Good morning! We're gonna kick it off with Black Rifle Coffee. Excuse me, sorry. Here today to tell you more about their strategy is the CEO, who the team calls Monz, the CFO, Steve Kadenacy, the Chief Information Officer, Chris Clark, and the Chief Revenue Officer, Danya Kennedy. With that, take it over.
Thanks, Dawn.
Yep.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you. We'll see if we get that at the end. No, thank you all very much for being here for the first meeting of the day. It's a real honor to be here. Chris Mondzelewski. So I'll start with some introductions of myself and the team, we'll get into the, into the content. So I have been at Black Rifle about a year now. I came here early last year, actually met the founders. At the time, I was the Chief Growth Officer for Mars, and I had been working for the few years prior to that on strategies inside of Mars and integrations of founder-based companies. And I started to develop a passion for working with these types of companies. That was in the pet food industry. We had some very successful acquisitions.
Of course, like anything, we had some failures, but most of all, I learned to love these founders and the kind of passion they had for their business. So when I got a phone call from Black Rifle, which was a company that I was already personally passionate about as a veteran myself, I had to follow up on it. I spent, you know, my first meeting in Salt Lake City. I met all three founders there. It became very clear to me that not only was the mission itself an impressive one, but the business model behind it was actually incredibly sustainable. Long story short, you know, I decided this was something that I really wanted to go spend the next chapter of my life on, you know, bringing that to life.
With me, you know, I'm incredibly lucky to have pulled together a management team that I think is really overweighted, you know, when you think about a $400 million revenue run rate business. And I think a lot of that is again, the mission behind our company, right? And the type of talent we're able to attract. So Danya Kennedy is our Chief Revenue Officer. She comes with incredible experience at both large and small company, which is a facet of many of the folks inside of Black Rifle. Her experience... Sorry, I'm gonna flip forward here. Her experience is across, you know, you can see Reckitt, Mars, but then also a number of startups that she has decided to go and really, you know, take some risks on, building her own skill set around.
So she'll talk about quality growth and how we grow the company, not just from a, a percentage standpoint, but really from our ability to go create and capture profit pools in the market. Chris Clark is our head of both technology and supply chain, and again, it is awesome that we have someone who has a background, experience in both. As you think about supply chains of the future, you all know this, that is what it's gonna be defined by, right? We sit at a point right now where we can define what we want that next five years to look like.
We can define our journey to $1 billion, to $2 billion, and Chris has the type of experience we need to understand how we build a supply chain that is based off of, you know, technology and the ways that it needs to be. He'll be talking about our journey of margin optimization and how we create a profitable model underneath all of this. Then finally, Steve Kadenacy is our CFO. He'll close things down. I'm still not 100% sure how Evan and I convinced Steve to join us. Steve was living the cushy life of an investor, a pretty successful one at that, you know, but we convinced him to roll the sleeves up, come down and join us in Salt Lake City.
You know, all joking aside, it has been a real gift for me, both professionally and personally, to have a CFO with this type of experience, right? 12+ years in the public company world as both a CFO and a CEO as well. So, again, very experienced team. They'll all be, you know, presenting today. Before we do that, though, I want to spend a little bit of time on our brand. At Black Rifle, our brand is really everything, and it starts with the founders, as any successful founder-based company, I think, does. And the founders, for those of you that don't know the story, you know, Evan and his partners, you know, they were all Green Berets, Rangers, CIA contractors, serving overseas in many, many different markets around the world.
And, you know, they learned the concepts of guerrilla warfare. Those concepts are really what they brought into how they built this company as well, right? I, I love to joke with Evan, I said, "You're probably the only guy on earth who is both an expert in guerrilla warfare and guerrilla marketing." But those early years of guerrilla marketing, when we were able to build what we have now, a 12.5 million owned audience, right?
So across our social platforms, across our subscriptions in DTC, 12.5 million people have voted to say, "We wanna be part of what you do, you know, with your mission, that we're gonna subscribe with you." You know, that comes from that grassroots ability to build the brand, and we're going to ensure, you know, that we carry that forward culturally as we think about how we expand the business. That authenticity back to the community, you know, plays an enormous role in that. On top of that, you know, as Evan went on this journey around the world, he developed a personal passion for coffee and an expertise in coffee, right? All the different markets, you can imagine the markets he went to, the types of beans that he was exposed to, the roasting methods, the extraction methods.
And so as he came back to the U.S. and created a company in a manner that he wanted to deliver the best coffee experience on earth, we've held that true to our heart. So we've expanded into many different types of products now. We deliver coffee in all the different forms that are out there. We hold that quality true to what we do, because if we deliver that super premium quality, we ultimately can be charging super premium prices, and that has thus far delivered an extremely successful business model, which Danya, the team, will be talking about. And then finally, you know, when you build this model, it all comes round because, yes, it starts with the mission, it starts with what we want to do to be able to support the veteran and first responder community.
The way we do that is by building a great business, and as we build that great business that's able to ultimately create shareholder value, it works symbiotically to come back around and make our mission that much bigger. So now we're going to go into the different facets of the presentation. As I said, you know, Danya is going to be talking a bit about our consumers, customers. Chris will talk about that journey to a 40%+ margin. We all are CPG veterans. We understand the need and the value of what a 40%+ margin in the CPG world will deliver for us. And then ultimately, Steve is going to talk about how we bring those pieces together to a healthy bottom line, cash generation, and ultimately shareholder value. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Danya.
Thanks, Monz. As Monz alluded to, my name is Danya Kennedy, and as he, you know, as he talked about, I've got 20-plus years of experience in both really small and large CPG businesses, and everything from startup to multibillion-dollar mature businesses of scale. I've done that not just in the U.S., but also in Europe. But one of the things that I would tell you is that, you know, in all that experience, I've never had, honestly, more fun than I've had sitting up here with these three gentlemen, and I've never been more proud of the work that I've been able to contribute to. So when, you know, when Monz called, he's one of those people for me, and I'm sure you all have these, right? He's one of those people that you drop everything and you pick up the phone for.
And as he talked to me about the opportunity, and I started doing my research, I really quickly realized that this was something I just couldn't pass up, because what we do makes an impact, and what we do matters. And, you know, there are organizations, you know, all over this world really trying to create something that is truly authentic and truly genuine, and that resonates with their consumers and their shoppers, and they simply don't have the magic that we have at Black Rifle. And so it's incredibly fulfilling to get up and get out of bed every single day to do this. And you know, one of the other things that Monz didn't necessarily mention is that I've also had the opportunity to work across virtually every single revenue stream.
And so that's what I want to take you through today, is the prioritization of where we're spending our time and energy in 2024 and the revenue channels to bring that to life. So we're going to spend a little bit of time, as you might imagine, talking about the wholesale channel, the food, drug, and mass business, as well as convenience and gas, is the growth engine and where we see this business continue to take off for the foreseeable future. And it's, you know, it's clearly illustrated in the bar or the pie charts on the right. That yellow bar, you can see we've more than doubled our food, drug, mass, and convenience business from 24% to 61% of our revenue over the course of the last few years.
We will also touch on our direct-to-consumer business, as well as what we lovingly refer to as our outposts or our retail coffee shops as well. But before we dive into that, I think one of the things that I find most exciting is that we've really only scratched the surface of the shopper and the audience that we can reach. We know that 94% of the U.S. population wants to support veterans and first responders. And within the population that's aged 18-64, which is 203 million, we've been doing significant research as of late, quantitative research, to truly understand that shopper that we have and we can reach, and that equates to about 57% of the coffee drinkers that live within that 203 million, which equates to 115 million people.
And while we're quite proud of the people that we've already reached, Monz talked about the 12.5 million owned audience that we already have and the founders have built. We're also converting 2.4 million through our various channels today. You can just see the massive headroom that we have yet to go and how exciting, that, that is for all of us, right? And, you know, as we think about that audience, what we also know is we want to be able to convert them and provide our coffee wherever it is that they want to shop. And so that's why it's so critical that we now take this step and truly push into the food, drug, and mass channel.
One of the things, you know, when someone asks me like: "What do you do for a living?" I will often describe it as it's, you know, my job to create a compelling selling story to drive people, categories, and organizations to explosive growth. Categories, obviously, in this case, being coffee, organizations being Black Rifle, clearly, that's what I'm here for, right? But also our retail partners, and there's a nuance in building credibility and trust with retail partners to help them drive their category growth, agnostic of brand first, and then the role that we play within it. And so when I look at this chart on the left, which I'm going to walk you through, it's really humbling to see how we've been able to disrupt what is a rather stagnant category.
What you see here on the left is you've got three time periods: the last four weeks, the last 13, and the last 26 weeks. That yellow bar is total XAOC. For those of you that aren't playing in Nielsen every single day, all day long, XOC, XAOC stands for Extended All Outlets Combined. That's food, drug, mass, it's club, dollar. Really, it's everything except convenience and gas. And you can see the coffee category in XAOC is relatively stagnant, at best, growing single digits at the moment, and improving as you get into the more, the closer time periods. The next bar, grocery, is the Albertsons, the Safeways, the Krogers of the world. You can see very similar performance, single-digit growth, if you will. And then that green bar is Black Rifle Coffee within XAOC.
Again, this massive disruption has taken to what, again, was a rather stagnant category. I think the thing that makes this even more impressive is that we made a very strategic initiative and focus to drive this in one particular retail partner to start. We did that by design so that we can ensure that we could deliver the supply metrics and meet their needs at a superior level, and that this was gonna be viable in the market. What you see on the right is, again, the coffee category, but this time you're looking at ACV or All Commodity Volume.
And if we take that yellow bar, which is again, XAOC, food, drug, mass, club, dollar, you see that we were pretty level because we were playing, again, strategically in one partner, and then start to see this massive tick up. So the green, the green line is highlighting BRCC in grocery. So as we entered in Q3 of last year, our first grocery partner, you see this massive hockey stick. And again, it's only just the beginning. So as we've reported on our earnings call, we're in 14 retail partners now and all of their various banners across the United States, but we've got massive room to grow. And it's, it's working, right? We've built a $100 million business.
We've been very lucky and humbled to carve out a 4.3 share in the coffee category in our largest mass partner. We're their number four brand in bagged coffee now. And again, as we ventured grocery, which is just a couple of months' worth of data, we've quickly cracked the top 10, become the number six brand, and growing in 12-ounce ground coffee in that partner. And we've got the portfolio to do it, and Monz talked about this. We can play in mass across the 24 ft to, you know, 40+ ft shelves. We can fill that with bagged ground, whole bean, K-Cup, and we've recently launched into cold brew and instant coffee that's also performing well.
And then we have a more modest, I would say, right-sized range that we're focusing on as we go into grocery to fit the more modest shelves of 4 ft-8 ft and maybe a little beyond in the grocery customers. If we switch gears now, and we talk about convenience, the convenience and gas channel. As the title suggests, RTD or Ready To Drink is an explosive yet still nascent business for us. We're actually quite proud of the underlying results that we've been able to deliver in this business behind six core SKUs. And of those six core SKUs that we've launched back in March 2020, four have quickly become top 35 products. And again, you can see we're growing 4x the rest of the category in ready to drink coffee.
We're the number three brand with the likes of Starbucks and Monster, and we've got a 43% ACV. We will continue to focus in this space around improving our margins and our demand forecasting capability, which Chris is gonna touch on in his section here in just a moment. And we know that this is also important and integral for the future innovation and where we believe this brand has the right to continue to grow. But let's not forget, like, what I would like to say is the heart of our business and where this business really began, and Evan and his team built to become the, you know, the number one coffee subscription business in the world.
We love the direct-to-consumer space because it can be our playground, and we can create that Black Rifle unique experience on our direct-to-consumer website, like we can't simply do when you're standing in front of a grocery store shelf. We can provide unique coffee, curated experiences. We can provide merchandise, accessories, media, and content to the 231,000 coffee subscribers that we have and that 2.4 million that we're converting here. And we'll continue to test and learn and use it as our playground to make sure that anything we launch into the future is viable with our most loyal shoppers. And lastly, I want to touch on our retail business again, which we lovingly refer to as our outposts.
We're continuing to remain focused on how we create the most optimal, true, authentic BRCC experience for our 18 company-operated outposts, our 17 franchise outposts, so that they can continue to experience the year-over-year growth that we have been experiencing. We will spend more time in this space to ensure that we truly are making that unique experience, something that when you walk into a Black Rifle Coffee Shop, you know it, and it's differentiated from any other coffee shop. And we'll be putting some capital behind that into 2025 and beyond. But with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Chris to walk you through how we're gonna become even more margin accretive.
Okay, excellent. So I'm Chris Clark, as Danya mentioned. I've been with the company almost two years at this point. So I've been given the opportunity to kind of leverage my 30 years of technology and operations experience to drive kind of the efficiency we need in that space from a risk and opportunity perspective across kind of process, data, technology, ways of working. And so with that backdrop, we've kind of leaned into the initiatives that we need to drive gross margin holistically at the company. And so what I would tell you is we're very confident in achieving the kind of long-term goal of 40%+ margin growth. You know, why are we confident about it? Well, the core of our gross margin is you know, up and to the right at this point.
We feel good about that at the core. We have had some one-time, non-standard, issues. If you look at Q3 in particular, that's really about managing demand and supply effectively, so that, you know, gave rise to raw material, finished goods, write-offs, and incremental costs associated with some of our contract commitments. But going into 2024, what we've done over the last several months is we put in an integrated business planning process, right? Looking at portfolio, demand, supply, a very, very robust program that's given rise to significant improvements already. So if you look at where we ended in July of 2023, we were at $110 million in inventory. We have line of sight to being $50 million-$55 million in 2024. So a lot of great work already happening.
So we're very confident that we're putting in the right processes and disciplines to manage demand and supply effectively. And I would tell you that we put together a cross-functional task force several months ago to drive into the initiatives that are required. We've actioned all of those initiatives, and we're actually in the process of looking at additional upside going into 2024. So what I'm gonna do is give you some color on each of the areas. So I would tell you, in the channel product mix, as Danya mentioned, we're pivoting into FDM. So from a pricing volume perspective, that is margin accretive across, you know, bags and rounds. So we're confident in that regard. We've done some great work there.
I would tell you also that the trade allowance that we've accounted for in 2024, both from a inventory and promotion management, significant improvement there. I've mentioned inventory, but there's also promotion management. A lot of great work being done on promotion management that gives us confidence. On distribution logistics, what I would say in supply chain holistically, is that we've offset inflation completely at this point, with the initiatives already actioned. On distribution and logistics, we're doing things like next-gen implementation, which goes live this week, which is a new Salesforce Commerce Cloud ecosystem. With that, we put in new capabilities features, so consolidated subscription shipments with a new order management system, which drives greater efficiency and cost savings on shipping. We've also optimized our co-man network, which is also driving lower cost.
So if you look at number and location of our co-mans, there's been a lot of great work done there. I would say, we also have put in a transportation management system, which is driving greater efficiency, in terms of looking at our expanding carrier options. On manufacturing, if we look at our co-man network, again, number and location, it's driving significant savings there as well. And then also in our owned and operated manufacturing facility in Manchester, Tennessee, we're driving a lot of productivity efficiencies there as well. And in overall sourcing, green coffee strategy, we're 82% covered at this point, going into 2024, from a C Market rate improvement over 2023.
We've also, our differential is fixed for 52%, which speaks to the quality of the coffee, the freshness, and at the same time, we're optimizing our carrying costs in the sourcing area. So we're looking at a 40% reduction year-over-year from a sourcing perspective. So again, obviously, looking at continued market opportunities when it relates to sourcing as well. So just want to give you some color on some of the initiatives we've already actioned going into 2024. So feeling very good about, again, long-term prospects for 40%+ margin. With that, I want to give it to Steve K for the bottom line.
Thanks, Chris. A little bit more background on me. Chris mentioned, I've been on the investing side for about the last five years. Before that, I was, you know, ran a large company, both from a financial standpoint and ultimately from an operating standpoint, and was part of the investment consortium that brought Black Rifle public. So I've been with the company in some form or fashion for almost two years now. And the reason I jumped in and rolled my sleeves up, as Monz said, was to come in and drive operational excellence within the company, which is kind of my personal passion and what I'm good at, is the execution side. So Chris Clark just spent some time on the gross margin. That's the first line of defense in driving profitability, is what you can drive to the gross margin line.
The level of... I mean, Chris ran through a lot of technical information there. The level of focus and, and scientific approach to our gross margin line across the entire supply chain has grown exponentially just in the last few months, and that's kind of line one. Line two is the rest of the P&L, and it's not just the P&L management, but it's how do you make sure that whatever things that you put in place are driving good cost management to capital allocation management, stays in place regardless of the person running the business? And that's what I'm focusing my time on, is making sure that we have not just taken the right steps, but put those processes in place.
I break them down into two broad categories: on the SG&A management side, which are number 1 and number 2, and on the capital allocation side, which is more about strategically how we're gonna spend our time and money, not just dollar capital, but human capital as well. Since I joined full time, we've taken a number of actions and executed, quite frankly, in an amazing fashion for any company I've ever worked for. There's an element of being part of this. The brand is authentic because the company is made up of veterans, people who've grown up in and around the military culture, first responder culture, and when we said we're gonna do something, we actually went out there and executed it flawlessly. The first was consolidating the headcount relative to where our growth was coming.
What we saw was an imbalance between where the company was growing, FDM, for an example, and the relative capital, human capital and financial capital that was going to that side of the business that was growing so rapidly. So we took headcount down in certain areas and reapplied it in others, and for a net savings, that was pretty significant. And that's really just to align where we think the future state of the business will be and make sure we're focused our attention and precious capital in that direction. The next was like, this is a young company. It was started 10 years ago by Evan Hafer and the other founders in a garage selling coffee. It's not uncommon for young companies to over-rely on consultants.
What we have done is make sure we have the right talent, this team is evidence of that, to be able to execute for ourselves, and we've taken out a significant portion of external consultants. Some of those were necessary to get the infrastructure of the business to where it is now, that can sustain us from $400 million+ of revenue to $1 billion, which a lot fell in Chris Clark's court here, where we now have NetSuite. We're on a great system. We now have Salesforce, we now have Workday, so we don't have to make those investments going forward, and as a result, those expenses have kind of rolling off the P&L. We talked in our last earnings call, roughly $30 million+ in cost takeouts just over the last four or five months. Second is allocating capital to core business.
We have taken, as Danya mentioned, a tactical pause on opening stores, which is primarily the largest CapEx component here. As a result of that and these cost takeouts, we are pivoting to cash flow positive in fiscal year 2024. We were actually on the last thirteen-week forecast—but actuals—inflected into cash flow positivity. As we said on our last earnings call, our free cash flow prior to debt service for next year is going to be greater than EBITDA. That is an incredible inflection point for a company of this size. Lastly, there is, and Danya's slides show this, an incredible amount of analytical data going into how we look at the market and the deployment of our marketing dollars. The sophistication in that is beyond what we have done in the past.
So there's a lot to unpack there, but we published these slides, and of course, anyone who wants to have follow-up meetings, we can delve into a lot of that detail. And with that, I'll have Monz wrap it up.
Yeah, so really quickly closing here, you know, look, what are we most proud of? Among those 2.5 million that are purchasing our brand today, right? That twelve, which is within that 12.5 million owned audience, we are ranked number one in loyalty in the first customer we launched in. We are number one in NPS across the entire coffee category. So we know that we have a proposition that works, right? As we look at 2024, it's about opening up the capital to be able to put back into the business and grow our advertising. We're going with bigger partners. We have a big announcements coming in the next couple of months as to other partners that are going to come into our business. We were able to convince Walmart in the early days.
We have many other large partners coming in across the business, and all of that ultimately will bring this proposition to life among more Americans. And you know, what gives me the greatest hope is 94% of Americans ultimately support veterans and first responders. So as we expand this mission, we know that ultimately we create more value, and that, that more value symbiotically comes around, you know, to what we, we do back in the mission again. So thank you all very much for being here today. Hopefully, I'll get time, and we'll get time to spend with you over the next couple of days.