I'm Brian McNamara. For those of you who don't know me, one of Canaccord' s analysts in the consumer space. We are very excited to have Traeger here and to host CFO Joey Hord and Nick Bacchus, who heads up Investor Relations. Thanks very much, guys, for joining us today.
Thanks, Brian.
Joey, perhaps you can start us off with a quick overview of the business and kind of key takeaways following your Q2 earnings last week.
Yeah, sure. We're a Salt Lake City-based company, Traeger Pellet Grills, founded in 1986. We make the premium pellet grill and cooking platform, as well as a flat rock or flat top griddle. We have made significant gains in market share and household penetration from, call it, the mid-2000s up through the pandemic. What else to add to this? We are what we consider, even though we're over almost 30 years old, we consider ourselves a young and ambitious company. We believe we have a great product, a great brand. We invest heavily behind our brand and in the product space. Obviously, we've had some challenges post-pandemic. There were two cohorts that were significant in terms of their purchases. In 2020 and 2021, there's been a pullback in the category subsequent to that. We've been working through that, and at the same time, we are now experiencing what we consider some tariff challenges. We had an earnings release last week. As a new CFO, I went through my first earnings release, a fun process, which Nick helped me to prepare for. Some of the highlights of the quarter, we had a pullback in revenues, largely driven by a timing shift between Q2 and Q1, and then Q2 and Q3. At the same time, sell-through is our lifeblood at retail, and overall, we are pleased with our sell-through results. The underpinning of our sell-through is largely driven by just investment in the brand, investment into some promotion, and overall, we're pretty happy with how our peak season just finished. On a full-year basis, we are forecasting the business to be down year- over- year. That's largely driven by a pricing shift that we've made subsequent to the tariff environment. At the same time, we believe that we've taken, we're prioritizing our balance sheet and financial health, and overall, that's cascading into our P&L and our financials. We're looking forward to the next few months. Do you have anything to add to that?
I think that we'll talk about this with Brian, but the key takeaway from the Q2 was really our focus on profitability. The tariff environment certainly brings a significant challenge with respect to the P&L, but we're talking about offsetting about 80% of our tariff exposure to drive profitability this year. We also talked about Project Gravity, which is a streamlining effort, a large-scale project to drive efficiency in the business. We'll talk more about that in a bit, but our focus really is driving profitability to set up for growth in the future.
A question we're asking all of our companies at the conference is, obviously, tariffs are a key topic of discussion. You guys are no different here. We generally have not seen broad-based price increases at the shelf level across the consumer segments. Overall, do you expect tariffs in the long term to be a net positive on your business or a net negative?
Yeah, there's kind of two ways to answer that. First off, we have taken price. Tariffs were announced post-Liberation Day. They do impact us. We have a blended tariff rate that's settled around just in the low 30% range. That definitely has impacted our business. The management team got together the day after Liberation Day, and we decided to take control of our business and take swift action. We're really focused on tariff mitigation in terms of three key areas. One is pricing. We've taken pricing of low double digits. Two is supply chain optimization, and three is cost management. Nick talked about Project Gravity, which is cost management. We're going to deliver $30 million of run-rate savings on a per-year basis, $13 million in 2025. Supply chain, we're finding efficiencies in the supply chain, which will yield long-term results, diversification of our supply chain as well. As far as pricing goes and elasticity, the low double digits are at retail right now. The tariff environment really is impacting most, like I would say, largely speaking, tariffs are impacting all grill products and grill brands the same. We have largely speaking the same footprint. Tariffs, the way they've settled, the difference in tariff rate between Vietnam and China, even though we consider it material, it's not so significant that one company has a significant advantage over another when you look at broad-based competition. As far as long term, are tariffs good for the category? Tariffs are a tax. They're an embedded tax that we're now passing on to the consumer, not fully, but partially. There is a scenario that is playing out that we've discussed, which is the following. The category is noisy. There's a lot of competition. There's a lot of what we consider ankle-biter brands. They operate at lower price points. They have a different way they distribute in the marketplace. We invest heavily behind a brand and our product and innovation. There is a scenario that plays out where the smaller brands that don't have the operational discipline, they don't have the financial discipline, they have not invested into the brand, operate at lower price points. They don't have the ability to negotiate supply chain and have supply chain scales of economy or economics of scale within the supply chain that the category becomes less noisy and less clustered or cluttered. The other thing I could say is this is forcing us, the tariff environment, to be very disciplined. What that means is discipline on how we allocate cost, how we're shifting to an ROI-based mindset, how we invest behind the brand, who we're investing with. These are things that are important in the long term. At a high level, in the short term, I think tariffs are noisy. They're volatile. They are impacting us. You can see that in our guidance. On the other hand, there is a scenario where there is a long-term payoff here. Do you have anything to add to that?
No, I think that was great.
So 80% of your grills roughly are sourced from China. Exposure, I think CEO Jeremy Andrus last week said you want to see meaningfully lower next year. Where will this production move to, just given the materiality of a shift from perhaps China to Vietnam?
Yeah, so right now we're 80% in China, 20% outside China on our grills production. We have great partners in Vietnam right now. They're candidly looking for our business. This is a shift that was in flight pre-tariff environment. This is accelerating it. Long term, I would say the following. Diversification is very important to us in terms of supply chain. It de-risks our operation. We are too reliant on China, and we have been. This is accelerating that. We also, with our plans long term, have great partners right now in Vietnam, and that's the priority of our focus. The other thing just to mention is the tariff environment is not settled. Every week there's some new noise within the tariff space. We just need to stay agile and nimble. The high-level message is we're not making long-term decisions based on short-term news, a news cycle. We're making long-term strategic decisions that will benefit us down the road.
Why is it not so easy to quickly move supply chains? I think like a typical investor, like just get out of China kind of thing. Why is that not so easy? What are the advantages that China still represents in terms of craftsmanship, technical skill, and cost advantages?
We have longstanding relationships with our partners in China, and that's something we're actually very proud of. They've done a really nice job for us. We have a significant amount of innovation that we put into our grills. It's not just bent steel. There's technology, innovation, et cetera, and you can see that reflected in our product, our product quality, and that obviously flows through the price point. It's not just a lift, shift, place. There are CapEx investments. There are technological capabilities that we have to help the factory stand up. It's not as easy as just up and move. These things take time, and these are long-term investments. We want to make sure we're making prudent long-term investments, being very selective of our partners, because these things will yield through down the road.
Certainly, investors that may cover kind of the apparel world or other soft goods, those areas are typically easier to shift production. Our production process has more complexity to it. Certainly, focusing on quality and the quality of the product is a key pillar to our strategy.
Q2 is obviously your most important quarter and the industry's most important quarter for sell-through. Why didn't the consumer come out this year, in your opinion?
Yeah, I mentioned Q2 in my opening remark. The consumer actually, we have a sell-through versus sell-in dynamic. I mentioned Q2 was noisy in terms of two main drivers. One is a timing shift. It was largely due to we had an operational work-through with our accounts in terms of direct import. There was a shift from direct import to domestic fulfillment, so there was a timing shift on revenue. As far as the sell-through goes, I mentioned earlier, the consumer actually performed according to our expectations or even better than our expectations. What does that mean? It means consumers walked into retail, purchased our grills. In Q2, our unit volume for sell-through was actually up year -over -year. There are some key learnings off of this, which is a consumer is seeking value and lower price point. Two, which we know we have to play at, and that kind of feeds into a long-term strategy conversation. As far as the retail environment goes, it's largely speaking outperformed.
Industry volumes are materially below 2019 levels. You had the pandemic pull forward. We've gotten back to that and then some, right? This year that number is a little bit lower, right, considering what the market's done?
Sure.
Why has this downturn lasted so long, do you think?
Yeah, I think just the share, there's kind of the category was significantly impacted. We all lived through COVID, and we had a shift in consumption behavior and just overall behavior, meaning we're all locked up in our homes. There was a significant consumption around the home and the attached to the home. Home transactions were high during COVID as well, and that's a leading indicator for us. As far as why has it lasted so long, there was a pull forward in demand. That's number one. We've metabolized that. We feel we have a five-year replacement cycle, which is typically around two years faster than our competition. The other thing to mention is just the overall heavy durables. This is a high-ticket durable. It's a considered purchase. There is some, what we call, just noise around. I mean, housing transactions are at all-time lows right now. That's something that we feel will continue. Interest rates and financing are obviously impacting us. The price point we play at is we have about 2.5x industry standard of our ASP, and that is something that does impact us, probably more so than our competition. At the same time, one thing we're very proud of is we're holding market share. Household penetration for our brand is 3.5%. Our unedited brand awareness on the East Coast is very low, which ties into a long-term conversation around our opportunity ahead of us is really around driving awareness, driving education. We have an education hurdle with our product. This all ties into a replacement cycle that we believe is coming. Five years is, we're starting to tiptoe into that replacement cycle, and we believe it's going to be a nice tailwind for us.
Yeah, we're certainly watching, obviously, not only our industry but other big-ticket categories. You know, the furniture industry and home improvement largely remain sluggish. Things that are high-ticket, kind of tied to the housing cycle, generally have not seen that robust recovery post-pandemic. We think the industry is a stable industry over time. Americans love to grill. Americans love to cook outdoors. That will continue. It's really a question of timing of when the replacement cycle really starts kicking for our industry. Then just largely around housing rates, all that kind of ties into the larger play around consumer discretionary spend.
Yeah, I'll add one more thing to that. Largely speaking, the category is experiencing a price increase. Like I said, we've taken pricing of around low double digits. We did not take price consistently through our product line. We have grills that were at $499 all the way up to close to $4,000. We have a broad price range that we operate or we play in. We believe that, generally speaking, whether a grill is $500 or $550 will not affect consumer demand in the long term. In the short term, that's built into our guidance in terms of our revenue outlook. Like Nick said, Americans love to grill. It's a grill enthusiast country. We believe that, generally speaking, the category is going to have a nice recovery.
One consistent theme during the grill industry's recent struggles is weakness in that $1,000+ price point. Given Traeger's premium offering, with ASPs two or three X the industry average, talk about some of the success you've had with introducing product at more accessible price points and how low can you go there while still maintaining your premium brand status?
Yeah, the goal overall is to be premium at every price point and also accessible. We definitely have played in a very premium space. If you get on our website, we have grills all the way up to $4,000. You're talking about segments of the dam that are fairly small at that point. One of our key learnings over the last year and a half, definitely coming off of last year where we had very strong sell-through at lower price points at retail in our peak season, is there's a broad set of consumers around $500 or below, and they want to access our brand. This is a key learning for us. As we talk about, we innovate, and then we innovate at higher price points, and then we draft down into our product line at lower price points and make them accessible. It's just a key learning that when we talk about long-term product strategy, accessibility is definitely part of that conversation.
Traeger historically has been a category disruptor, strong grower up until and kind of through the initial pandemic boom here. Once we get past this tariff noise, the stuff that's out of your control, how should investors think about growth for Traeger, both in absolute terms and relative to the industry?
Yeah, I mean, our opportunity is education and awareness. Household penetration in Utah, which is our backyard, is around 16%. Nationally, it's 3.6%, I believe is the latest number. If you go to the East Coast, our brand awareness, our unedited brand awareness is much lower than the West Coast, where we're actually an Oregon-based, that's where Traeger was founded. We have these pockets of much higher household penetration. If we interact with either a consumer or an investor or anyone that has a Traeger, it's a completely different conversation than somebody that doesn't, right? I think the opportunity for us is ongoing investment, education, understanding that our product is actually just a better solution, the ease of use. I was at retail, I'm a homeowner, so I go into Home Depot often, probably way too much. Every time I'm in a Home Depot, I go to the grill section, and I try to see if there's a consumer looking at the competitor, and I try to sell a grill to them. I was there this weekend. As I'm having a conversation with this potential grill buyer, the education hurdle is real for us. I needed to tell him what a pellet grill was. I needed to explain to him about the fuel types, the sourcing, the better output of food, the versatility. I ended up selling a grill, which was great. It took me 20 minutes, but that's our opportunity, an education hurdle and overcoming that. How do we do that? We need to focus on continuing to drive education through, we have a robust RSS program with Home Depot that we're continuing to focus on scale. We have a great partnership with Home Depot and ACE to focus on education at retail. These are big opportunities for us. The other thing we're very proud of is once you're in a Traeger or a pellet grill, you usually stay, usually upgrade, and usually attach to it along that consumer journey. A significant number of bags of pellets, accessories, consumables, and really what they, you know, a consumer wants to rent, they usually stay in.
I think if you distill it down, we've got a significant opportunity in terms of market share and household penetration, where Joey said very low household penetration at 3.6%, significant upside there. You combine that with what should be industry tailwinds as the industry recovers in the next few years and gets back to a normalized volume level. We think there's a nice path for an acceleration in growth in the out years.
Yep.
Tell us about MEATER, which has been a really nice acquisition up until the last few quarters, which is where you've seen some material declines there. What's happened there and how quickly do you think you can get that business back on track?
Yeah, I think MEATER is sort of a, we're sort of a victim of our own success. We were the first connected MEATER probe that was launched, you know, pre-acquisition, and then we acquired this business in 2021. It's been a really nice acquisition for us in terms of there's a lot of synergies between the products. It's a connected device. It synergistically works with our grill. We feel there's just a lot of opportunity to tie these two together, even like the app and user experience around both. As far as MEATER and the challenges it's faced, there's just been a flood of, we call them ankle-biter brands into the space, lower price point. They produce and they distribute on Amazon, and it's a discounted model. We're working through that. The shifts we've made, I believe that we've talked about, is the centralization of the MEATER business in Salt Lake City. MEATER has been a standalone operation. It's been a significant standalone operation just north of London. They built an entire infrastructure to support that business. Earlier this year, the leadership team decided that there's no reason why we need two capabilities in both places when there's so much overlap of what they're doing and what we're doing. We are centralizing that business in Salt Lake City. It's a project that's, you know, six months in the works. It's going to yield a lot of fruit. The other thing I believe it's going to do, it's going to allow us to tap into our fixed cost infrastructure regarding our sales fleet and sales force. We believe retail and the retail landscape, physical retail, is the way that business is going to get back on track and capitalize on growth and the opportunity there. MEATER's actually been a really nice acquisition for us. Even though it's experienced some short-term revenue challenges, there's a long-term opportunity there.
A sticking point with investors has been leverage. With the industry, you know, at or near, hopefully a bottom here, how should investors think about deleveraging?
You want to take that one?
Yeah, you know, clearly there's leverage on the balance sheet. Deleveraging is a top priority for the management team. When you think about our key kind of strategies for this year, prioritization of profitability, Project Gravity, which is going to result in reshaping the P&L and enhanced profitability over the next few years, all that's going to drive the ability to deleverage. Deleverage will come from two sources. The first is growth in EBITDA. As we execute against our profitability strategies, drive the streamlining of the business, as we see top line recovery, those top line growth dollars are going to flow through to the bottom line. It's going to allow for deleverage via EBITDA growth. Secondarily is excess free cash flow. The business has very strong free cash flow conversion. It's a fairly capital light business, and excess free cash flow can be used to pay down debt in the next few years. Those two drivers will allow us to delever. We target getting to kind of a two to three turn profile in the medium term.
Your CEO, Jeremy Andrus, a large shareholder, and I admire him because he's always buying stock in the open market. For investors looking to get involved today, what do you believe the market underappreciates about the Traeger brand and the stock?
I think it's some of the things I've already spoken about in terms of we are a category disruptor. If you understand the product and you understand what we're trying to, if you understand the brand and the product and the experience around it, it just makes sense. Like I mentioned earlier, anyone we intersect with that has a Traeger, it's a completely different conversation. They just, they understand the product, the replacement cycle. They understand that they're in. I think Jeremy, in terms of, you said he buys stock, that's because he sees the long-term value in the company. I personally, I've never sold a share as well. I have the same fundamental core belief in the future of this business. I do think that the opportunities that I already spoke about are abundant.
One final question that we're asking all of our consumer companies at this conference that we like to do every year is, in your view, you guys were here at the conference last year, how healthy is the consumer today compared to a year ago? How do you see consumer spending overall shaping up in the back half of this year and as we enter 2026?
I think the consumer is worried. They're worried about, I'm currently trying to sell a house. It's kind of the same conversation. It's like, let's wait, right? I think that is when you're talking about a $1,000 +, you know, considered purchase, which is where we largely play. I think the consumer is a little bit hesitant to buy. At the same time, we have this backdrop of interest rates, and we believe that could be a catalyst for our brand and the overarching category. At the same time, in terms of the consumer, as I said earlier, whether a product is $500 or $550, we do not believe that's going to affect the long-term outlook of the category. In the short term, there's obviously a little bit of volatility, which we've adjusted to guidance appropriately. Do you have anything to add to that?
I think that's all right. I think the consumer's held in very well, given all the headlines this year. I do think the trend of big-ticket spend remains in kind of a more challenged position, where to Joey's point, the consumer's very, very choosy about where they're spending their dollars. That'll normalize over time, but I think that trend remains in place today.
Great. It looks like we're out of time. We'll leave it there, guys. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks, Brian.