Okay, we're gonna get started. Thanks for coming, everybody. My name's Jon Andersen. I'm the sell-side equity research analyst at Blair that covers Vita Coco. We're super pleased to have Chief Executive Officer Martin Roper and Chief Financial Officer Corey Baker with us here today to tell the story. Vita Coco was founded 20 years ago. It's pioneered packaged coconut water in the U.S. and remains the clear leader in the category, which is one of the fastest-growing categories in the beverage aisle in the United States. Company offers branded coconut water products in a variety of formulations, flavors, and packaging formats, designed to serve an expanding range of consumers, shopping occasions, and use cases. Before handing it over to management, I have a couple of housekeeping items.
Immediately following the presentation today, there's gonna be a breakout session with management in the Richardson Room. So I encourage everyone who has an interest to attend. Second, I must inform you that a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest can be found on the William Blair website. So with that, we're gonna start with a video, and then Martin will kick us off after that. So cue the video.
Two guys walk into a bar. Oh, you think you've heard this one? Think again. Two Brazilian women walk in, too, missing their home a little and their água de coco a lot. Cue fireworks. One guy, Ira, flies to Brazil and gets married. Then a few months later, the other guy, Mike, comes to visit, and that's when and where Mike and Ira had the idea for Vita Coco. They were drinking coconut water. Everyone was. It was packaged and sold in stores right next to bottled water and soda. Mike and Ira kept reaching for the coconut water. Everyone did. It was refreshing, delicious, and made people feel great because it was natural, unlike the stuff gunking up shelves back home. Cue light bulb, cut to Brooklyn. That's where Mike strapped on his rollerblades and created the U.S. market for coconut water.
From bodega to bodega at first, then borough to borough, then, before long, considerably beyond rollerblading range. Remember, coconut water wasn't anywhere, then Vita Coco was everywhere. So the big sugar water overlords caught a base case of FOMO and bought their way into the market. They figured they'd win. We figured we'd fight. To win a coconut water war, you need to have some things your competitor doesn't. For starters, way more coconuts. To get that, you need the right supply chain and strong relationships with farmers and factories. On top of that, early adoption by health and wellness trendsetters, plus the passion, hustle, and vision of a fearless underdog. And, yeah, when Madonna and Rihanna believe in you enough to invest early, that helps, too.
Fast-forward, we won and kicked off a healthy beverage revolution, one that proved there was a market for healthier beverage products and a demand for brands that made them the right way. Doing things the right way came, well, naturally. Pretty soon, we were cracking 2.5 million coconuts a day. We saw that Vita Coco was having a positive impact on the farming communities which grew and harvested our coconuts, and it went beyond buying a lot of coconuts. The industry was creating opportunities for those communities to thrive, so we partnered with local organizations and shared best practices with farmers so they could get more from their land, and we helped these communities build infrastructure and schools, doing it all fairly and sustainably, the right way. We called it the Vita Coco Project and realized there's more to our business than selling coconut water.
We learned that doing good can be synonymous with making profit. Now, we're going to redefine the market so that doing good is the only way to make a profit. We are doubling down and driving growth with our core brand, Vita Coco, while at the same time building a multi-brand beverage platform through innovation and exciting categories, along with a targeted M&A strategy to acquire brands that share our vision to support the health and wellness of the next generation. Instead of a chart about our market opportunities, let's try this. That's the market for what we make, people everywhere who wanna feel great, billions of them, chasing their own fireworks and light bulbs. We can't wait to meet them all, and we plan to do just that. Two guys walked into a bar. It wasn't a joke at all.
It was an adventure, and 17 years later, this is only the beginning.
Good morning. I'm Martin Roper, CEO of Vita Coco. To start, as while we're switching the slides, we have a message from our lawyers. If you wanted to read the small print when they pop it up there, it would say that we're gonna talk about non-GAAP measures, we're gonna make forward-looking statements, and you should take into account all of our SEC filings, company website, and all other information available, et cetera, et cetera. So if you want to read it, please come back to our website and read the presentation at a later date. As I said, I'm Martin Roper. My background is 24 years at Boston Beer, 17 as CEO, presiding over the growth and diversification of that pure craft brewer to a diversified alcoholic beverage company that it is today.
... I joined Vita Coco in 2019 with an expectation that perhaps I could do the same thing around a coconut water business, and I'm pleased to say, 5 years in, we've made significant progress in professionalizing the organization and in expanding our market share, and we're well-positioned to try and do a very similar model. I'm joined by Corey Baker, who is our CFO, who comes to us from Pepsi. 17 years experience in the Pepsi system, including a lot of international experience, some DSD experience, some juice experience, and so we're delighted to have Corey here. He's just completed, I think, 15 months and is still alive and still walking into bars, which we do a lot, as you sort of saw in the video.
When we think about, you know, our story, we're trying to build a better for you beverage platform, built around an authentic core brand in Vita Coco, which is the market leader from a brand perspective, both in the U.S. and in the U.K., which are two of our more developed markets, and we're trying to position it to be, the brand leader in less developed markets, which Corey will perhaps talk about a little later. We have a history of innovation in coconut water, both with launching coconut water in the U.S., but, introducing flavored coconut waters, introducing multi-packs, introducing cans, and also in exploring non-Vita Coco brands or Vita Coco extensions outside of coconut water. We have very strong, commercial capabilities, in the U.S. and in the U.K.
We have a very flexible route to market that we'll touch on during the course of our discussion today, and we have a differentiated asset-light supply chain, so that is both a moat on protecting our coconut water business, but also, we believe, a strategic advantage as it relates to private label and also competing in coconut water. And we'll also talk about that a little bit in greater detail. We are demonstrating strong top-line growth and strong profitability. The numbers here are trailing 12-month numbers, and we have a very strong balance sheet, over $120 million in cash and 0 debt at the end of the quarter. Our vision is to be the leading independent, pure-play natural beverage portfolio company, and to help our consumers eat a little better, drink a little better, and live a little better.
So very purpose-driven. We believe in democratizing health and wellness while using business as a force for good to drive positive impact in our communities. We're B Corp certified, Fair Trade certified ingredients, and since 2021, a public benefit corporation. We're also a B Corp, and our purpose is harnessing while protecting nature's resources for the betterment of the world and its inhabitants by creating ethical, sustainable, better for you beverages and consumer products that not only uplift our communities, but that do right by our planet. Our supply chain is designed to support that positive impact at all stages. Our priorities on the environmental and sustainability side are to protect natural resources, working with farmers to build thriving communities.
Our Vita Coco project has built 36 schools, delivered countless farmer education around how to grow coconuts, how to harvest coconuts, and how to cross-crop and increase the economics of the farms. And then we also, as our third pillar, have a champion of health and wellness for our consumers and our communities. And so those are the three things that we drive to try and deliver a positive impact. The company is aligned with key consumer trends, and those, you know, as we think about them, are consumer interest in clean ingredients, consumer interest in functional benefits, consumer interest in companies with positive impact, and we deliver all that at a premium price point, but at, it's quite affordable.
And indeed, over the last 4 or 5 years, has become more affordable because we've taken less price than most of the other beverage categories. So we think we're well-positioned to benefit from all these consumer tailwinds and to continue to grow the business. So why are we winning in coconut water? I mentioned that we have very significant share in our major markets. Both Coke and Pepsi entered the market about 10, 12 years ago through the purchase of ZICO or and O.N.E., and both have exited. And so we always get asked by investors, "Why is it that Coke and Pepsi can't do what you're doing?" And we think it's because we're singularly focused.
This is a smaller category that, frankly, is not that interesting to them at the scale that it is, unless they were to have our market share, and that our supply chain delivers a competitive advantage. We believe that they saw the opportunity for coconut water and then discovered that it really didn't fit their systems, and they exited, and they typically exited with significant less market share when than when they acquired. So why do we win? We put it down to a strong brand, a supply chain that we believe creates a competitive moat, very strong e-commerce focus and execution at retail, and a culture of trying to win and trying to drive and trying to grow the category that is singularly focused on the category.
We have an authentic brand that is loved by a very diverse consumer group, and we'll have a little bit more data on this during the course of our discussions. You know, when consumers tell us what they like about Vita Coco, it's authentic, it's fun, it's refreshing, it's natural, and all of that plays into all the imagery that we use in all our social media postings. Our packaging and brand communication celebrates our natural roots and our sense of fun, and this is a very powerful combination in the beverage category. Coconut water is a very unique beverage. It provides hydration functionality, a little bit of energy from the natural sugar of the juice. Coconut water is a juice, and it can be used all day round in all day parts.
So you see it like a breakfast in smoothies or as a milk replacement on cereal or on fruit. We advocate, we push that through partnerships with brands like Bloom to basically advocate for using coconut water as a liquid base for a lot of functional beverage occasions. Also can be used as a pick-me-up from the energy and sugar perspective, but it also works really well in cold brew coffee as the water base. You can see our partnership with Bluestone Lane. Smoothies, and that's our Erewhon partnership with Becky G, the bottom left, in cocktails.
So at the end of the day, you can still use coconut water and mix it with your tequila, and you'll see Vita Coco branded cocktails at various higher-end bars. And then finally, after a night out, and the signage on the bottom right is signage at Las Vegas Airport during a Super Bowl weekend. But also, we believe that young consumers, and I know there are some young folk here, discover coconut water on Sunday mornings at college, when they're looking for hydration and looking for a recovery to the events of the previous night. And so we have a natural built-in discovery of coconut water functional benefits through urban myth and legend, and obviously, we're not making any medical claims.
Our supply chain is one of the sort of most interesting and oddest things about our business, I suppose. Coconut water is a by-product of the coconut processing industry, and the coconut is used for a wide range of cooking ingredients, beauty ingredients, and then actually some textiles and fuel. So the whole coconut gets used, and coconut factories are built in coconut-growing areas to capture the coconuts. You don't ship coconuts large distance, so you have these factories that are built in remote locations around the tropics. For many years, the coconut water was dumped. They would drill the coconut, and they'd dump the coconut water because there wasn't a market.
No one was willing to pay for packaged coconut water, certainly in those countries, which are obviously developing countries economically, but also no one had built a first-world demand source for a branded product of coconut water, frankly, until we came along. So when we came along, we basically offered these factories the opportunity to monetize the coconut water. We shared with them the best practices for how to produce it and produce it in a shelf-stable way with good quality controls. And we basically gave them sort of the icing on top of their cake and improved the profitability of the factories, and the relationships became quite dependent in some ways, but obviously to both parties' advantage.
In return, we obtain long-term contracts, many with exclusivity for the markets that we compete in, and most of them sort of renew partly because there is no one who can take that volume of coconut water from them when the contract comes up. We are the largest player, you know, globally, and so, we're in a great position just to roll them, and it's been a partnership. What we bring them is technical know-how, engineering support, quality control, and access to market for their products, and we basically treat them as partners, and if they have excess coconut oil, we will try and move it from them. If they have excess coconut cream, we will try and help them. So it's a very cooperative approach.
Our supply chain is low capital. These partners package the coconut water at the factory and load it onto containers to ship to our markets, and we take possession when it goes on board the ocean containers in most cases. So it's very asset-light 'cause the factories own the assets. We occasionally have loans to the factories to support their expansion, but it's a very low capital business model from a sourcing perspective. We source from multiple countries and continents to diversify our geographic, political, and/or weather risks and to create flexibility and some negotiating leverage, so we're very diversified across supply communities. We believe that our supply chain, at its current scale, is very difficult to replicate and very...
Anyone coming in would find it very difficult to scale a business to compete with us. I sort of mentioned that we deliver technical resources. We have a team of over 30 people in Singapore as part of our supply chain team. That includes engineers, includes a central lab, and it includes the logistical and ordering support and planning support for all those factories. On the left-hand side, you'll see that over the last, well, that's 3 years, our total cost of goods on a case equivalent basis has really not gone up relative to the inflation environment that most domestic producers certainly have experienced.
We point this out just to sort of make an emphasis both of our supply chain skills that we bring, but also the fact that we experience largely flat cost of goods. The other point on this slide is that private label is an important part of our business model. It operates, obviously, at lower gross margins than our branded business, but it is decreasing overall as a percentage of our business, and we expect that to be a long-term trend. But that said, we do like the private label business. It delivers scale to our supply, and it allows us to take more coconut water from our partners. We have deep relationships with major retailers in the US, and some of those are listed, but a very sort of slightly complicated route to market.
You'll see that about 50% of our route to market is DSD, about 50% direct to warehouse, and then a small bit that's broadliners. It also, our business is across all channels, and not all channels are tracked by Circana or Nielsen. So the channel breakout is on the right, and you'll note that the Circana MULO+C only tracks about 50% of our business. And so we just raised that because that does mean that there's stuff going on in the untracked channels that are hard for investors sometimes to understand. Over the last 12 months, Vita Coco has been driving the coconut water category growth and outgrowing it and gaining share. The major drivers of growth are multipacks, which has been the biggest driver.
Coconut water was built largely as a single serve, and certainly in food and mass, it was largely single serve up until about a year ago, and we've been trying to roll out 4 packs of 500 ml, 12 packs of 330 ml, and multipacks of 1 L. Some of our growth is coming from innovation. On the slide there is Farmers Organic and Juice, and then some of it is just from the core business, which remains strong even with the introduction of multipacks. From a consumer perspective, we use Numerator data. The last published Numerator hard data we published was last year. Numerator did a data reset, and we're still logging with them about what it means, but this is just designed to show you the trends.
We have very strong penetration to ethnic groups that are growing part of the population, and we're growing households, and we're growing buy rate. So the brand is very healthy. And finally, just before passing over to Corey, we have an experienced leadership team with a lot of tenure, and with an entrepreneurial founder who keeps our culture, you know, pointing north, but a very strong public company capability, and well-positioned to sort of future growth. And we balance that on top of a young, energetic, entrepreneurial, passionate, retail execution team that drives the business. And with that, I will pass over to Corey for the financial ones.
Good morning. Thanks, Martin. All right, we'll, we'll go through a bit of, of where we are today and, and where we're going in the future. And so if we look back from 2019 to 2023, we've delivered exceptionally strong volume and revenue growth, and you can see on a, on a revenue perspective, we've grown... Sorry, volume, 60%. That's a 12% CAGR over the last four years and revenue at a 15% CAGR. So as Martin touched on, not a lot of pricing compared to our peers. We're really delivering true household penetration and volume growth to drive the business. And gross profit has followed. You can see the ocean freight impact through COVID was a, a unique event that we don't expect to reoccur at that scale.
So from 2019 to 2023, we've doubled our gross profit, and then our EBITDA has followed, tripling from $20 million - $66 million through 2023. If we go to more recent performance, over the trailing twelve months, we've continued to grow net sales 12%. Gross profit is, has continued to accelerate, reaching 39% and EBITDA as well, at 16% of sales, has reached $80 million. Our cash has grown at $123 million. Martin touched on our asset-light model, and you can see on our balance sheet, we operate the business with $2 million of property, plant, and equipment, so virtually no capital to support the PNL. And so no debt. We expect cash will continue to grow into the future with $123 million ending the quarter. The balance sheet is in a very strong position.
And if we, if we look forward to this year, our, our current guidance coming out of Q1 was revenue of $500 million-$510 million. There's a few moving pieces in the year. We've transitioned out of some private label oil, so there's six to eight points of revenue headwind in the business, so the overall revenue growth is slower. That private label oil in some of the, the laps we have are lower margin, so you can see continued strong EBITDA growth of $76 million-$82 million, which is ranging from 12%-20% growth at the high end. So despite the softer top line from the headwinds, continuing to deliver strong EBITDA and, and strong cash flow.
So if we look forward at where we go from here, we're really excited about where our brands can go, and if we think about the categories we play in, we pull somewhat equally from sports drinks, flavored water, and juice. People looking for a more natural, functional beverage. It's a $30 billion addressable market in the U.S. at retail. Coconut water is approximately $1 billion within this category. Then you can see on the right, our household penetration has a long runway to grow. There's very common products such as hummus, cranberry juice, well above our current penetration that we believe we can continue to capture as we execute on our strategy.
And our long-term aspirations, if we continue to deliver growth, both domestically and internationally, is to grow our branded business in the mid-teens and reach an adjusted EBITDA margin in the high teens. From this asset-light model, this will continue to generate a lot of cash, allow us to support innovation, and over time, deliver M&A. This is rooted in a few things. One, our core strategies and our core objective is to continue to grow households. Growing households and then increasing occasions, which leads to buy rate, is what we've been executing for the last many years, and we expect to continue to execute. That comes from additional price pack offerings to serve new occasions, whether that's smoothies or alcohol, and innovation starting closer to the core.
You can see here organic, which allows us to offer a premium product with a bit cleaner label to certain consumers, and juice, which is a super exciting innovation. It's in a can that's about 30% of the category today that we traditionally have not played in. We're currently a 5% share of that portion of the category, and we expect we can continue to grow that aggressively over time. Then in new areas, still using the coconut, like Vita Coco Milk, and then over time, expanding brands beyond coconut. International and M&A are the next two legs of our long-term strategy. International is a super exciting opportunity for us. The category is very developed in the U.S. and very developed in Brazil, as Martin talked about the roots of the brand.
Internationally, we have a very strong business in the U.K. We're at over an 80% share of the U.K. business. We're really dominating the coconut water category. It's grown over 20% at retail last year. We expect that can serve as a base for Western Europe. We've recently, over the last couple of years, entered Germany. Germany is growing over 50% at retail, and we're gaining share, and we believe we can continue to grow this business through Western Europe and through Asia to be a meaningful part of our growth story over the long term. And then Martin talked about the organization we've built. We have a really strong organization with scaled resources in Singapore and London, in the US, that we believe can be leveraged for more brands.
We have strong balance sheet cash flow that we can use to acquire brands and continue to build our platform and build out the business over the longer term. So in summary of what we're looking to do and why we feel really excited about the future is we believe there's a lot of room to continue to grow households, build on the occasions, and bring in new consumers to the brand. We can innovate outside the core with the capabilities we have and build a broader beverage platform over the long term. That we can grow international and grow it faster than the U.S. to be a meaningful part of the growth, and then over time, finding the right brands. Brands with scale, play in a better-for-you beverage category that leverage our organization, can really help grow the business for the long term.
With that, I thank you. Thank you for your time, and I think we'll move to the next room for Q&A. Tom?
Yeah, I think we'll, we'll cut it there, and we'll move to the breakout room, which is the Richardson Room as well. Thank you.