All right, good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm Matt McGinley. I lead the investor relations team here at Black Rifle Coffee. I have two quick housekeeping notes before we begin. First, a copy of the presentation and press release with guidance that we will reference today is available on our investor relations website and has been filed with the SEC. Second, I'd like to remind you of the company's safe harbor statement. During today's presentation, management will make forward-looking statements, including guidance and underlying assumptions. These statements are based on expectations that may involve risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ materially. For further discussion of these risks, please refer to our previous filings with the SEC. Additionally, this presentation will include certain non-GAAP financial measures.
Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our presentation, which is available on our investor relations website. With that, I'd like to introduce two members of the Black Rifle team. We have Chris Mondzelewski, who's our CEO, and Steve Kadenacy, who's our CFO. With that, I'm pleased to hand it over here to Mondz.
Awesome. Thanks, Matt. I appreciate it. Thanks, everyone, for being here this morning at our first session of day two. We did day one yesterday, day one last year. I'm not sure which is better. Based on the bar last night, maybe it is better to be day one. Plenty of energy drinks out there in the hallway, down as you come out to the right. So if you feel the need, if I'm boring you that badly halfway through this, make a quick run, go grab one. I figure for every time I screw up on a page, maybe Steve's going to slam one. He's a big fan of them. So no, all joking aside, we have a lot to get through. Fortunately, we've got a good amount of time to do that.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to spend quite a bit of time up front. Some of you are familiar with our brand. Some of you are deeply familiar with our brand. We've got some great friends and allies out here. Some of you maybe are going to be hearing about it for the first time. And if I was in your shoes, particularly if I was an investor, I would really want to understand for a brand like us, what is the real story behind this and what ultimately drives differentiation in what are very competitive categories that we compete in. That's what I'd want to understand more than anything else. So we're going to spend a pretty good amount of time on that. And then we'll go through each of the pieces of the business as well. There will be more depth posted online later.
So you'll see all of these slides with some additional depth on them. So you can go back and you can look at that. And some of those slides, as a result, I'll move through a bit more quickly. So on that note, let's kind of just start at the beginning for it. This was a veteran-founded brand. It was started by three guys: Evan Hafer, Mat Best, Jarred Taylor. They came together after three different careers. They didn't know each other in the military. They did different things. I'll talk a little bit about some of the things they did a little bit later because it is important to what our culture inside the business looks like today. But suffice to say that while they were serving in the military, they all had kind of side hustles that they were working on as well.
And the most important of those side hustles was Evan's. He was becoming an expert in coffee. So as a Green Beret, some of you may be familiar with what Green Berets do, others maybe not. They're all over the world in strange parts of the world doing things to help protect our country. As he was doing that, and then in his time in the CIA, even more doing that, he was learning about coffee. Of course, he was doing his job out there, but he was also learning about coffee, learning about the beans, learning how to roast it, figuring out how to roast different bean profiles in the field, and becoming an expert on what true super premium coffee quality is all about.
So when he got together with his other two founding partners after they were out of the military and out of the CIA, they made the decision to bring to life this company through the lens of coffee. That's not why they created the company. All three of them were war fighters, meaning they were in combat situations throughout their entire career. Unfortunately, that means that all of them lost friends. And as that happened, they all made that commitment that as they came out, they wanted to build a business that would place a legacy against that. So this idea of building a company that was founder-based with founder authenticity, I'm sorry, veteran-based with veteran authenticity through it, that was the primary idea.
The idea of then building that around coffee came from Evan's expertise in that category and their acknowledgement that this was a strong category in the U.S. market. We like to joke that about however many 200+ years ago in Boston Harbor, there was an event that happened that really led to that coffee culture coming into America. So again, that's the story as to how it started, which then takes me to the second bucket here. Authenticity is everything for us. So think about what I said and how and why we built this company. This was built to be a legacy to what they did in the military service. We need to have that authenticity. That authenticity back to our veterans and to those that know veterans and love veterans, that is what differentiates us.
If we ever deviate off of that authenticity, that would be the number one issue for us as a brand. And therefore, again, as you're going to see, we construct the entire company around that. Premium positioned. Again, Evan's a coffee head. He was not going to allow a product out that he himself did not believe was at the absolute top of the market. So sometimes folks that are not familiar with our brand, they may be familiar with our media and our media strategy, and we're going to talk a lot about that because we're very proud of it, our brand building. But they may be less familiar with the quality of our coffee. We hold ourselves to an excruciating standard, which I'll get into later.
And that allows us to charge price points that are then building great business for us, better margin, the ability to be able to reinvest that margin. And then finally, the community-focused component. This is the mission itself. We build community. We work with the communities that we build around. So what then really differentiates us? The mission, clearly, so we talked about that, but there's other elements as well. We're choosing to play in large profit pools. So again, it's a two-sided thing. It's a large profit pool. Clearly, there are going to be well-capitalized competitors there. Clearly, there are going to be other entrants that we have to compete with. But the prize is there. In the categories we go into, the prize is there.
So if we can show differentiation and if we can build a reasonable share position, there is significant financial return that comes from the categories that we choose to play in. We have a very experienced team. He'll introduce himself in a minute. I'll let him do that. The rest of my team is out there in the market right now operating. They're more senior than you would typically find in a $400 million business because of the mission. They are attracted to that. They want to come to a company that is more than just financial returns. And again, that works for our consumers. It also works for our ability to build a strong team inside of our walls. And then finally, the types of partnerships that we choose to put together for ourselves.
And again, I'm going to go into this in a lot more depth, but we choose to find partners that are aligned with what we do, with our ideals, and that bring much more force to what we want to be able to do with our brand. So just a couple of numbers to set and orient everybody around the business if you're less familiar with it. About a $400 million business in revenue, high growth rate, close to 40% CAGR over the last few years. We're very proud of the third number. This, the business did not, coming into this year, have a 40% margin. Steve and I, the rest of the team, we knew that that 40+% margin was going to be key operating. I've been doing CPG for 20+ years.
There are very few categories I have operated in that you can make work if you're not in that range. You need to be able to reinvest in your brand, reinvest in your teams. So it was critical for us. We know we can push much higher than this, by the way, but to at least get over that 40 boundary from a margin standpoint. And then that led, of course, to our first year of profitability. We delivered over a 10% margin. We're very proud of that and will continue to drive that going forward. Most importantly with this, however, is we've done that without compromising this authenticity that I talked about. And the proof of that is in the next two numbers you see.
The Net Promoter Score, that may be a number you're less familiar with, but suffice to say, 78 is exceptionally high for a consumer packaged goods brand, candidly high for any type of brand in the market, and then we still have the largest coffee subscription business in the world. It's not the focus of our investment, and I'll talk more about that as to why, but it is still the largest coffee subscription business in the world at 190,000 subscribers. You see our different product ranges below that. We're going to go into all these in a little bit more depth, but first, I want to talk about our fans, and again, I've been doing this for 20+ years in CPG at Kraft, at Mars. I've worked on some incredible brands. I've never been able to talk about one of my brands as having fans.
And the reason we use the term fans versus just consumers is because they truly are fans. They are invested in what we do. We're going to show some numbers around this. They're not just invested in our products. They're invested in what we are as a brand. We bring badge value to them in the way that a lifestyle brand does back to the authenticity. We link them to something that they want to be linked to, whether they're veterans or not. Many of our consumers are not veterans. Many of our fans are not veterans, but they want a link to this community that we provide that. So as we talk to our fans, this is what they say they want out of products. We have that research database we can go to anytime that we want with the millions and millions of fans we have access to.
This is what they tell us. Premium, I already talked about that. We're doing that. Functional and convenient. As you think about how we're pivoting our resources, it's about putting products out there that are functional to the needs of our consumers. The energy launch plays a huge role in this. They love our coffee, but they're saying, "Hey, we're energy consumers. We want a product that plays in this refreshing space." And then convenience. It's on-the-go consumption. Again, this is not a new trend, but among our fans, it's a massive part of how they are consuming products themselves. Again, it's not an accident that we chose a major strategic partnership with, in my mind, the greatest beverage company in the world, Keurig Dr Pepper, because they give us access to that convenience, that on-the-go consumption.
And then finally, again, our fans hold us accountable to the mission and to the authenticity. That's a key component of what they are looking for. They play that back to us. So I talked a little bit about Evan's background as a Green Beret. Why is this important to us inside the business? It defines our culture. And it's really important. If I have one role, if I had to boil down one role as CEO, it is to ensure that we maintain that culture through the perpetuity of this business. As this goes into hundreds of millions and then ultimately a billion, we have to maintain that original culture that the founders put in place. I've had the great blessing of working with many founder-based businesses in my career based on what I did inside of Mars.
And if there's one thread that I would hold constant against the founder-based businesses that scale themselves out to success, it's that ability to hold that original culture in place. But it shifts. The way that Evan originally brought it is going to change as we go forward. And so we boil it down into these six areas. Small team operations were very flat. As we grow, we ensure that we keep the levels of decision-making tight. We have put process in place. We needed process badly when Steve, myself came in, and we've put tight, simple processes in to make decisions. But we want those teams to be able to operate fast, which then takes you to adaptability. We're going to adjust to the market very rapidly. Dr
Pepper acknowledged we were the fastest they have ever worked with when it came to commercialization of the products that we have partnered with them, and they've worked with many, many brands. We had energy commercialized in four months, and we are extremely proud of it. If you like energy drinks, go try our product. I will put it up against anything in the market, and we did that in four months. Clearly, we leaned on partners. We found best in the industry to help with flavor, etc., but we are going to be adaptable to be able to drive speed when we know there's a pivot that needs to be done. Intel gathering. I talked about our subscribers. We have a great Intel base already inside our walls. We do buy research occasionally, but it's great to have 200,000 subscribers we can talk to every day.
Force multipliers, our key partners, not just KDP, Walmart, UFC, Joe Rogan. We'll talk about the role that each of these play in making our brand feel even much bigger than it is already. And then, of course, for a brand our size, resource optimization. We're competing with much larger, more capitalized competitors. We have got to be very tight as to where we spend our dollars. And the final piece, arguably the most important, I said it already once, the people that work here really want to work here. They love this brand. They love this brand. And so there's a level of resilience and persistence that we know we get from them because it's not just about making money. It's about doing something bigger. And this is proof that we know that it's working. So that promoter score is one way to measure it.
Here's a better way to measure it. This is just subscribers, not people that view our media. That's a much bigger number. These are people that are subscribed to our social media accounts. And this is a staggering number compared to CPG brands. I can tell you all the brands I've worked on, Pedigree, Jell-O, etc., none of them have anything even close to this. And so again, that's a measuring stick for us that we're standing for something more than just products and making money around those products. So now let's talk a little bit about marketing. The brand is everything to us. So that authenticity is that center point. The brand is then what exhibits that authenticity. There's four areas we break this up. The first, creating brand fame. So we've got to feel bigger. You're going to see in a minute.
We don't have the budgets that our competitors do. We have got to find ways to feel bigger than what we really are. And we've done that on the back of a number of really key partners. Joe Rogan. I think you're all familiar with Joe Rogan, whether you listen to him or not. It's the most downloaded podcast in the world, 250 million downloads. Joe is a friend of the brand. He's not a partner. He's a friend of the brand. Yes, money changes hands between us, but he believes deeply in what we do. He learned about it many years ago from Evan. He got to know Evan, and he became infatuated with what we're looking to do to prove that a CPG brand can be more than just a profit generator.
For that reason, we get ridiculous amounts of value out of our partnership with Joe because he believes in it. He doesn't just do what we pay him to do. He believes in it. And his network believes in it. His network is wide. About a year and a half ago, Evan, myself, Matt, the two founders, we got a call from Dana White. He said he wanted to talk to us. Well, Dana had heard about it from Joe. Dana wanted to know why the UFC couldn't get involved in this. And again, I use these examples because while I can't, I'm not going to announce to you today some of the additional partnerships that we're moving into in 2025, it's going to be based on the same principle. We work with people who believe in what we do.
Yes, money changes hands on these partnerships, as has to happen in a marketing deal, but these are people who deeply care about what we do. The Jones family and the Cowboys are another example. The second piece, disrupting in store. So we're a super premium brand. We don't want to price promote. I'm going to show you in a minute. We price promote far less than our competition, which means that we've got to be more innovative in the way that we get our brand out there. You cannot rely only on your primary shelf. This is a new skill we've had to learn. Again, founded as a DTC business, grew up as a DTC business. Most of our revenue, as we'll see here soon, actually now in wholesale, this is a skill we've had to learn, and we do this through our brand and through our equity.
We build promotions that put the brand out, that build our mission rather than having to drive price promotion in order to get out in store. Yes, we do price promote. Everyone in grocery does at some point, but we want to be able to limit that number. The third area, what we call high-impact experiential, but maybe you know as grassroots marketing. This is really where the brand started. It started with Evan when he was roasting it in his garage, starting to send product overseas to forward-deployed warfighting units, and the reputation just built. I heard about it 10 years ago when that happened because of my roots back to the Marine Corps. There was this grassroots effort in building what Black Rifle was all about. We maintain this. We still send product all the time to forward-deployed fighting units because we want them to have great coffee.
We care about them, and we also know that it's an investment in our brand. What we've expanded here is we now do this within the walls of the U.S. as well. So I'm very proud to say that in 2025, we're actually going to be in many of the ladders, many of the fire department ladders in New York City. Other cities we're working on as we speak. The NYPD has Black Rifle Coffee. Again, many other police departments around the country we're working on. We care deeply about these communities that are linked to what we do with the veteran community as well, and it pays back to our brand. It's an authentic way for us to be building brand exposure. And then finally, innovation.
Energy is probably our biggest example of this, but behind the scenes, we are continuing to work innovation ideas as we know that we need to be on top of the market when it comes to this. All right. So we are a brand that sells culture. I'm going to now pause for a minute. I'm going to show you a little bit of that. I want to take a bit of a step back. I'm a marketer at heart. I love marketing. I love brand building. Coming to this business has been a dream for me. And real quickly, what I want you to see in these two videos I'm going to show you, building a brand is in itself quite simple. You need to build an emotional connection to someone, and then you need to apply your brand to that.
That will then make that brand stick in their brains, and that is what we do at Black Rifle. Generally speaking, there's kind of two ways to do this: how do you drive emotion? Make someone laugh, make someone cry. We do both, and we do it through the lens of our community. So, as you think about the veteran community, it's a very, very serious job that you're doing out there. There's a high level of emotion, and as a result, we have emotional content that we put out in the market. There's also a goofy side of it. There's a let your hair down and just relax side of it, and that's barracks culture, the term that the military will use. We do that side as well, so some of our marketing is flat out ridiculous.
And we're proud of that because, again, it brings that authenticity to life. So I'm going to show you a reel. The reel is going to be a little bit the crazy energy-driven side of it. It's going to be splashes of different things we do. And then I'm going to show you a video that we ran during the Olympics. We worked with NBC. We got some very high-profile placements, and they were very, very proud to show this video alongside us during the Olympic coverage period. So with that, I'm going to run them. All right. Go straight into the second one here.
Sorry. Oh, shit. For the moments we will never get back. Daddy. To see the light in their eyes, the unwavering love, our past, our present, our future. It's why we fight. It's why we stand.
So again, two very different images coming from the same brand, but this is what builds our authenticity. One of the things I'll tell you about these is that nearly every single individual you saw in these ads is either an employee of ours or a family member of an employee of ours. So the last ad you saw, Clint Trial. Clint is in our marketing department. He's a marketing manager. Clint was in a clandestine part of the Marine Corps. He served for 23 years. On his last mission, he stepped in the wrong place. He had his legs blown off. He's been part of what we are as a culture since that moment when he came inside of our walls, and he wanted to bring his family into that ad to create that ad. That's the way we like to do things because, again, it's about that authenticity.
If we just put actors up there portraying it, it's not as deep as us putting the people who work within our four walls into these ads. So that is what we strive to do. By the way, there'll be links in the presentation online. You can see a lot more of our media on all of our social sites if you want to see more of it. So I mentioned a few of these numbers. Let's look at them real quick. I'm going to start to speed up here a little bit as we get into some of the business segment slides. So you'll see here, this is the spend profile. We're very proud of what we've been able to do from a brand building standpoint. We've done that at a much smaller budget than our competitors.
If you look at the kind of growth rate we've driven, comparable to a Celsius, but at a much smaller percentage of our overall revenue. And then, of course, as you compare that to some of the bigger players we compete against, you can see why a KDP was coming to us to say, "Look, this is a partnership that we can drive together on this. We will be able to bring you more resource." And of course, we bring the brand that we believe can drive the growth that is needed in the market. And then this is from a promotional standpoint. I talked about driving equity promotion in store. Well, you can see why. We're going to promote less than our competitors. We want to be able to build margin on our business, but we also don't want to dumb down our positioning.
We don't want to be focusing our brand at low prices when this is a super premium product, and we want to train consumers as such. So again, we've been walking the walk on that. Real quickly, we don't really look at TAMs. I mean, we talk to our consumers, and they tell us where we need to go compete. But here's the great thing. TAMs aren't even an issue for us. We play in some of the biggest profit pools in the world. Again, I talked about this already. Coffee, functional beverages, there's plenty of room out there for us to compete. Inside of our walls, one of the things we'll talk about is we've already proven, and I'll show this in a minute. In many of the bigger retailers we've gone into, we've already proven that we can create a three, four share position.
If we create a three, four share position across the categories that we compete in, in the channels that we compete in, we're a billion-dollar business. That alone, that alone, we're a billion-dollar business, and we've already proven that we can do that in major retailers, so that is why we are excited to be playing in these big spaces because it gives us that opportunity to compete and build a scale business rapidly. Quality. Again, I've talked a little bit about coffee. You see our two different coffee segments on the top. You've got our grocery there on the left, our exclusive coffee subscription, which is only available online. We still grade every single bean that we put in a bag, that we put in a pod, that we sell. We want to ensure that our bean grading is higher than anyone else out there.
Any other super premium brands out there, we're going to be higher than that. So if you buy a bag at Walmart, it's going to be a higher graded bean than what we compete with in Walmart. If you buy a bag online in our exclusive coffee club, it'll be the best beans in the world, period. We won the gold medal this year in the blind tasting competition globally. We won both gold and bronze. Those both came out of our exclusive coffee club. So again, we have the ability to source the very best when it comes to coffee. What we've had to do now is learn how to apply that same ideal to what we do in our other categories. So RTD, whether it's coffee or energy, these are different. But in the case of coffee, we're using the best extracts.
We actually use the very best dairy supplier that uses regional milk because milk is so important to the profile of that product. In the case of energy, we're using a profile that actually our consumers helped us design. They wanted a profile that was largely natural, natural from a caffeine standpoint, natural from a vitamin standpoint, and zero sugar. So that was the profile we put together, and again, you all should try it yourselves, so the business has pivoted dramatically. I just want to give you a bit of a snapshot as to what that looks like. I talked about it already. You see the DTC, largely DTC there in 2019, some specialty wholesale customers starting to come in, and then by 2023, 2024, you can see that the business is largely split.
Of course, going forward, you're going to see that darker brown portion become bigger and bigger as the business continues that pivot into the wholesale and convenience channels. From 2023 to 2024, you'll see a bit of a flattening on the growth profile. Again, back to fixing the fundamentals of the business, building the margin to invest, getting that pushed up over 40%, getting the overheads under control. We really wanted to get the business into a strong fundamental position, build a better business before you build a bigger one. As we then get ready to go into 2025 with our energy launch, where, of course, we're going to go back onto an explosive growth profile. Here's a snapshot of what that wholesale build has looked like for us up to now, or FDM being the other term for those of you in the industry, food, drug, and mass.
So you can see the steady ACV or distribution build. You can see the retailers down below that we started with. We have many more than this on now, but these were the first ones to go out. And then you can see the results. We've been able to drive substantial growth in our categories during this period. And I've said this before, the 48 ACV, we're going to have every ability to get to what I'll call full national distribution that all of the brands that we compete with. We're the number eight coffee brand out there. We're going to get bigger and bigger as we drive more distribution. Given that we have the ability to play in that top four or five brands, we will be nationally distributed. We're having those conversations with every retailer. We just launched in Kroger as an example.
We're super excited about how that's going already, and you're going to see that continue to grow as we go into next year. Here's a couple of quick case studies as to what that looks like. I wanted to keep retailers' names out of this. This is a very large national retailer. You'll probably back into who it is. They actually came to us years ago and said they believe that we could compete in wholesale. I give some of their senior management a lot of credit. They were the first ones to have that conversation with us about what that pivot looked like coming off of DTC into wholesale, and we've had a fantastic partnership with them, driving up over $100 million in the first couple of years and then maintaining that four-share position that I talked about.
So we've maintained that despite distribution to the rest of the market. As we've expanded to all these other retailers now, Albertsons, Kroger, many others, we've been able to hold that four-share position. And the one stat I'll call out to you as to what I think we're proudest of and probably most links to that success is the second box you see down, which is with that customer, we are the number one loyalty rating. When you combine qualitative feedback on brands that they care about, coupled with repeat rate, we are top of the category. And again, we're going to strive for that in any of the categories that we move into. I have a second case study in here. This is probably more normative of what you're going to see on other customers that start to come in the business.
This is a large but smaller than the first regional retailer. We launched with this retailer, as you can see, in Q4 of 2023. So we've now got one full year of distribution. And while they only accepted six SKUs out of the gates because these smaller retailers have much smaller shelf sets, they've made the decision already to expand to 15. Now, why did they make that decision? The retail game's not complicated. You need to have a higher velocity, and you need to have a higher margin profile for these customers. If you're making more penny profit on every SKU that is going out the door, those retailers are going to have a high incentive to want to put more of you on the shelf. And that's exactly what we did with this retailer.
That's the game that we're going to play with any of the retailers that we go into in order to ensure that we can drive that shelf set expansion as we go forward. Our RTD business. So I'm going to talk in a minute about our partnership with Keurig Dr Pepper, and we're very proud of that. It's going to be a huge unlocker for us. But I'm actually, in some ways, even prouder of our team on this. They built a $100 million RTD coffee business that is the number three brand in the United States without any partnership, just through scrappy hard work. Literally eight guys out on the street bringing in distributors, 200 different distributors, and scraping product onto shelves in the beginning, growing, growing, growing. And at this point, we have now passed Dunkin'. We are the number three RTD coffee brand out in the market.
And that's without any strategic partnership. That is what led to us then starting to have the conversations about how do you go even bigger than this? How do you take a brand that has so much power that it can do that on scrappiness and start to add the actual muscle behind that? And that's where the conversations with KDP came in. We talked to many different companies around what it might look like to bring partnership into our business. And we were blown away with these guys. We really were. We have a tight relationship with their management team. We like the way they look at things. They're big, but they're still pirates at heart. Those are my words, not theirs.
But they are the perfect partner for us in the sense that they bring the capability that we need, but they also understand our brand, and they understand what makes us different. So let me talk a little bit about the different aspects of this partnership. I've already referred a number of times to the distribution component of that. You can see the map on the right. This is the territory chart that we now gain access to, 180,000 outlets that we can kind of snap our fingers, and their drivers now give us DSD access to. A lot of hard work going into that. We're going to be leading with energy. That was a decision we made together. I don't know if you're following KDP. You'll see they're making some very big announcements about how they are putting more focus on energy.
We're going to be in the center of that. We're going to be one of the brands that they are going to market to compete with. And again, we're very proud of that. We know that our brand is going to stand up well against that, and it gives us that ability to compete at those even higher levels. What we know we can do scrappy, now we can do that with the power behind us of someone who is literally best in the industry when it comes to that distribution. There are other aspects to this partnership as well. We actually, probably six months before that, we started a pods partnership with them. You're probably familiar with this, but Keurig is the inventor of the pods. They are the very best still at making these. And so for us, this was an easy decision.
The quality was far higher than what we were able to do on our own through other co-mans that we had in the industry. We still make our own bagged coffee, by the way. We're very proud of that. But with pods, because we were using co-mans already, it was a very easy decision to go to the best in the business. And it's more than just manufacturing. They distribute to outlets that we don't want to have to build sales force against, office buildings, hotels, etc. They're going to make sure that our pods are out there getting into distribution to drive trial on the business that we wouldn't be getting otherwise. And then the centerpiece around manufacturing of our energy drink, it's actually separate from our distribution agreement. Over time, as we get bigger on energy, we may have to take on multiple partners here.
This is what many brands do. But we're going to start with KDP simply because they came through with the highest quality and the best cost out of the gates. And as you'd imagine, while it is two different parts of their business, the synergy helps a lot as far as communication as we think about how to rapidly build out that business. So this is a quick snapshot on energy itself. I'm not going to go into a ton of depth on it today. We're going to be learning tons about this. As you can imagine, behind the scenes, we are steering many of our resources to couple with KDP's resources and prepare for that launch that is happening as we speak in Q1, getting the distribution out there for the summer season. The build, however, is going to be slow.
We're going to start in geographies that we know we can go and really build out and that we can really go own. And we're going to do it well. And so again, we're going to take on what we believe we can take on with them in partnership, with the goal then being as we move into 2026 and 2027, we are in full distribution across the entire market. And again, we'll work hand in hand with them on what that looks like. But one of the things that we feel we've been good at in the past is choosing where we go when so that when we go there, we can actually go in with a level of force that builds our brand the way that we want to be able to build it. Final slide.
I got probably three slides left, but final slide on the business units themselves is the DTC piece. So DTC plays a very different role for us now. We still have a $100 million DTC business. Consumer behavior has shifted. Post-COVID, fewer consumers are going and saying, "I want to buy from individual sites." And that's fine with us, particularly the one-time purchases. We now have wholesale distribution. We have a great Amazon business. We have a great Walmart.com business. If people want to go drive their purchases there, great. We're going to be in full distribution, full partnership. The subscribers are where we focus here. The subscribers bring incredible long-term value. Our average subscriber is spending hundreds of dollars with us a year. But more importantly, they're invested in our business, and we can talk to them. We can learn from them. We can push them new items.
We can have them try them, give us rapid feedback so they're part of our whole mechanism as to how we go to market, and this is a piece that was different. When the business was founded, the entire business was around DTC. Now it is certainly a profit driver for us, but more importantly, it's going to be that research component that kind of keeps our consumers linked to us, and then final piece, our apparel. We're not an apparel business, but we sell an enormous amount, millions and millions of dollars of apparel, and again, it's because we're a lifestyle brand where people want to wear that brand. They want to show that they are part of Black Rifle, and again, for us, it's just a marketing engine. We don't build our apparel business in a way where we're looking to go make gobs of margin.
We build our apparel business in a way where it's high quality. People are going to wear it, and we get those free brand impressions that come with that happening. And again, a huge amount of that is sold online. We sell in retail as well. We have some great partnerships, including Bass Pro, where we sell a lot of our apparel, but primarily that ends up happening online. All right, so where do we go from here? Why are we so bullish? Why am I so bullish on this business? Well, I mean, I'm going to reinforce what I said upfront. This stuff is cool, but at the end of the day, the brand is why I'm bullish. If you compete in CPG, your brand is everything.
And if you don't have that, I don't care how many opportunities you might see from a math standpoint going forward, you're going to have trouble accessing them. But we believe we do have that brand. And more importantly, our fans believe we have that brand based on the numbers that I showed you. So now what do we do with it? Well, this is what we believe the roadmap is in a loose form. Nailing execution is first. Expand our shelf assortment, ensure that we have innovation across the categories that we're competing with already, and then, of course, ensuring that we're in all of those channels. So yes, we are widely distributed, but there are channels that we've not gone into. Food service is one example of that. We're having conversations behind the scenes as we speak. There'll be others as well. Our Outposts.
Our outpost is our term for our coffee shops. I purposely did not spend a lot of time talking about that today. We will. We're spending a lot of time in the background talking about our coffee shops, collaborating with our coffee shops, thinking about partnerships. Again, back to this idea of how we use others to make us feel bigger. Because those coffee shops are not only a profit driver for us, we've now gotten all of our 38 into the black as a whole. They're not only a profit driver for us, but more importantly, they bring our brand to life. So we will continue to slowly expand that as a part of how we build our brand and work in the background on what that potentially looks like as a massive scale opportunity for us in the future.
And then the final piece is adjacent categories and other places we can take Black Rifle. Again, we're very fortunate in the sense that we are a lifestyle brand, which means we don't necessarily only have to compete where we are today. We're proving that with energy, and we're going to be looking at other areas as well. And we'll do this in a smart fashion. You can't overextend your brand. We'll do it hand in hand with our partners, KDP being a key partner, providing us an enormous amount of research that we wouldn't have on our own to be able to make the types of decisions we need to make on where we need to go and how we would do that. Final piece, priorities going into 2025. Again, I talk these. Hopefully, nothing on here is a huge surprise.
Massive focus on our energy rollout coupled with that partnership with KDP. Continued penetration. We're only halfway done on our penetration of FDM, so we have huge business-building opportunities there. The innovation component. And then finally, Steve, he'll talk about this more. We're very proud of what we were able to do to build that fundamental middle of the P&L, that strong margin profile, that strong overhead profile. We have to maintain that. We have to be able to do both the center of the P&L as well as the high levels of growth that we know are going to be coming in 2025 as we start to expand into our new categories. So these are the focus areas. With that, I'm going to kick it over to Steve. He'll go into some more.
Thanks, Måns. So Steve Kadenacy joined about 15 months ago to come in and help Måns and the team really focus on the operational excellence side of the business. But that wasn't my first exposure to Black Rifle. I was part of the sponsor team that took Black Rifle public in 2022. And this slide kind of emphasizes, if you step back as an investor, and we've never sold a share. In fact, we bought more. It's like, what is it about Black Rifle from an investment thesis standpoint? There's a lot of things, and Måns just took you through, but if you step back at a high level, the company is only 10 years old.
Evan started roasting coffee in 2014 in his garage, and then expanded into the Salt Lake facility with a larger roasting facility, and then built the Manchester facility, which I'll get into in a little more detail in a minute, where we're now probably the highest performing coffee roaster around in a singular and a smaller scale. It's unbelievable what we've accomplished down there. From there, the business obviously started as a DTC business, but wherever they have chosen to penetrate, the brand has been super successful. It resonated to me back in 2022 or 2021 when we first started getting exposed to the company. Måns hit on this in a lot of different ways, but take it from someone who's not from a military background, although my father was in the Air Force, my grandfather's a Marine, my brother's a Marine, my brother-in-law is a Navy fighter pilot.
Why do these things mean so much to people? That's what enables us to get into these markets is the fan aspect of it, which I'm one. And most of our consumers are fans. It's just a fact. It's something that resonates differently. So when we went from DTC and we launched RTD Coffee, convenience, etc., it resonated. We talk about being a four or five share in RTD Coffee, but we're only 42% penetrated on the back of our own organic distribution network. So for a four or five share total in that 42%, we're actually like a 10 share. That, and as Måns said, in a guerrilla warfare capacity, because we're not advertising like our competitors, it's grassroots. It's our social media. It's our own media. Then the partnership with Walmart. We're a four share at Walmart. How does that happen? There's something different.
What I'm trying to point out is the brand has a unique quality that allows us to compete at a much higher level pound for pound, so you see on the chart on the right, we went from when we went public to mostly DTC, and you see this massive expansion in FDM and convenience. The reason I'm pointing out that brand's ability to expand is that we're now expanding into energy. Most of our customers are energy drinkers, and they've been asking for this. Some don't even drink coffee, but they want to hold a Black Rifle can, and it just resonates, so we have no doubt that this transformation of a DTC business to a DTC FDM convenience will continue in the future, and then the second to last slide that Måns talked about, all these other opportunities.
We get more ideas on a daily, weekly basis of where we could go than we can handle. And that was part of why I was attracted to come in and help at a more detailed level is to bring that discipline because growth at all costs is not where the business needs to be. It needs to be responsible growth so that we can fuel our own path and we're not dependent on anyone else. This shows you at a super high level how that has manifested itself on the bottom line. So the company in 2022, 2023 was not profitable, was not flowing cash. We've changed that around in very short order, which speaks to the execution capability of the culture within Black Rifle and also lays that groundwork for growing profitably going forward. And Måns alluded to this very quickly.
He said, "We have our sights on a much higher than 40% margin for a lot of reasons." And I'm going to go into those as to why. But first, let me just take you through how we got to the 40% margin from where we were in the 30s and the low 30s just over a year ago. As we focused first on that gross margin optimization, I mentioned the Manchester facility. Per bag, we've cut our cost per bag about 50% in the last 15 months. And that's just a focus on a team that is super dedicated and passionate about what they're doing on the coffee side, on the culture side. If you ever get down to Manchester, Tennessee, it's only about an hour or so outside of Nashville. Go down and check it out. They've got a little store.
We're not allowed to call it a store because it's not licensed for that, but you can buy merch and they'll serve you some coffee. But if you go through the plant, these people are dedicated in a way that you won't see in a normal plant. And that is a competitive edge. And people come from miles around just to visit it. I was down there with Måns about a month ago, and someone had literally just left a note on the door. It was about two pages long, someone who had driven by off hours and wrote a two-page note about why they go out of their way to come see Manchester as part of their lifestyle when they're driving through and how disappointed they were. They weren't blaming us, but they missed the hours and we weren't open.
Then the rest of it was just a story about their family and their relation to the veteran community. I highlight that because it really just brings out the fact that this is not a normal brand. It's sneaky good. If you wear a Black Rifle hat or a hoodie through an airport, someone will speak to you. They will come up and tell you a story. They'll tell you why it resonates with them. We have a Camo F-150 with Black Rifle across it, and I was driving it one day getting gas, and a guy walks by and says, "You work for Black Rifle? That must be the best job on the planet." That goes to being able to recruit people that are way more capable than the average brand has the ability to recruit because they get there and they want to make it work.
Second, SG&A management. Typical of high-growth companies, our SG&A was oversized. We focused on it starting in Q4 of 2023. We've been focusing on it the whole time, and as a result, we've lowered our headcount. We have internalized things that we used to outsource, consultants, other things, and built out a management team that has a backbone that can grow to be a much bigger company. Our marketing will flex. That's absolutely true, but we can support a much higher revenue business on the backbone of the core of our SG&A. On the far right is capital allocation. We also focused on this, and this goes to the discipline. We can't grow at all costs.
We focused on where we knew the low-hanging fruit and low capital expenditure growth is, which is in FDM, growing our bagged coffee in pods and center store, growing RTD coffee, and launching energy. These are things that will help us over time. I was missing on the gross margin side. As we shift away from the more complex RTD coffee, energy will be accretive to our margins on the gross margin line because it's less complicated. If you look at a lot of the companies in the energy space, they're running at 50+ margins. We have discipline. We're expanding our own capabilities, and we have a great margin mix tailwind. We expect that to continue. We expect to continue the discipline on the bottom line in the SG&A, and you will see that profitable growth continue. Just a little bit on our capabilities.
We have plenty of capacity. We have capacity to grow RTD coffee. We have capacity on bagged coffee. We're very disciplined in our purchasing on coffee beans, and we have Manchester, which with a little bit of CapEx over time, we could double to triple the size and output of that Manchester facility, and we've proven, which we probably didn't believe 15 months ago, that we can do it better, and then we maintain that quality, which is obviously core to our brand, so the punchline in our last couple of minutes here, we want to give three-year financial targets. We expect a 10%-15% top-line growth, which would bring you somewhere between $525 million and $600 million by 2027. We continue to drive gross margin up above 40% over time.
We won't expect that in 2025, largely because of the rollout of energy and the trade and slotting costs of energy will be dilutive to margin because it's contra-revenue. But that's okay because we see that longer term and the return of growth in the margin side in 2026 and beyond. Adjusted EBITDA will grow as well. As I said, we have a good backbone. We have growth of 15%–25% on the EBITDA line, which obviously should be greater than the revenues if we're true to our discipline. So with that, we hope that you all will join us in the breakout session for a Q&A. I understand we're not taking Q&A in this room, and we'll cut it off and hopefully see you next door. Thank you.