Welcome to the BellRing Brands Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call and webcast. Hosting the call today for BellRing Brands are Darcy Davenport, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Paul Rode, Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay beginning at 1:30 P.M. Eastern Time. The dial-in number is 800-839-5241. No passcode is required. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Matt Mainer, Investor Relations of BellRing Brands for introductions. You may go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for BellRing Brands' third quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call. With me today are Darcy Davenport, our President and CEO, and Paul Rode, our CFO. Darcy and Paul will begin with prepared remarks, and afterwards, we'll have a brief question-and-answer session. The press release and supplemental slide presentation that support these remarks are posted on our website in both the Investor Relations and the SEC Filings sections at bellring.com. In addition, the release and slides are available on the SEC's website. Before we continue, I'd like to remind you that this call will contain certain forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that should be carefully considered by investors, as actual results could differ materially from these statements.
These forward-looking statements are current as of the date of this call, and management undertakes no obligation to update these statements. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and an audio replay will be available on our website. Finally, this call will discuss certain non-GAAP measures. For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP measure, see our press release issued yesterday and posted on our website. With that, I will turn this call over to Darcy.
Thanks, Matt, and thank you all for joining us. Last evening, we reported our third quarter results and posted the supplemental presentation to our website. I'd like to start with the quarter's headlines. Net sales grew 8% over prior year, and our Adjusted EBITDA was up 15% with healthy re-margins. Premier Protein is tracking to our expectations. It grew 7% net sales versus prior year and grew sequentially 23% over Q2. Premier shake supply continues to be tight, and we continue to allocate supply. However, I'm pleased with the progress we are making to satisfy our customers. In fact, this quarter, we prioritized building some inventory to improve customer fill rates rather than maximizing our sales volume in the quarter. This helps both BellRing and our customers more reliably build the brand. Meanwhile, Dymatize continues to show impressive momentum.
Elasticity was a bit higher than expected, but the brand still had a strong quarter, up 17%. As you saw in yesterday's press release, we tightened our fiscal 2022 guidance range for both sales and Adjusted EBITDA. We slightly reduced the top end of sales growth and increased the bottom end of our EBITDA range, factoring in our actual Q3 performance. As planned, Q4 expectations are largely unchanged, and sales should sequentially grow versus Q3 and deliver our largest year-on-year growth rate in 2022. Our guidance delivers an annual sales growth rate of between 11% and 14%, coupled with robust EBITDA, despite capacity constraints and limited promotion and marketing. Our industry, like many others, is experiencing inflationary pressures. We continue to see our major dairy protein inputs for our shake products escalate.
As a result, we announced an additional price increase on Premier Protein RTD shakes effective Q1 2023. Our preliminary 2023 outlook still suggests our 2022 back-half Adjusted EBITDA dollar run rate to be a reasonable proxy for the full year fiscal 2023. We believe our net sales will be above our long-term algorithm of 10%-12% growth, driven by both strong volume and pricing. We'll provide more detail on fiscal 2023 next quarter. Now turning to our category, brand highlights, and updates on our capacity expansion. We continue to see healthy growth in the convenient nutrition category. Ready-to-drink beverages grew 9%, and ready-to-mix powders grew 14% in dollars. Although pricing was a major factor for the dollar growth, consumer tailwinds around wellness and healthier food solutions continue to push the category higher. Premier Protein continues to demonstrate tremendous strength.
Market share returned to growth in Q3, and TDPs stabilized, while repeat rates and velocities held steady, continuing to exhibit our high consumer loyalty. While Premier Protein shake consumption and household penetration declined in Q3, this is consistent with our expectations given our intentional pullback in promotion, marketing, and SKUs. We expect overall shake consumption to be down in Q4 as well versus prior year as we lap a big promotional period. Encouragingly, July, which had little promotion in the prior year, posted a consumption increase of 11% as a result of improved retailer stock levels. We remain confident we will continue to see this type of improvement as our new supply continues to ramp up and we return to offense in fiscal 2023. These metrics reaffirm that we have a long runway for sustained growth. Turning to Dymatize.
The brand had another great quarter with consumption dollars in the U.S. up 21% across tracked and untracked channels, and that momentum continued into July. Although we did see a distribution loss in club as a result of our last price increase, all other key channels saw significant double-digit growth despite reduced promotion and marketing. Overall, the brand's health remains strong. Dymatize is the number one or number two sports protein brand in most of our key retailers with a ton of upside. As planned, we will begin to ramp up marketing and promotions in Q4 to further drive demand. Moving to our capacity expansion. We remain on track. We improved our service levels, trade inventories are starting to rebuild, and our co-man partners are producing largely as expected. We increased our shake production by 20% versus prior quarter.
In closing, I'm pleased with our year-to-date performance in a very challenging environment. We remain on track to deliver not only our full-year guidance, but equally important, complete our key objectives that will set us up for a strong fiscal 2023 and beyond. We have two leading mainstream brands with tremendous consumer loyalty. Premier Protein is gaining momentum and market share despite no demand-driving activities. New capacity is coming along as expected, which paves the way for future years of robust growth. Dymatize continues to win with mainstream athletes, and the brand is accelerating into Q4 with a new media campaign, distribution drive, and new products. We feel confident about our long-term outlook and the building blocks we have in place to get there.
Thank you for your continued support, and I look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter, along with more specifics around the upcoming fiscal year. I will now turn the call over to Paul.
Thanks, Darcy, and good morning, everyone. Net sales for the quarter were $371 million, and Adjusted EBITDA was $81 million. Net sales grew 8% over prior year, and Adjusted EBITDA increased 15% with Adjusted EBITDA margins of 21.8%. Premier Protein net sales grew 7%, driven by higher average net selling prices, reflecting price increases and reduced promotional activity, offset partially by a 9% volume decline. Remember, last year's third quarter was exceptionally strong, and we depleted inventory in addition to selling what we produced. These prior year inventory reductions, in contrast to a planned inventory build in the current quarter, resulted in volume declines despite production increases. Dymatize net sales grew 17% compared to a year ago, driven by higher net pricing and favorable product mix, offset partially by lower volumes.
Volumes were impacted by several factors, including elasticities from recent pricing actions, reductions in trade inventory levels during the third quarter, and lapping prior year promotional activities. Gross profit of $120 million grew 8% with gross margins of 32.4%. Gross margins were flat to prior years. Our pricing actions offset significant inflation. Excluding one-time items, SG&A expenses increased $2 million compared to last year and as a percent of sales improved 40 basis points. Our cash flow in the third quarter was unfavorably impacted by higher working capital, primarily increased finished good inventory and raw materials. Shake inventory levels increased as planned as we continue to rebuild safety stock to better service customers. We expect working capital to moderate in the fourth quarter and result in stronger free cash flow.
During the quarter, we repaid $25 million against our revolving credit facility. As of June 30, net debt was $889 million, and net leverage was 3.5 times. Turning to our outlook. We tightened our fiscal 2022 guidance range for net sales of $1.39-$1.42 billion and Adjusted EBITDA of $262-$268 million. Our sales outlook for the quarter remains largely unchanged, with double-digit net sales growth expected for Premier Protein and Dymatize, which both benefit from higher net pricing. Similar to the third quarter, we are lapping significant shake inventory reductions as shipments outpace production and that is an expected headwind for Premier Protein shake volumes in the fourth quarter.
We expect sequential net sales growth from the third quarter, driven by new products on both brands, as well as increased distribution, promotional activity, and media support for Dymatize. We expect fourth quarter Adjusted EBITDA to grow significantly for prior year, benefiting from higher net sales and modestly higher margins. We anticipate fourth quarter gross margins to improve compared to prior year, but decline sequentially from the third quarter as a result of expected dairy protein inflation. In closing, we are encouraged by our third quarter performance and are well-positioned to close out another strong year. I will now turn it over to the operator for questions.
Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. You may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing the pound key. Once again, that is star one to ask a question. We will pause for a moment to allow questions to queue. Thank you. Our first question will come from Ken Goldman with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning, everybody. I wanted to follow up, Darcy, on the guidance or outlook for fiscal 2023, and thank you again for providing that and updating it. Was there a minor change in how you are sort of looking at sales? I think previously sort of a midpoint that you were looking for, and I know these are all kind of rough numbers, is around 12%. It sounds like you're guiding for a little bit higher than that, if I'm hearing you correctly. I just wanted to make sure I'm not reading too much into this or you're actually tweaking that number higher a little bit, or am I just kinda overthinking it?
You are not overthinking it. That was our intention. The main reason is last quarter, we didn't factor in the price increases.
Got it. Okay. It's all pricing. I assume there's some elasticity built in there too. Can you talk a little bit about the elasticity level you're baking in for next year?
You know, at this point, I don't wanna go into details about 23. What we wanted to do was simply, obviously last quarter, we gave you a guide, and this quarter it changed a little bit for the positive, so we wanted to give you an update. We will go into detail about giving you know, guidance, a range for both top and bottom line next quarter.
Yep. No, no complaints. You've been generous with that already. I just wanted to ask one quick follow-up. Do you have an update, and if you said this, forgive me. Do you have an update on the timing of the SKU assortment sort of rejuvenation, I guess, for lack of a better word, for Premier? What I mean is when do those SKUs sort of come back on shelf that aren't there right now?
Yeah, last quarter, we said that we expected the latter part of this year and into next year, we would be focused on increasing inventory, fill rate, trade inventories, et cetera. We would introduce the new flavors, or at least we expect to introduce the new flavors, kind of mid-2023, and then marketing and promotion would be slotted toward the end of 2023. There's nothing. I think that's still in place.
Got it. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question will come from Kaumil Gajrawala with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
Hi. Good morning.
Good morning.
Can you give your perspective on how the active nutrition category performs in an environment where consumers are under increasing pressure and looking for savings? I know, the category was pretty nascent, in 2008, 2009, but maybe just some historical context on how it performed then and how you think about its resilience, in a tougher macro backdrop.
Sure. That's a great question. You're right. I mean, you think about this category, and it's really only about 30 years old, so it was small in the last downturn. I'll talk about first my thoughts on the category, and then I'll briefly hit on our brands. The category in general, let's talk about RTDs. Most RTDs, and especially our brands being Premier Protein, are used as breakfast replacements. When you think about the cost of, for instance, our shake and Premier is about $2, you know, anywhere between $1.50-$2. It's a pretty cheap breakfast. What's also interesting is there's very low substitutability for something like a high protein, low sugar option.
I think that based on our research, first of all, Premier is really set up well for kind of a recessionary environment. I think the overall category, the RTD category, is well positioned. From a powder standpoint, same thing. It's for the most part a supplement, and these are high loyalty consumers that are just trying to figure out new ways to, you know, increase their protein intake. From a Dymatize standpoint, we have high consumer loyalty. I think our most loyal are going to stay loyal. It's a high-priced item, so I do believe we're gonna see some shifting. Actually we saw it this quarter. We're gonna see some shifting into smaller sizes.
We, you know, we have our biggest size of Dymatize is now close to $100. What we've seen this quarter is a move to the smaller sizes. Then we did see some move into less expensive, kind of less quality protein. I think we'll see some of that. I think the category is good. Macro trends are still there, providing tailwinds to the category. Our specific brands, I believe, are set up well, but I do think we're gonna see some trade down in powders.
Thanks. I just wanted to follow up on your comments on Dymatize. You've taken a lot of pricing on the brand and noted that elasticities have come in a bit higher than you expected. How do you think about balancing pricing growth on Dymatize versus driving further household penetration gains? And how has the consumer reaction to pricing influenced your strategy going forward?
Yeah. Powders specifically, you're exactly right. We've taken a fair amount of pricing on Dymatize and overall the category because we're at historic highs on whey pricing. Candidly, you know, we have at certain times in the year, we hadn't even covered the price increase or the cost increases. What we've seen, I'll first start with my comments about Q3 being a little bit higher in our elasticity than we expected. We forecasted kind of moderate elasticity. What was interesting is what we saw this quarter specifically is consumers, once the higher price was reflected, almost had a little bit of sticker shock, because I talked about that $100 price point. They paused and then evaluated, and then came back and purchased, for the most part, smaller sizes of Dymatize.
I think that pause and reevaluation we did not expect. That's why that kind of the higher-than-expected elasticity really occurred in Q3, and it's why we feel good about our forecast for elasticity on Dymatize in Q4 and beyond. That is a little bit more color on the Dymatize elasticity. Your question about how do you balance kind of taking more price versus driving demand. You know, we don't have any. When I talked about taking another price increase, that is just on Premier. It is not on Dymatize. We do not have any plans to take further price on Dymatize. Actually, now we are you know going into Q4, we are going to be you know. We have a new media campaign. We have a distribution drive. We're launching a couple of new products.
We're really getting back to accelerating demand on that brand. Up to now, we've kind of held back on our demand-driving activities on Dymatize, and now we're, you know, kind of pressing the accelerator. I think that looking forward, we don't expect any additional pricing, and we're all about driving demand.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you.
Ben, your line is open. Please make sure your phone is not on mute. Hearing no response, we'll go to our next question from Andrew Lazar with Barclays. Your line is open.
Hi, Darcy and Paul.
Good morning.
Hi there. Darcy, first off, I'm just curious, what do you think caused the difference, I guess, between sort of consensus sales estimates for the third quarter and what you guys reported? Was the entirety of the difference, do you think, the decision that you talked about to sort of rebuild inventory rather than, you know, sort of maximizing product sales in the quarter? Or, you know, maybe we just all mismodeled it, you know, to start with. I'm trying to get a sense of what that difference was.
Yep. Really two factors. The first is around Dymatize. I talked about elasticities were slightly higher than expected in Q3. We also had a reduction of trade inventory levels in Q3. That first was Dymatize. The second piece is what you referred to and what I talked about in my prepared remarks was the choice to build inventory and kind of prioritize fill rate over maximizing sales in the quarter.
You feel like you'll still do that, but maybe not to an extent in the fourth quarter that changes your outlook on the fourth quarter sales, it seems like.
Correct.
Okay. Maybe you can remind me. I don't know if there are any learnings from the last time you went through the capacity constraint issue. This was pre-IPO. On sort of what happened to household penetration trends then? I don't know if household penetration took a dip in response to those capacity constraints then and you know, re-accelerated once capacity came online or if the brand was in a different place back then such that it didn't behave the same way.
All right. Yeah, household penetration and PDPs, household penetration, and you know, market share, it did take a little bit of a dip. It was a little bit shorter. You know, I think the brand was in a different place then. But in general, we saw a little bit of a dip, and then once we started, you know, re-accelerating demand, bringing back our new items, filling out the shelves, all of the metrics rebounded very quickly, like within, call it three-six months, everything rebounded. We expect this to be the same. I also believe the brand now, first of all, last time we went down to two flavors only. This time, you know, we have seven flavors on the shelf. The brand is bigger.
We have more loyalty, more household penetration. I don't think, you know, everything would say that, you know, we will rebound kind of either in the same amount of time or even a little faster.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question will come from Ben with Stephens. Your line is now open.
Hey, guys. Sorry about the technical difficulties. Jim Salera on for Ben Bienvenu. If I could ask a two-part question on the sales breakout. First part, can you guys delineate between the capacity constraints versus demand elasticity for the price increases and how each of those impacted volumes specifically with Premier?
Yeah. Make sure I heard your question correctly. For Premier, as we've taken pricing, we have not seen any elasticities on our shakes to date. As we took the March, April price increase, our consumption trends have been very stable and steady throughout that time period. That would suggest that there's no elasticities on our shakes to date.
Second part, as you guys start to ramp up on the promotional spend, is that gonna be more focused on driving category usage, so bringing people that don't use Premier into the category as a breakfast replacement shake? Or is that driving higher purchase rates, or is it gonna be increasing just visibility to the brand overall to help with distribution gains in the new channels?
Yeah, Ben, when I talked about increasing promotional and marketing spend in Q4, I just wanna make sure that it was clear. It is on Dymatize. It is not on Premier.
Right.
Are you talking about for 2023?
Correct, yeah.
Yeah. On Premier, when we begin driving demand again and doing marketing, yeah, our marketing effort is all around household penetration. We have a pretty high buy rate, one of kind of the highest in the category, and it's been pretty stable throughout this period of time. This is a household penetration story. Even though we're the highest household penetration within the category, we still believe there's a ton of upside or, you know, between 7% and 8%, and we believe that it can go much higher. It's all about new households.
If I could maybe sneak in one quick question on capital allocation. Moving forward, I know you mentioned there was capital demands in the quarter. As cash flow normalizes, do you guys have a preference on debt reduction versus, share repo? I know you did a little bit of share repo in the quarter, a little bit of debt reduction, but do you have a preference one way or the other?
Yeah, sure. Our primary focus is to de-lever. We do have you know we have amount on a revolving credit facility that we did pay down $25 million in the quarter, and we'll continue to focus on that. We will continue to look at share repurchase as you know opportunistic. Where we see attractive opportunities to enter, we will buy. Those are. De-levering is our primary priority, but opportunistic share repurchases is also a key priority for us.
Thanks, guys. I'll hop back in the queue.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question will come from Kaumil Gajrawala with Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.
Hi, thank you. First one, just a quick one as you're thinking about your costs for the rest of this year and next year. Are there any hedges or things that we should know about, just as it relates to how that might work through the P&L? Then, secondly, can you maybe just talk a bit about your performance by channel, perhaps what you're seeing in club versus e-com versus, and even if, I'm gonna assume given the capacity issues, the expansion into groceries has slowed, but any update there would also be useful. Thanks.
On your first question, no, there's really no hedging per se, you know, that would have an impact that you would need to factor in. Most of our protein buys, which is our biggest buy, is mostly firm fixed contracts. There is some indexing based on the CME and other indexes. From fiscal 2022, we certainly have a good line of sight of what our costs are at this point, and we obviously have some coverage into fiscal 2023 as well, but from a hedging perspective, there's nothing that you would need to model in.
Regarding consumption by channel, Kaumil, are you asking about Premier or Dymatize?
Really both, but probably Premier a bit more.
Okay. Well, I'll go through both quickly. Premier during the quarter, and if you look at our supplemental that kind of goes through, but I'll give you a little more information that's not even in there. You know, when you're looking versus year ago, the change is gonna be all about if we're lapping promotion prior year. What we find is when you actually look at the trends, they're very stable on Premier. But the year ago number, when you're comparing versus year ago, it changes if there was a promotion last year. Just so you know that.
When you look at July. So what's not in the supplemental, and that doesn't have a lot of promotion in prior year, you start seeing, you know, for the most part, we are up, so I said 11% in my prepared remarks. Untracked is up 16%, tracked is up 7%. Overall, you know, club is up 10%, mass is up 15%, food is about flat, e-com up 25%. So really solid growth rates when you take away the noise from last year promotion. So I think it's very encouraging. When comparing what's going on across those channels, it really has to do with fill rates.
Where we have solid fill rates, solid supply, the business is doing great, where we're, you know, don't exactly have the right flavors on shelf, et cetera, you know, the consumption is, you know, affected. That's the first part. Dymatize, really strong double-digit growth across all channels with one exception, which is club. When we took our last price increase, we lost distribution in a club account, and that shows in the supplemental. When you go to July in Dymatize, same story, up about 27% overall in tracked and untracked, double digit in both, and again, double digit across the board with the exception of club.
Useful. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question will come from John Baumgartner with Mizuho Securities. Your line is now open.
Good morning. Thanks for the question.
Good morning.
Maybe first up on the Dymatize business, Darcy. Your explanation on the pause and reevaluate makes a lot of sense, but are you able to get a read from that dynamic to the extent that, you know, maybe it implies sort of an absolute ceiling on pricing for the category that, you know, maybe indicates more limited future opportunities for maybe creative innovation? Or do you still find a high willingness from the consumer to pay for differentiation, and this resistance is just more tied to the rate of pricing over a short-term period?
I really think it's the latter. You know, this category, as you know, just has taken a ton of pricing. I mean, I think on average, pricing is up 25%-30% in a very short period of time. I think that that's why I kinda called it, you know, temporary sticker shock. What was interesting is it was truly temporary because what we saw is consumers kind of lean, I mean, my view of it is that they saw it, they paused, they went back and did some more research, and then came back. Again, now we're seeing pretty consistent consumption, but higher 20-serve, lower five-pound.
The only other dynamic I would say is, you know, we are seeing some of those, I don't know, you know, maybe lower value consumers or less loyal consumers, where in channels where they don't have the option of multiple different Dymatize sizes, we have seen some, you know, a small percentage go to less premium options. I think my take on that. I think that makes, you know, sense. You guys are seeing it across other categories with private label. In the powder category, we see some movement to private label, a slight increase of market share, but more often just going to kind of less premium branded products.
Okay, that makes sense. Thank you for that. A follow-up for Paul on gross margin. Can you quantify the impact from the network inventory inefficiencies or the imbalances this quarter? I think it was like 200 basis points last quarter. As the new supply ramps, how quickly do you think you can get that network headwind to moderate? I mean, I'm just trying to get a sense for the opportunity to recover gross margin from supply chain normalization as opposed to just waiting for commodity deflation to set in. Thank you.
Sure. Yeah, I'm happy to report that the inefficiencies we saw improvements on that front this quarter, so it definitely peaked in the second quarter, and we saw it come back dramatically in the third quarter. It was less than 50 basis points headwind in the third quarter. We'll still see some of this as we have from time to time imbalances within, say, a flavor or a product. We expect it to moderate as we go forward, and we've really pulled down our expectations for those inefficiencies as we continue on.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you. Our next question will come from Ken Goldman with Bank of Montreal. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning, guys.
Hey, Ken.
Morning.
Just quick question. I don't know if you said this. What gave you the confidence to actually raise the EBITDA, and does that create a new base from which? Because I remember back in the day when you were able to get a higher EBITDA, you kinda came back down once the new capacity. I'm assuming that this EBITDA is here to stay. Just, I guess that's my two-part question.
Do you wanna hit that, Paul?
Well, do you wanna hit the increase, I guess, from in there.
Yeah. From a guidance standpoint, Ken Goldman, sorry. You can tell we're not in the same spot. From a guidance standpoint, it really was factoring in Q3 actuals. That we typically tighten the range in Q3. We did on both net sales and EBITDA, and we've seen some favorability throughout the year. You know, do you wanna hit kind of going into the future, Paul Rode?
Yeah. I mean, we still feel good about, you know, delivering EBITDA margins within our algorithm. We've, you know, we're in the neighborhood of 19% this year, around that last year. As we look forward, we continue to believe that we can deliver EBITDA margins in that range. You know, we'll see as we move forward of how inflation plays out and where there might be expansion opportunities, to, you know, expand that as we go forward as well, depending on levels of investment behind the brand marketing activities. You know, we still feel good about our ability to continue to deliver EBITDA, strong EBITDA margins going forward.
I guess, is there a giveback of EBITDA in 2023, given the smaller production, or does this become a new base from which we kinda continue to grow from?
Yeah. If your question is, obviously, EBITDA margin's over 20% this quarter, we would not expect that to continue going forward, partially because we have further inflation coming. But no, we're targeting still more to be in that, you know, on the higher half of our algorithm, which is 18%-20%.
Okay. Can you just, one quick one. Can you just remind us exactly the cadence of capacity coming online in 2023? I'll leave it there. Thank you.
We have three new co-mans coming on in 2023. We have a small one in the first half and two major co-mans coming in in the second half, actually Q4. We always know it's back-end loaded because of the two major ones are greenfield facilities.
Sure.
Those take, you know, two-plus years to build. They're on track. We see pictures all the time. The production, basically, if you're looking at, you know, the quarters in 2023, the production grows every quarter.
I appreciate it. Thank you, guys.
Yeah, thanks.
Operator, we cannot hear you.
Okay.
Perhaps Ken was the last one.
We show two in queue, but, okay. We're showing no other additional questions. Thank you all.
Thank you.