We're going to go ahead and get started. Good morning, everybody. I'm Jon Andersen. I'm the sell-side equity research at William Blair that covers consumer packaged goods. I want to welcome everybody to William Blair's 46th Annual Growth Stock Conference. We're here to help you have a great time, productive time. If there's anything we can do, please reach out. We have an awesome opening act here, with Vita Coco, and really happy to have the company's Chief Executive Officer, Martin Roper to my direct right, and Chief Financial Officer, Corey Baker. Vita Coco pioneered packaged coconut water in the U.S., and is the clear market share leader both in the U.S. and in key international markets such as the U.K. and Germany.
Coconut water is one of the fastest-growing categories in the beverage aisle, as more households seek out natural hydration alternatives and consumers choose coconut water for more occasions. As the market leader, Vita Coco is driving growth by expanding its product range and availability through the rollout of multi-packs and organic line, juices and cans, as well as coconut milk-based products such as its Treats line. Despite all the company's success, we think the company has ample runway ahead, both on household penetration and use case expansion. Before handing it over to management, a couple of quick housekeeping items. Immediately following the presentation, there will be a breakout session in the Jenney A room, so please join us for that. Last, I just want to inform you that a complete list of research disclosures and potential conflicts of interest can be found on the William Blair website.
With that, I'll turn it over to Martin to get started.
Thanks, Jon. Thanks, William Blair, for inviting us. A pleasure to be here. Before starting, a quick word from our lawyers, who would want me to assure you that it covers all the relevant aspects of what we're going to cover as forward-looking statements, et cetera. I'm Martin Roper, CEO of Vita Coco. I have over 30 years of beverage experience, 24 with Boston Beer, and now seven with Vita Coco. I am joined by Corey Baker, our CFO, who has also 20 years experience in beverage, primarily with Pepsi, and we're delighted to be here to talk to you about Vita Coco and share our story. We're a very special beverage company with a vision to be a leading platform for natural beverages to consumers, helping them eat a little better, drink a little better, live a better life.
We're obviously a natural beverage in coconut water, but our mission stems through to our supply communities. We're a public benefit corporation, we're B Corp certified, and we have a charitable foundation that focuses on raising our farming communities, sort of raising their economic standards, their educational standards, and also their own agricultural capabilities. We're a very unique sort of business with a very long supply chain reaching into the tropics. Currently, as a public company, I think we're also pretty unique. As a public company beverage, we're having very strong current performance, top line growth in the 20s, which is very unusual in beverage today, particularly sort of mature beverage categories. Coconut water was launched over 20 years ago in the U.S., so you could describe us as mature. We still think we're a little bit of a toddler running around and bumping into things.
We still have a long way to grow. The category is, we believe, in early stages of its growth and has significant upside, easily potential to double in the U.S. and as a business to get Europe to where the U.S. is today. It has a very attractive consumer profile, educated, health-oriented, young, and still growing. We benefited, as we'll talk about, from growth in households and velocity of households. We're the category leader in our major markets, so we have a very strong brand position that we'll talk about and a clear path for growth and for doubling the business. The business is also asset light, so we have a very strong balance sheet and a very experienced team with a lot of tenure and stickiness. We think we're in a very unique place as a public company, and very excited about the future.
I think it starts with consistently delivering what we said we're going to deliver. Over the five years since we've been public, we've delivered 14% top line CAGR, going to the midpoint of our guidance this year, and at 30% adjusted EBITDA CAGR, going again to the midpoint of our guidance this year. Pretty consistent delivery of what we said. Certainly some lumpiness with ocean freight around COVID. Otherwise, a very strong profile. We also have a very strong balance sheet, $202 million in cash at the end of Q1, no debt, and a very strong ROIC. We think this is a very unique profile in the public market space, and obviously one that we intend to maintain, and Corey will talk about our long-term financial metrics. Coconut water is a natural beverage. It's a fruit juice. Coconut's a fruit, obviously on trees.
Coconut water is right now in the center of a whole bunch of interesting consumer tailwinds, from clean ingredients to functional benefits to positive impact on society through a public benefit corporation. We also benefit from a very diverse consumer group with over-indexing to key ethnic groups like Hispanics, African Americans, Asians. All of this is a very strong tailwind for us as a brand, and we believe is a grounding for why this growth is going to continue, and we'll touch a little bit on this in the next few slides. Coconut water is also quite an interesting beverage because it can be used in a multiple of day parts. You can use it at breakfast, as a smoothie, or even as a milk replacement over fruit or in cereal.
It gets used widely as a hydration post-workout, which is really where it started because of the electrolyte properties. It can be used as a cocktail mixer. It's actually a great mixer with scotch. Instead of ice cubes, make your ice cubes with Vita Coco, please. You'll find it gives the scotch a very unique flavor. When you've done all that and you wake up the following morning, it's got this nice benefit of recovery, which frankly, is an entry point for a lot of our young adult consumers, is when they discover coconut water is on Sunday mornings after Saturday night, or on Saturday mornings after Friday night, or indeed on any morning after any night. That it really does help them rehydrate in a very positive way. It has 3x the electrolytes of the major sports drinks.
It's high in potassium, so it's also benefiting a little bit from some of the current consumer interest in looksmaxxing and de-bloating that's going on. We hear some of the guys laughing. Maybe some of the young ladies are laughing about what the guys are laughing about. There is something going on in diet and health with young male adults who really want a chiseled look, much like Jon Andersen here. The potassium content in the coconut water is part of that, and that is also part of what is going on. We have a natural beverage from a tree that is fulfilling real functional needs, and it's increasingly aligned with what's going on with consumers today, and that is driving very healthy growth. Where do we source from? We talk about sourcing primarily, right? I use the word primarily because obviously we're a beverage.
We source from all beverages, primarily from flavored waters, juices, and sports drinks. A little bit more functional. On a global basis, that's about a $125 billion category. That's obviously a subset of the total beverage. I think we estimate that coconut water is order of magnitude $3, $4 billion in that on a global basis. Again, obviously global numbers are pretty hard to deal with, and they're all estimates, so please take that for what it may. That's the category we're playing in, and we have opportunities to gain share from that category. There is real upside. We're a very small player in that sort of sector. Again, we're part of the total beverage sector, which is obviously much, much bigger.
Huge opportunities for future growth as we continue to educate people about the benefits of coconut water, why you should use it, how you use it, increasing occasions, and basically spreading the word. Lots of upside. The U.S. is our most mature market. As I said, we launched in the U.S. in 2004. Really saw consistent growth for the last 22 years. We sort of looked at it as we were going public and decided it was about high single digits, low double digits, volumetrically every year. There were some changes to that, and we saw that growth continue in the early 2020s. Starting in 2024, second half, we saw an acceleration, and we started to see growth in the mid-teens volumetrically.
That continued in 2025, where there was a fair amount of pricing taken, which took the numbers up, but actually has accelerated in the first quarter, and is now above that first quarter growth, or year-to-date growth is 30%, and I think this is through May 24th, so it's the most updated Circana data. We use [Circana Plus], which includes all the club stores and particularly Costco. That is not included necessarily in Nielsen, which Nielsen uses a representative sample of some description. These are the numbers we're looking at, and there has been a definite acceleration that started in 2024 and then has accelerated late 2025, early 2026. Our growth historically has come from increasing households. Half the growth has come from increasing households, and half has come from increased velocity per household, which to me has always been indicative of a very strong category.
As the category's accelerated, we've seen a little bit more of the growth coming from household growth, but the velocity has still maintained, and is still growing. The acceleration, we think, is an acceleration of households, which is coming about because of some of the sort of health and beauty sort of waves that I talked about. Then also potentially from our own marketing investment in these markets. Interestingly enough, we've seen this acceleration not just in the U.S., but also internationally. S ome of what we're seeing, we think, is actually spreading globally, maybe less surprising because a lot of the marketing and investment we do is social media, which has global reach. There was a social media item that we did that got over 200 million views in the first quarter, and about half of those appeared to be international.
It does look like with the current ability to market using social media, that you're getting international coverage from some of our investments. From a consumer point of view, we over-index to young and Gen Z millennials, multicultural over-index, relatively speaking, under-index to people my age and Jon's age, unfortunately, but we're working on it. From a consumer profile, we think the future is very good because these consumers basically adopt coconut water as part of their diet, as part of their lifestyle, and then will grow with the brand, we think we're still a young brand. This is why we talk about the category being in its early stages. The recent growth. It's being generated by Gen Z shoppers and families with kids aged 13 to 17.
We think that plays into what we're talking about as maybe it's the looksmaxxing and the gut de-bloating elements of diet that are currently sweeping through this community is driving some of this consumption. Certainly, if you're looking for potassium, you should pick up a coconut water, not a banana, right? Coconut water is better for you. This is, again, we think a very healthy tailwind behind our business. The other thing going on which helps this is that retailers are leaning in, particularly in the U.S. These are U.S. representations of what is going on. Over the last two, three years, we've seen retailers moving from placing coconut water on bottom shelves, not that visible, to greater visibility to now blocking. The most impactful for that was the Walmart reset that took place in November.
If you are in a large modern Walmart, you'll go in, you might see 8 ft of space dedicated to coconut water and some other beverages, which is up from maybe 3- SKUs a year ago to us. This was a very significant move and we hope other retailers will follow. Part of this is about getting visibility in the store and reminding people that they should buy coconut water, and part of it is also about getting shelf space to hold inventory, because as the velocities increase, then with a single SKU, providing inventory is very challenging. This is going on in the U.S. We're very excited about it. In international, it's much earlier. [Pik] will talk about international, but the development of the market is significantly lower, so we're at much earlier stages.
This probably has another two, three years to play out in the U.S. with people following what Walmart has done. In Walmart, we more than doubled our SKUs. We more than doubled our space from a visibility and availability and inventory perspective. Walmart is now gaining share of coconut water within the coconut water category, which is good for them and obviously good for us because we're the largest brand in that set. We have a very strong position in the U.S. with 42% share currently. The next largest share point is private label. These are Circana data, so it includes club stores and other things. The private label share is a little overstated, because one, not all retailers have private label. Two, some retailers only carry private label, and so private label share in those channels is 100%. That's the next biggest category.
Then if you actually just think purely about brands, you get down to Harmless Harvest, which is owned by Danone and is a cold product only. We are center-of-the-shelf warm. You get down to Goya, which is canned product typically in a ethnic aisle, and so not necessarily next to us. We are 5x the size of the next brand. Our mission is to grow the category and benefit from being the lead brand. As part of that thinking, we also supply some private label customers, and Corey will talk a little bit about that. We're trying to grow the category and benefit from that growth of the category through our share of brand and private label means we get the majority of the growth that we generate.
We have a national coverage, national distribution coverage, some of it through DSD with our primary partner being KDP and independent distributors, but some of it also direct to warehouse. We combine an interesting combination of DSD to those retailers that need DSD and are best serviced by DSD, with direct to warehouse for those retailers that don't, and then broad line distribution for food service and other classes of trade. We have, on a measured basis, retail a very strong ACV at 86%. There's still opportunities outright. There are always opportunities. Most of the opportunities are at the tail of convenience store. The smaller convenience store chains, the chains with maybe four beverage doors where they don't want coconut water yet, but it's going to come there, so we'll get there. That's where a lot of our distribution opportunities are.
Also in food service is a major opportunity for us because our food service business is in the low single digits of our total business, and it probably should be in the low teens. We estimate that Circana covers about 85% of our America's branded case equivalents for those who follow along in retail tracking and try and back in to what the numbers are. As I sort of said, we have significant room to grow. Coconut water represents less than 1% of total U.S. beverage, and for all the reasons I've sort of touched upon, we think there's an opportunity to double our U.S. business. The health and appearance initiatives from the consumer side, we still are under-indexed in large parts of the country, mainly what I would call the Midwest. We're strong on the coast and the South, and we're underdeveloped in the Midwest.
Those regions actually are growing the fastest of any regions, and that's just upside. It's also how the brand was built. The brand was built on the coasts, and you might expect, I suppose, from some of the health initiatives and experiencing it after workouts, that's where the brand would be built. We do have the middle of the country that we are working hard to try and solve. We look at flavor innovation and pack innovation to bring new people in. Once they come in, people tend to migrate towards the core product. That's how we think about innovation. Opportunity to double the U.S. Outside of the U.S., there's an opportunity for international to be the size of the U.S. today, if not larger. Many countries are behind the U.S. in per capita consumption.
This is a presentation of an index relative to the U.S. per capita consumption. The U.S. per capita consumption is only $4.70, so that's per population head. That's not that much. Lots of opportunity in the U.S., but when you look at other countries, significantly behind. Canada is the closest behind U.S. Australia actually is ahead of the U.S., so Australia is more developed. It's actually higher and actually indicates where the U.S. could get to a little bit. Our goal is to try and get Europe primarily to where the U.S. is. You'll see U.K. is at 45% of household consumption ahead. U.K., I think in the first quarter, grew 37%. Germany is at 16% of the U.S. Germany grew as a category over 100%, and the brand grew close to 200% in Germany.
Our goal is to get Europe to the size of the U.S. in a five- to seven-year timeframe if we can, and that's how we think about our business goal of growing the business. If you look ahead five to seven years, we think international will be a larger part of our business. That's important to note a little bit because the gross margins in international are a little lower than they are in the U.S. That's how we see the business evolving. We certainly believe the business could double, and based on the growth of Europe. With that said, I'll pass it over to Corey. Corey?
Good morning. We wanted to go a little bit deeper into our supply chain, so I get to play the role of Chief Operating Officer for a bit. The supply chain is really a competitive advantage and one of the unique aspects of this business. For over 20 years, the team started in Brazil and quickly realized it needed a model that could scale, and scale efficiently. It's built on a few key pillars. First, long-term partnerships. Mike, Jonathan, Ira went out to the largest food-grade manufacturers of coconuts and said, "We will take this byproduct you have of water. We'll help you package it.
We'll help you build the capacity, and we'll sign long-term agreements, ideally exclusive, to bring that coconut water back to the market. They went all across [LT Sager] in Brazil and built a globally diverse network, and then built it in a manner that could be repeated over and over across factories, helping the factories become more efficient. As you saw from our return on capital, they did it in a very asset-light way. This is a very productive operation for the factories to invest to package this coconut water. We support that, they generally make the investments. I'm going to play a quick video to give a bit more of a color of what it looks like in the factories.
We source coconuts from our network of thousands of small family farms across the tropics. Around 9-11 months after growing on the tree, the coconuts are ready to be harvested. Each and every coconut is handpicked by a skilled laborer and dehusked on the farm. We are on track to crack about 1.5 billion coconuts this year, which is over 4 million coconuts a day. From there, the coconuts are loaded onto trucks to be brought to our factories. One of the most waste-free crops in the world, coconuts and the trees they grow on can be used for everything, from renewable energy to textiles, building homes, and state-of-the-art water filters. Not to mention all of the food products that come from coconuts, like coconut chips, milk, oil, and more. These versatile fruits find their way into cuisines across every continent and culture.
Once the coconuts have arrived in our factories, they are sorted for the right quality. The coconut water is extracted by drilling holes. In some of our factories, about 40,000 to 50,000 coconuts are processed per hour, which can account for up to a whopping 4,000 gallons of coconut water. After being drained, the coconut water goes into small collection tanks. Once the tank is full, it's tested for many of our quality parameters: Brix, pH, acidity, and taste, to name a few. After the coconut water passes these tests, we process it to make sure it's safe to drink. The coconut water is then filled, sealed, and capped in Tetra Paks and loaded onto pallets for shipping. That's how we lock in Vita Coco's freshness, flavor, and nutritional value, and ultimately, how we get the best tasting, highest quality coconut water to as many people as possible.
This is a network, and you saw the day-to-day operations built currently across 18 factories in six countries. You can see every coconut, 5 million a day, touched one by one. We like to manage this network at 80% capacity. That gives us flexibility to avoid any disruptions. Currently, with the growth you're seeing to start the year that Martin showed, we're running well above that. We have lots of coconuts out there to go get, and the constraint is really to build packaging capability and have those lines ready to manage within that buffer. With inventory and the capacity we try to run, we can support the growth we're currently seeing. These communities are super important to us. We work extensively within the communities through The Vita Coco Project. One of the biggest initiatives is to plant new trees.
As the trees get older, they get less productive and get senile. Helping to support up to 10 million trees is a key initiative for us that we're investing in. We built approaching 40 classrooms and hospitals in these factories, and we spend a lot of time with farmers helping them make their land more productive. As you saw, many of these are small family holder farms, so helping them plant other crops that can increase their income, in addition to the coconuts, is where the team works with partners on the ground to get that done. From a margin perspective, the supply chain, despite some of the volatility we had through COVID, has been relatively stable. We do see some short-term spikes in ocean freight, as we're seeing now with some fuel surcharges.
With a combination of pricing, supply chain consistency, we've held our margins and are able to manage our margins in our targeted range of the high 30s. Ocean freight has kind of become a much smaller perspective as our mix, as it's become more stable. As we said, as we're running the network a little bit less efficiently than we would like with the volume growth, it's not a bad problem to have. We do see some inefficiencies as we do that. Martin touched on private label as a component of the supply chain that we think has some real value for us. It has become a much smaller percentage of our mix as the brand has grown much faster and as we've effectively managed, but it's become more diversified with more customers in more countries.
When we can manage the margins to the right place, it brings scale to the supply chain. It makes us a better partner for our retailers, makes us a better partner for the factories. It fits very nicely within our overall strategy. We provided guidance at Q1 earnings, and we are expecting a very strong year. Net sales, 18%-20%. Gross margins, again in that high 30 range at 38%. Adjusted EBITDA, $132 million-$138 million. This is built on a few key things. The U.S. category growing about 20%. As you saw, it's currently growing about 30%, so we are off to a very good start to the year. The Vita Coco brand, mid to high teens globally. Some unique things in our prior year, and then some expected launches of private label in the market, but tracking pretty close to the category.
We are investing for growth in our supply chain, in our marketing. SG&A growing high single digits. We are picking up private label share. We're launching new private label with a large U.S. customer. That's driving private label growth in the U.S. of 35%-40%. With this growth, this continues to keep us on track with our long-term objectives. We've laid out two key objectives, one, to grow branded net sales in the mid-teens. If we look back over our five-year CAGR, we're doing exactly that at 15 at the midpoint this year. Adjusted EBITDA margins in the high teens. We're approaching the high end of that at 19% at our midpoint this year. Very strong performance that we feel really excited about. As you've heard, we've got a category that's in its very early stages.
The consumers have a real generation of tailwinds for us. We're dominating the category and leading the category in almost every market we're playing in. This gives us a really clear path for growth, and financially strong margins, asset light, great team. We're really excited about the future. Thank you. I got back on track, so you didn't- Very nice use up my time then.
I did. Apologies.
That, I think, Jon, we'll move to the-
Yeah. We're going to move to the breakout room. That's Jenney A. Just remind everybody, and I want to thank Martin and Corey for-