 50,000 boxes? Absolutely. We believe so. We're seeing I think what we need to continue to see is an ability to acquire customers favorably, that CLTV, the CAC that I talked about. That needs to continue to hold up, and we need to continue to scale it with time because for the last couple of years, we've been battling those inflated subscribers that joined during the peak. I think all of that's mostly done now, and we can start focusing on growth again. But can this business, quote-unquote, "10x from where it is here"?
We absolutely believe it to be a real opportunity, and that's certainly why I'm personally spending a lot of time there with the team. In terms of tuck-ins in this space, there's actually quite a few smaller meat subscription businesses and DTC businesses in meat and broader grocery, for that matter. I wouldn't say that any of them are close to truLOCAL's size right now from what we can see. Some of them are getting decent traction in niche opportunities within meat. So certainly, I think there are opportunities to go after these tuck-ins and build out an even bigger-scale company over time. But I think first and foremost, we're focused inwards on making sure our playbook scales, is growing, is profitable. But we would definitely and we like this space with the folks in this space.
Again, as I say, they're smaller, but we like what some of them are doing in certain niche areas, and their messaging and their approach is a little different. Over time, there may be opportunities for us to continue to tuck in there. But I think in terms of the size of the opportunity, ButcherBox US is $560 million today. They're aiming to be $1 billion one day. Can this be a 10x opportunity for truLOCAL alone? We certainly view it to be the case. Thank you, Ghassan, and congratulations on your to-date results. Remember, it's only one month, but we feel good about that. Can you please provide some examples of managing operating expenses in 2024, not tied to customer acquisition, that boost cash flow? And I think that's a great question.
It ties into what someone asked me on the first question around rent and office space. If you think of some of the savings that we've looked at, both at the HQ and operationally, I'll touch on a few things. We used to have a CAD 120,000 investor relations firm. We used to have board comp that was in cash. We used to have a full-time HR team. We used to have social media folks. We used to have a PR company. We used to have bigger offices, as I mentioned. All of that's gone. All of that's gone already. A lot of that and I wouldn't say it just happened in 2024, but a fair amount of it's happened over the last year, let's say, as we continue to streamline our business. So there's quite a few HQ savings at the top on the one end.
But on the other end, operationally, if you think of let's take truLOCAL, which has, again, been a prime example today. When you think of, for example, let's go down the COGS, right? So there's the price of meat, which, again, we do have, I should say, one of the advantages of truLOCAL with such a strong brand and following. We've been able to increase prices. We don't do it often, but we've proven there's pricing power in this model, and we will be opportunistic with it. But we also want to be mindful because these loyal customers are ones that we want to work with forever, right? And so we got to be careful with how we do pricing, but we have established that this model has pricing power. That's number one. Number two, in terms of savings, there's things like shipping costs.
There's things like dry ice, the cost of dry ice. You think it's trivial, but when you look at the 5,000 boxes a month, 60,000 to 70,000 boxes a year, each of them has different amounts of dry ice. Those are hundreds of thousands of CAD. And if you get a better deal there, you're getting real savings. Shipping is north of CAD 1 million-plus on the business. There's some savings there, right? And of course, our overheads generally consolidating email marketing for all of our brands is something is an active project now. It's something we talked about, but we finally got to now with the focus, right? So email savings, shipping savings. So there's a tremendous amount going around, and some of it will show up immediately. Some of it will show up over a quarter or two.
But I think overall, in 2024, everything that we have in our, let's say, bag of tricks for savings will have made it happen. Will we get a full year of all of them? Probably not, but we're on it. Another question, would you consider share buybacks in the near term? Not necessarily just quite yet, right? We're preserving our capital for our own growth initiatives, for our own improvements. We do think these are compelling levels, for sure, but it's not like we're sitting on that much excess cash that we can start talking buybacks. It could probably be a nice signal to the market, but we're really trying to play a long game.
Rather than just do signals or spend a bit of capital on buying back shares, we'd rather use that capital to drive growth, to drive organic growth, to improve things over time, and hopefully, share price takes care of itself over time. We won't rule out share buybacks. I don't think there's anything you're going to see in the short term. Does the resurgence in Shopify as an indie e-commerce facilitator and Facebook as a revived advertising engine give you better customer acquisition traction, especially after the huge hangover from the iOS and Android clamped down on retargeting? Great question. Great question. We talk about this a lot lately. In fact, if you heard me talk a little bit about the truLOCAL customer or influx of customers, our highest influx since the pandemic, it's largely attributed in a way to what we are seeing with these Facebook improvements.
Largely, it's an AI-driven engine that's becoming smarter and smarter. They call it Facebook Advantage +, among other things. So what happened was, for those of you that don't notice the quick I'll touch on this quickly. A couple of years ago, Facebook was rocking and rolling. Things were going great. Suddenly, Apple came in and changed privacy settings for users, you might recall, as a user being prompted not to be followed or targeted. And that cut all visibility. It turned advertising into a black box, whereas we had a calculation or a formula a couple of years back where we would want to target certain demographics, certain age, certain time, place. All of that became much harder to be sure of in a post-iPhone change for privacy, iOS 15, I think it was.
So lately, in recent months, and as Facebook has beefed up their own comeback on sort of driving AI for better decisions, better targeting, that we've found has been very helpful for our business. We are seeing more traction. So are other e-commerce companies. This is a very exciting development, but we're a bit cautious to overdo it now. I mean, again, we are seeing traction, but still early. But definitely, I would like to also say some of this is true tailwinds. We can't control interest rates. We can't control if Facebook's working as good as it currently is or as bad as it was a couple of years ago. What we can control is our own results, the quality of our product, the quality of our decisions, and our capital allocation.
And so we think those are things we're going to control, but it feels like these tailwinds are very helpful. I'll take one more question, or maybe a couple if I'm seeing a fair amount. I mean, this is a pretty general question. I have, oh, sorry. So it's a comment. I appreciate it. It says, "I have confidence that you will make this business successful moving forward as your priorities make sense." I appreciate you, anonymous attendee. Thank you very much. I will still take one more question. Why have we not seen much insider buying over the last year at these lower prices? That's a good question. That's a very good question and a fair one.
What you may not know or appreciate is in a business that fundamentally is tied in with M&A, whether we're buying businesses or selling them, we end up, as insiders, having blackout periods, right? So we're not allowed to trade. So if you think of the last year, just let's look at what we've done. We sold BattlBox in Q1. Then we reported our full fiscal year in April. Then we reported our Q1 in May. And then we sold WagJag in July. And then now we sold WholesalePet in January. But of course, in between, anytime you have an assigned LOI that is material, you're precluded from actually trading. So obviously, most of that is done, but you're not going to hear anything from me on whether we plan to buy or not. But we shall see, right?
Last time, there was not a blackout on us a little while ago, maybe a year, year and a half ago. I picked up CAD 110,000 worth of shares in the 20s and 30s. These can be looked up. They're on all the public filing and information that's out there. And I will say, notably, you will not have seen, at least I haven't, any single insider in EMERGE in the history of us being a public company sell a single share. And so I think, hopefully, that's a good litmus test of where our motivations lie, how we think of the business, and how we think of our prospects as time goes. We may have bumpy times as we did last year share price-wise. I believe I'm still the largest individual shareholder in EMERGE, and I haven't sold a single share.
I've seen this thing all the way up to CAD 1.40, right? And so to us, whether we buy or not, sometimes tricky. Sometimes there's blackouts. Sometimes there's other reasons. But overall, I think looking at the progress, feeling good about the business, our decisions in the capital markets are, of course, everyone's free to make their own decisions. But you're not seeing us sell, dump, and you're certainly not seeing me leave. This was a very tough year. I saw a lot of CEOs leave. I saw a lot of, quote-unquote, "shares that were battered like this never make a comeback." And I'm not saying we're done. I'm not saying we're back. But I am saying we're here. We have a plan. We're communicating it clearly, openly, transparently, and we're encouraged by our progress.
We still have a lot of hard work to do, but we're not here to do incremental wins. We're here to look at the major opportunity that I outlined with truLOCAL. We're here to look at the great progress we've been making with Golf. We want to build these businesses, give us more optionality, and ultimately drive shareholder value. Friends, investors, partners, supporters, really appreciate your time here today. There's still quite a few questions, so I'm glad we're back in action. Please email us at investor@emerge-brands.com. I cannot guarantee that we have a full-time IR person to handle them, but I promise you, I myself will get to them, whether it's me, whether it's our management team. We will make sure you are taken care of. You get the answers you deserve. Again, we really appreciate your support. It's a big year for us. We're zoned in.
We're ready to go. Thank you for your time, and have a great day.