All right, good afternoon and welcome back. My name is Christopher Barnes, and I'm on Deutsche Bank's U.S. Consumer Staples team. It's my pleasure to welcome Freshpet to the stage. With us today, we have Billy Cyr, Chief Executive Officer, Scott Morris, Co-founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer, and Todd Cunfer, Chief Financial Officer. They're gonna lead us through a presentation, and I will pass the stage to you.
Great. Thank you very much. All right. Here's our Safe Harbor Statement. I'm sure you've all seen it, and we'll be ready for the quiz afterwards. I want to just start, for those of you who aren't quite familiar with Freshpet, we are very much a mission-driven company, and we live at the intersection of humans and their pets, and we are in the business of creating a tighter bond between those two so they can all live longer, happier, healthier lives. And we'll do that while being better to the planet. And that goes across everything that we do and all the decisions that we make. Today, as you said, we have myself, I'm the CEO. I've been with Freshpet for about almost eight years at this point. We have Scott here, and Scott will speak in a little bit.
He is one of the co-founders of the company, and he'll talk to you about some of the things that we did to create the business and create this category. And then Todd, who's been with us, for about 18 months at this point, and he is our CFO. I would just let you think about taking away from today's conversation, there are three words you're gonna hear from us. You're gonna hear us about disrupting, and Scott will lead you through that, how we are disrupting the pet food industry. The second thing you'll hear from us is about how we are inflecting. Freshpet's at an important inflection point in its history, particularly on the profitability side, and I'll talk to you about that.
And then the third part of this will be, we'll talk about how durable this business is and how we're creating a business that will have durable growth, durable profitability over the long haul because of some very important strategic choices that we've been making for years and continue to make. But for those of you who aren't quite familiar with us, a quick primer of what the business is. Freshpet is a company that operates in multiple countries, but the United States still represents the vast majority of our sales. And while we have a cat food business, the reality is that dog food is the primary part of our business. We also have a relatively small treats business.
Not because those aren't opportunities, and I'll talk to you more about that later, but the reality is, keeping up with the growth of a U.S.-based dog food business has been a full-time occupation for us for the last several years. From a distribution, our products are sold in channels, grocery, mass, club, pet specialty, with the vast majority of our business being in the grocery and mass channels, and we have a small amount of our sales internationally. We're probably best known for our iconic fridges. Freshpet is sold out of these fridges that we own and that we have installed in the retail outlets. There are 27,000 Freshpet stores containing Freshpet fridges. There are 34,800 fridges in total, so that means that we have second and third fridges in some of the higher volume outlets.
In total, we have about 1.7 million cu ft of space at retail, and that's a very important asset for us. We compete in a category that has an incredible opportunity for long-term growth. It's a very large category, $53 billion in retail sales in the U.S. pet food category. $37 billion of that is the dog food business, and we still have only a 3% share of the dog food business. Now, we have a 96% share of the fresh and frozen market, but our total share is only 3% today, so there's a very long runway for growth. We have a really simple recipe for success. We start with a large and growing category.
We have a highly differentiated product, and we have a company that is specifically developed to create, and develop the, fresh pet food category. We're doing those things that are necessary to create a fresh pet food category. To take you a little bit more about how we have disrupted the category, I'm gonna hand it over to Scott, who is the original disruptor, and he'll talk to you about how we've disrupted the pet food industry. Scott?
Yep. Thank you, Billy. So when we started Freshpet, we didn't think about the word disruption. We thought a very simple idea of we wanted to basically make fresh food for pets and a food that was really basically in line with how people were thinking about their relationship with pets and also how people were thinking about food. And what we ended up doing over time, as we got bigger and bigger, we really became a major disruptor to an incredibly large category that was really based on kind of older manufacturing technology. And I'll kind of touch on that a little bit on the next slide. So if you go way back into the now, I'm gonna do this slide quickly, I promise.
But if you go way back, in the, you know, thirties and forties, pets were in our lives, but they were basically being fed the same food we ate. They ate a lot of scraps, right? They kinda ate whatever was around. And then all of a sudden, someone came up with the idea of, "Hey, let's come up with commercialized pet food." And that continued to develop for years and years. When they originally established commercialized pet food, it was basically kind of born out of animal feed, like cows, chickens, pigs, horses, et cetera, and it was extrusion technology for the most part, and there was some retort technology, which gives you cans. Extrusion is dry, and retort is cans. And then pets kinda came, came more and more into our lives.
You know, they moved from the backyard into the laundry room, into the den, and, you know, kinda heading towards the bed over time, like they were sleeping with us. But, in the 1990s, this idea of ultra-premium or better pet food came up, and it was really kind of where they wanted to put more meat into the food because people felt that was a more appropriate diet for pets. And you get into the 2000s, and there was, like, this birth of this next segment. It was actually called ultra-premium originally. That's kind of the Blue Buffalo of the world, and there were many, many products. In 2006, we actually started Freshpet, and we just felt like there was a real opportunity to change the way people thought about food, like they were doing on the human side.
And then now in 2010, we really have become this major disruptor and really a what's starting to be a really big piece of the pet food category over time. So there were two trends, two major, major, like mega trends that we were looking at, and I touched on these, but this idea of humanization of pets. So everyone in the industry talks about humanization of pets, and the thing I like to ask them is: What is human about taking meat, turning it into a dry ball that sits on a shelf for up to two years? That's not like food, how we think about good food, right? And then the other one, and this humanization of pets is like the involvement with pets, right? And I was mentioning they went from the backyard literally to the bedroom over time.
People talk about themselves as like, "My kids, my pet kids," or, "That's my kid," or, "I'm a dog mom or a dog dad," as terminology. But they're just so involved in our lives and really in many ways even replacing kids. And then on the other side of it, how we think about food. So 25 years ago, if you had stood in a room and asked people from a human food standpoint, "Who wants to eat a fresher, healthier, less processed, more natural diet with no preservatives?" You'd get a few people raising their hand. But today, that idea is becoming more mainstream on the human side. So those two trends coming together, humanization of pets and how we think about food, is really what's like the development or the kind of initial idea behind Freshpet.
So the next thing is, well, how do we make our food? How are we different, right? So we actually start with basically as many fresh, basically unprocessed ingredients as possible. So, like, if you walked into our kitchens, right? We actually call them kitchens. You'd say, "That's chicken, and that's beef, and those are carrots, and those are peas." If you walk through a dry pet food plant, you'd have a really hard time saying any of those things. So very different. The next thing we do is we use a lot of fresh ingredients. They come in literally 24 hours a day. There are fresh ingredients being brought into our kitchens, okay? It's part of that whole ideology. Start with as kinda unprocessed, as many unprocessed ingredients as possible, things that you can identify.
Then we take those ingredients, and we cook them as little as possible. We actually use pasteurization, right? Everyone knows pasteurization. So it's basically we use it, we cook it to a certain temperature to make sure it's cooked and safe, and then basically, we use refrigeration and the rest of the pasteurization process and our packaging to keep it fresh for a very, very long shelf life, over 20 weeks. So it's really kind of a very, very different ideology and approach to making food for pets. So the next thing is, we think about ourselves, we're building a category, and when we went into it, we started realizing we were going to be the next category in pet food.
So there's obviously dry, there's wet, and now there is fresh, and people are starting to talk about it, where we are becoming a very big segment and a very big category. So we've created a category, we created the products in the category, and then we're really building a great company in order to deliver on what we created in the category and the products. And we have a wide array of products. Some of them start with our rolls products. Then we eventually graduated to, like, our roasted meals, our bag products, and then we have multiple forms of our bag products all the way to the right side, which literally looks as good as something you could come over my house and eat. It's great stuff. We actually call it Home style.
The idea is to really cover, like, a wide array of different need states for consumers. Some of them are the most cost-effective, and some of them are the most human-like you can possibly have. We really kind of make sure we focus on cost-effective all the way to the other end of the, of the category, because what we wanna do is we wanna, on the category that we created, we wanna make sure that we're filling every consumer need possible. The next thing is that's really interesting is if you look at our journey, it's been pretty amazing. From the outside, it is easy to look, the lines look straight and upward to the right for the most part, but there's a lot of challenges along the way and a lot of learning.
There is a decade's worth of learning and challenges that we faced to figure out what we were doing to build a great business. And the thing that we're most proud of is, if you take any three-year period in here, we've basically doubled the size of the company. So we've been growing at 25%-30% growth rate for well over a decade, and we see that going on into the future. Well, how have we done that? Well, there's basically three, basically aspects to how we grow the business and how we've really driven the top line. The first one is our marketing, and I will put us in best-in-class in our creative, in our marketing, and the work we do in that area.
It's really tremendous, and one of the things we're most proud of from a marketing standpoint is we actually think about our marketing delivering a CAC, a consumer acquisition cost. Very unusual for a packaged goods company to talk about CAC. Our CAC has been range-bound for a decade, which gives us great confidence that we can continue to do this for a long way into the future and build out our total addressable market. The next one that's incredibly important is basically this idea of availability and visibility. So it's basically, what do we look at at retail? Pretty exciting. We've got these 4 ft wide by basically 7 ft high refrigerators that are our refrigerators. They say Freshpet, and they're very in sync with basically everything that we're doing on the brand and what we're trying to do from a brand standpoint.
Typically, over time, they've been incredibly well featured in the first aspect, which was the advertising, 'cause we had to tell people, "Where do you find fresh pet food? It's in the pet food aisle, and it's in those refrigerators." So we started to train people around that, and now what we're starting to see is second fridges. We have a lot of first fridges that we've covered that. We now start to have a lot of second fridges in the best stores, and we're continuing to kind of build that out to where we're becoming that significant segment in the category. The last piece that's really important, too, is not only to have great innovation but to make sure that our R&D and our operations are really, really delivering on what we've designed and developed.
Operations, we need to have great quality product there every single day for consumers on a consistent basis, so they can rely on it to be their pet's food. We also want to have the most innovative products in the future. Just because we're a great leader here, we never want to sit tight, and we always are thinking, "What's forward, what's next, and where the opportunities are?" All right, so I'm gonna play you some advertising, which may be the most exciting part of, like, my talk at least. All right, so this is one of our ads.
Refill? Help yourself, man. Dude, dog food in the fridge? It's not dog food. It's Freshpet. Real meat, real veggies. Real weird.
... He was bad luck anyway.
Freshpet: It's not dog food, it's food food.
So there's a whole series of these, and I'll talk a little bit about this, and then the next, I'm gonna show you something that's a little different. We're actually tying in with kind of a, like an influencer. You may have-- you may know her. Her name is Meghan Trainor. You-- when you hear her sound, you'll probably recognize it if you don't know her name.
My besties got the best hair, best hair. I bring them with me everywhere, everywhere. Yeah, it's a special kind of love we share. 'Cause I'm a dog mom, dog mom. My babies get the best, settle for nothing less. Yeah, I'm a dog mom, dog mom. My babies get the best, and the best is Freshpet.
So you may look at both these and go, "They're really kind of fun and silly." And honestly, there's a lot of humor in them because we want people to absorb the message. But the key message is, on the first one, and there's a whole series of these, basically, that person has chosen the dog and the relationship with the dog over the relationship with someone else in their life. We've kicked out girlfriends, we've kicked out mothers-in-law. Easy to associate with. We've kicked out friends, and we've kicked out even sisters in the different spots.
So we basically said, "Who's really into their pet?" And people have chosen, "That pet is an important person and an important relationship in my life." And in this one, we're having Meghan Trainor sing about being a dog mom or a dog dad, and people really associate with that. So again, really kind of tying into that relationship. And people look at these ads, and they're like, "They get me. They understand." And if you are involved with your pet in this way, and there's a lot of people, a lot of people that are really into their pets... We all know them. Even if you're not one, you know them, and there's a lot of them. Basically, this is the product for you.
All right, so this is all the soft side of it, but here's what we did from an analytical side, and we tracked this very, very closely, and this is one of these things where we're incredibly proud of. But if you kind of look over time and the media investment and our net sales, the correlation is shocking. It is absolutely shocking. So we know, and we, we have lots of different metrics all along the way. We know basically, when we run an ad, how many people come to the website versus our baseline. We know basically what POS is gonna look like in a couple of weeks. And over long periods of time, we know basically, if we spend this in marketing, we get this in net sales.
And the other piece of that, this is the important part of the correlation, is when we basically raise awareness through the advertising, how many people buy it? So that's on the right side. So it's basically the media investment aligned with basically the penetration growth. So basically, our marketing works. Our marketing works. A lot of people are waving hands and doing all kinds of stuff. I'm talking to you about CACs, and I'm talking about cumulative media investments over time. And this powers our model. So of the three components to the model, distribution's terrific, innovation's terrific. This is 75% of the piece of the model that drives it in the future. All right, so the next thing is we're now at this point, we're over a decade into this.
So what do we need to do as a company, as a brand? We need to take the brand mainstream. We're in 3,700-3,800 Walmarts across the country. I never knew we were gonna be in a Walmart. So we're really taking the brand mainstream. Very important, and we're working across the organization to do that. Main meal, how do we get people to use it as the center of their plate? Just like we want to eat fresh food at the center of our plate, pet parents should be thinking, "I want fresh food at the center of my plate." And if you want to sprinkle a few of those brown kibbles on top for croutons, be my guest. And then the last act, the last piece of it, which is critical, and it powers the entire model, is we have to be more profitable.
We have to be more profitable. We've brought a lot of discipline over the last couple of years. We've brought a lot of discipline to not only have great top-line growth but also be more disciplined in this area as we're building our business. This kind of powers this incredible virtuous circle that we've been sharing for many years. So basically, it starts with the advertising investment, drives basically the penetration, which drives velocity, which basically helps us expand to more and more fridges over time, and then we build more capacity around it.
And then the one thing we were probably not doing a good job at until the last 24 months, and it's people like Todd that have shown up, and there's many of them in the organization, we've added organizational capability and talent to not be a $500 million company, but to be a $2 billion company, which is where we're headed. That drives efficiencies over time, and as you get more scale, you drive efficiencies. And you can see how these strategies tie into the different aspects of this kind of virtual circle. And on the right side of the slide, you basically see the metrics that we put out as our 2027 goals. So Billy's gonna talk to you next about where we are as a company and the inflection point that we're at.
Great. Thanks, Scott. So, as I said at the beginning, we're at an inflection point, so the disruption that Scott described has really created an incredible platform. But the last couple of years have been tough. All of us have dealt with the pandemic, then rapid inflation came behind it, labor shortages and whatnot, and we're no different. But what I'm here to tell you is that, as you can see in our most recent results, and we're telling you, is what we see in our business, is we are at a significant inflection point. So what is that inflection point? Well, first, all the pricing that we've taken, we took 27% pricing spread across a total of four price increases over about 18 months, and that has now been passed through, and we're lapping it, and we're back to volume growth.
Our volume growth is now running in excess of 20% year-on-year, and so the business is back to where it was, which is we feel very good about volume-based growth. This is no longer growth that's driven by pricing; it's driven by volume. In addition to that, we're seeing our household penetration gains are resuming the same 20+% growth rate that we've historically seen. So during the periods where we had really rapid inflation, it was harder to bring consumers into the franchise while they were adjusting to the higher pricing. The reality is, we're now back to the place where we were before, which is we're getting 20+% growth in household penetration, 52-week household penetration, pretty consistently.... Even more excitingly is the high-profit pet-owning households. We call them HiPPOs.
The HiPPOs, who are an important part of our franchise, they account for about 89% of our sales. That group is growing, and it's growing faster than the overall household penetration. So what this chart shows you is that our overall household penetration is up to 12.3 million households, but it's up to now 38% of our households are HiPPOs, and that's up from 27% a few years ago. So a larger franchise and an increasing share of that franchise is now in the high-profit pet-owning households. Retailers are responding to this and demonstrating the same level of confidence that we see and we're experiencing in the way in which they treat us at retail.
So the green bars on here are the number of stores that we're in, and you can see it's a very steady, consistent increase in the retail availability. But what's even more impressive is the light green line on here, which shows you what percentage of those stores have more than one fridge in them. And we think going forward, that's one of the biggest drivers of growth for us, and so we're now north of 20% of the stores have multiple fridges, and we think there's an opportunity for that to go much, much higher. High-velocity, high-volume stores with multiple fridges is really the future for this business.
From an operations perspective, you know, we were knocked off our off our balance quite a bit in the middle of the pandemic, with difficulties getting materials, difficulty getting labor and whatnot, and we saw our gross margin drop quite considerably. But we've now rebounded, and we're back to where we want to be. We're up to a 45% gross margin at this point from the depths of the gross margins in a quarter where we were down to 33%, and it wasn't that long ago. And our cumulative EBITDA, trailing 12-month EBITDA, has grown considerably over that period of time, and we think this is a the beginning of a trend. It's not the endpoint.
The big drivers of the improvement are the things that we set out as our focus areas in September 2022, when we recognized that we needed to get back on our feet from a financial operating performance perspective. We said we'd focus on input costs as a percentage of our net sales, quality costs, and quality costs for us means the percentage of our product that has to go for secondary processing or be disposed. We are the pioneers in this category. There is nobody who is expert at making fresh pet food beyond what we are, and so we're still perfecting the technology. And so there is a significant or meaningful part of our product cost that is just not up to our standards, and we've had to deal with that.
What you can see is, both on the input costs and the quality costs, those have gone down considerably, mostly because we've stabilized our workforce, and we've hired really good leaders and stabilized the production workforce. Our logistics cost, which is sort of the tail end of the supply chain, has benefited from that. We hired great talent. We've gotten great fill rates, and you can see, as our logistics costs have come down. So in total, what you can see is from our worst point to where we are today, that's over 1,400 basis points of total improvement operationally, and these were the focus areas we set out a little less than two years ago. That shows up in what you can see in terms of the margins. What's even better is we set out, at CAGNY in February of last year, long-term targets.
At the time, we had just come off a year with a 3% adjusted EBITDA margin and a 36%, adjusted gross margin, and we said we'd get to 45% adjusted gross margin, and we would get to an 18% adjusted EBITDA margin by 2027. Well, we're well ahead of the targets that we set out. As you can see, our quality costs are ahead of the component that we needed at 2.8% in the most recent quarter versus 2.9. The input costs now, because of really good work on yields, we took a little bit of pricing, took a little bit of a deflation on input costs. We're in where we want to be.
Logistics costs are over 100 basis points ahead of where we wanted to be, and the adjusted gross margin is already, in Q1, at the level we want it to be in 2027. Now, we need to demonstrate we can do this consistently, and that's what we said on our Q1 earnings call, is we've got to demonstrate consistency against that performance, but there's the indication that it is... we are capable of doing that. And even more encouragingly is our cash flow, operating cash flow improved consistently. So we went from a negative $43 million in operating cash flow in 2022 to today, or in 2023, we had $76 million of operating cash flow.
We have communicated to the market that we will be Free Cash Flow positive in 2026, and we are well ahead of that schedule based on the improved performance in EBITDA. Our working capital position has improved, and frankly, our interest income is offsetting the interest expense that we have. The last part of this is a durable business model. So we are in disrupting, we have inflected to a higher quality performance. But what are we leading towards? Where are we going? And we think of this as one of the best business models in the CPG space. You think about where it starts. It starts with the idea for a fresh pet food, which is highly differentiated, and from there, you move into the technical know-how, how to create it.
Nobody else knows how to do what we do. There's thousands of things that we have to do right every day to create a product that has a 23-week shelf life with no preservatives to go through the refrigerated supply chain. From there, it's building out a fridge network. It's placing fridges, getting the right kinds of fridges, getting them in stores. On top of that, it's now the manufacturing scale that we've built, and I'll talk more about that in a second. Inventing new technologies and then building the brand equity, and I'll take you through each of these as building blocks because ultimately, the key business model differentiators for us are the retail availability, the consumer franchise, the brand equity that we have, the product assortment, the scale, and our technical mastery.
Putting it simply is we have 34,800 fridges that are within a short driving distance of 90% of the U.S. population. That is a, a network, a fridge network that will be very, very difficult for anybody to match in at least in a short period of time and at reasonable cost. Second thing is the consumer franchise we built is not a price-sensitive consumer franchise. This is a franchise who bought us at full retail price on their first purchase because we never do discounting or promotions. We don't do couponing.... This is a consumer franchise that understands the value of Freshpet and accepts that val- that, that franchise. The third thing is we're building a brand, a really strong brand equity. Scott showed you the advertising.
Since 2017, we spent $320 million in advertising against that brand positioning, and our advertising investment continues to be at very high level. Next year, we'll probably spend in the range of $100 million in advertising. The product assortment. Over time, we continually add to the product lineup through that innovation capability to meet a wider range of needs that pets might have, so it becomes very difficult for somebody to enter this space and have a subsegment of the market that they meet the needs better than we do. We address large dogs, small dogs. We meet the needs of specific health conditions like sensitive skin and stomach. We have products that are for people who do home cooking for their dog.
We wanna make it so that if you are interested in the idea of higher quality, fresher pet food for this treasured creature in your family, then you will find an item in our lineup that is appropriate to you. We're building enormous scale into our franchise. So you think about the manufacturing operations. We have 1,200 employees today, 800,000 sq ft of manufacturing, two distribution centers. 80% of our orders today go as full truckloads. We have 12 lines operating today, 12 production lines, and we have the footprint that'll accommodate more than 22 lines going forward. So we have a huge advantage in scale and manufacturing that's very difficult for somebody to replicate, especially since most people don't know how to do what we do. Our technical mastery.
We are investing very aggressively in the technical mastery to both drive the improved profitability but also to drive improved return on invested capital. So we are working on increasing the automation in our facilities, so our facility in Ennis, Texas, is much more automated than the original facility that we have in Bethlehem. We are investing in OEE, that is, operational effectiveness, so we have brought in outside consultants who've helped us to try to drive the improvement and throughput on our existing lines and yield, and we're investing in new technologies, new ways to make fresh pet food so that we will be a step ahead of anybody who decides to try to enter the space 'cause we'll have created proprietary new processes. Today, we are the number one brand of dog food in U.S. grocery, yet the upside opportunity is significant.
As I said earlier, we're in about 12.3 million households today. We think that the total addressable market is about 43 million households. There are about 70 million households who have dogs in the U.S. We think 43 million of those households are appropriate. 12.3 are buying Freshpet in some form today, and as I said earlier, the HiPPOs are about 4.5, 4.6 million of those households. So there's a long, long runway for growth for us as we try to grow into this, and that TAM keeps getting bigger. Every time we measure it, more and more consumers are demonstrating the interest and the value in fresh pet food that, that we have seen, and we think that that is a long-term trend, as Scott described. So where does that lead us? This is the grocery channel.
This is where if you look in grocery, what's happened to the category and where do we think it could go. Dry grocery is the top, or dry, dog food, kibble, is a line at the top. Fresh is the line that starts at the bottom and passes the line in the middle. The line in the middle is canned or wet dog food. As you can see, by 2027, we think that, or 2026, we think that fresh will be the second largest category, and if you do some dotted lines and extend those lines out, it's conceivable that by 2030, fresh will be the same size as, dry dog food in the grocery channel. So this is truly a new form of pet food in the, in the, category.
And while we build that out and while we try to meet the demand for that, we are really, really focused on doing this in the most efficient possible way that we can, 'cause this is a capital-intensive business. So we're focusing on getting more out of our existing lines through operational excellence, operational throughput improvements, yield improvements. We're focused on getting more out of the existing sites that we have, meaning each site having as many lines and as much throughput as possible, and we're focused on developing and implementing new technologies that make it more efficient to produce more product, higher quality product at lower total capital expenditures, and we've got a lot of work going on in that area. In addition to that, there are some white space opportunities for us.
When you're only a 3% share of a very large category, there's a long runway of opportunity ahead of us. Some of those white space opportunities are international expansion, cat food, where we're very, very small today, treats, added distribution. So as we think about the near-in pieces, it's more addressing all dog sizes. Our business skews towards small dogs. We just launched a large dog product. We wanna be more across more dog sizes. We wanna be across more life stages, so we have a puppy roll. We need to address the needs of seniors. And then elevating real, real food experience. Each of our products, as we look at them, how they get to be more and more like a real food experience and highly differentiated from kibble and can.
We do have our guidance out there, and we're reiterating our guidance, which calls for greater than $950 million in net sales this year, which is greater than 24% growth, greater than $120 million in adjusted EBITDA, and CapEx spending this year of about $210 million. We are very mindful of the capacity limits that we have as a company, meaning we wanna build our capacity to support our growth and deliver very high customer service to our customers, a very high fill rate. That's the sweet spot. 25% growth is the place where we find that our organization is capable.
We find that that's where our CapEx and the cash generation are in a good balance so that we won't need to go to the market to raise more capital. We feel like that's the right place, and so we're working very hard to deliver the growth in that range. We will not go up above 30% growth on any sustained basis, maybe for a short period of time. We're gonna live within that range because we think that's where we execute really well and deliver the optimal profitability and cash generation. From a capital spending perspective, we're very focused on delivering against the capital spending budget and maybe doing a little bit better. The reality is all the projects that we need to add capacity are on track and on budget for this year, and our liquidity is good.
We have over $250 million of cash on hand as of the end of the first quarter, and as we generate more and more meaningful EBITDA, and that could get us in a position where we would not potentially need to raise any debt, even debt, as we go forward. So that's it. We'll take any questions you might have at this point. Anybody have any questions? Yeah.
I would be interested how your European expansion looks like. This should be a huge market for you, too.
Yep.
How to address this market?
Yeah. So we've been in the U.K. for six or so years, and it's demonstrated very clearly that the consumer proposition is very attractive, the retailers like it, our fridge model works, our advertising model works. The issue for us has been that the supply chain coming from the United States on boats has not been very reliable. It's not the cost or the time, it's the reliability that's been the problem. So until we have a source of supply that is somewhere in Europe, we don't really wanna put our foot on the gas there. Now, having said that, that's work that we've had underway for quite some time, and at some point in the future, we'll be in a position where we can talk about what that would look like. To be very clear, we do not see ourselves greenfielding a manufacturing operation in Europe.
If we do it, we do it similar to what we do with our Kitchen South operation, where we have a partner who has buildings and some capability or expertise, and we would bring our expertise on some sort of exclusivity arrangement where they would produce on our behalf so that we could produce products that meet our standards and our specs, but not create new competition. But that's where it would go. Long term, I would tell you, we think it's a big opportunity, but in the near term, all the financials that we've laid out are based on a U.S.-based dog food business. Anything we deliver out of the European business would be in excess of that. Yeah.
As you reach greater efficiency in your factories-
Yeah
... and you have sales continuing to be strong, is there potential for the CapEx to come in, and you don't have to spend as much behind it as you become more efficient?
Yeah, ROIC is obviously an incredible opportunity for us to expand over the next couple of years. Part of it is just the math of we're gonna continue to grow 25% every year. Next year, it's $250 million, the next year it's $300 million, and so on and so on. So we will need to continue to spend pretty heavily on CapEx. We wanna be able to maintain it in kind of that $200 million-$225 million range, and again, if we're growing increasingly more each and every year, just maintaining around that level will be an improvement. But this is a very capital-intensive business, but we're gonna find ways to not only, you know, operate the plants as efficiently as possible, use every square inch of the facilities that we have.
We can get up to, as Billy pointed out, as many as probably 25 lines in the existing footprint. That'll keep us going till at least 2029 or 2030. Then we'll have to look for another site. But but we'll look for opportunities, whether it's a greenfield or another partner opportunity, which we're really, really comfortable with. We're gonna try to be as capital efficient as humanly possible.
I would add to that, that is, we look literally every month at where are we on our operating effectiveness, where are we in on our capacity planning, where are we on the commitments to new equipment? And it is a very dynamic process, very engaged, all of us are involved in it. And if we see the operating effectiveness improve, we have the ability to push projects back a quarter or two, or whatnot. But we're operating with roughly an 18-month lead time on any capacity project. So anything we're doing right now is already committed out for roughly 18 months. But if we think that our operating effectiveness rises to a higher level than where we had anticipated, we wouldn't hesitate to push a project back, in essence, improving the near-term cash flow. Yes.
You've effectively made the market in the U.S., right?
Yes.
With fresh. And obviously in Europe, if you don't find a way to expand with manufacturing, then what is the risk you see of someone else making that market and kind of... Or how do you see-
Yeah
... the broader fresh market developing in Europe, absent, you guys entering?
Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. What I can tell you is that what we do is very difficult. It's very hard for people to figure it out. Both Mars and General Mills have tried to compete with us in the U.S., and were not able to produce products that were of any reasonable quality. They certainly hadn't figured out the distribution system, they hadn't figured out the fridge network and whatnot. So there is always the possibility that somebody could try, but they have to overcome all those knowledge hurdles, those operating experience hurdles that we've, you know, that we've mastered over time. But that's also part of the reason why we wanna continue with the work in Europe. We aren't gonna break the bank by investing in Europe at a rate that would impact our, the cash generation of the business in any material way.
But first mover is important to us, and the mastery that we've got is important, and this is a scale-driven business. So we want to be aggressive in developing that opportunity, but we don't wanna compromise the profitability of the company. So it's a fine balance that we've got to walk, but we're comfortable that the consumer here wants the product, and we just need to get ourselves in a position where we're ready to put our foot on the gas and do that because the supply works. Yes.
Yes, on the cumulative media investment, you see the line actually converging with the households, the total number of household penetration. So is that a reflection of that you temporarily had lower household penetration gain because you raised prices, or do you see that in general, the ROI that you get on the marketing spend is decreasing?
So there was a period there when the prices went-- We took four price increases, two 5%, one 12%, one 2.7%. Consumer didn't blink on the fives and the 2.7. On the twelve, there was a pause, and so that did impact our business. But we're now back to where our customer acquisition cost is prior to all those price increases. So we're at the place where today we have the, the marketing efficiency that we had expected to have, and we'll continue. A big reason for that is we have so many more fridges out there that are amplifying the value of the advertising. So you see an ad, you walk in the store, there's now two big lighted fridges. Your conversion rate is dramatically higher than it had been before. Yeah.
So, I have quite a large dog, too. I'm wondering about two things. It's like online, it's like, you said about the fridges at the supermarkets or wherever.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
So how is your online business plans and all this stuff? Because, like, just don't want to go to the supermarket and buy-
Mm-hmm
-food. I want to get it delivered. And the second of all is like, the, you know, the fridge size. Is like, you need a fridge for the dog food then—if you get like-
You live here in Europe?
Yes, I do.
Yeah. You want to talk that part of it, too?
Yeah, sure. So, well, the two pieces, one of them, I'll get a fridge sent to your house, and we'll take care of that. So we'll take care of that. That's easy.
Okay.
No, but in all seriousness, so it's really interesting. So we have developed where basically the fresh shop is primarily done today, which is in grocery, right? We're sharing some of the grocery numbers. It's really. The numbers are pretty extraordinary, and the other thing that we definitely recognize is especially younger consumers, but everybody really appreciates the ability to kind of sit down and order it and have something delivered to them, right? So today, about 9% of our sales are done through some type of digital or e-commerce. The majority of that is through, like, an Instacart or a Shipt, which are models in the U.S. that. Okay, you're familiar with those, where it's basically delivered to someone. But we're way under- indexed because the average brand is over 30. So we know this is an opportunity. So we focused on grocery.
We've done a lot in pet in mass. We've done a lot in pet, and we know we have an opportunity in digital. More exciting from a distribution standpoint, we talked about second fridges, we are more excited about the digital opportunity that we have to develop and what we want to do, and Billy touched on this, and Todd touched on it also, but there's 27, almost 28,000 fridges. There's 30-something thousand fridges, 28,000 locations across the U.S. today, and we want to figure out ways where consumers can easily get that delivered from a local fridge and almost think of it as, like, many, many thousands micro-fulfillment centers. So we want to use it that way, and that's how we'll develop digital, and we'll close that gap.
I don't think we'll ever be a 30% of our business brand, but we think there's a lot of opportunity to both work with Chewy and Amazon and also that model that I was just explaining.
Just explain the sizing in Europe versus the US.
The sizes of the
Size.
Yeah.
The smaller fridges.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
The fridges are in the U.S. You know, you've probably been there. People have bigger fridges. They also have a second fridge someplace, like whether it's downstairs in a basement or in a garage or whatever. So we really don't run into that, but the way we think about it, too, is we're trying to design products that literally, even for a larger dog, can fill up a crisper drawer, like in the U.S., in a U.S. fridge. So literally, we're asking them to kind of designate one crisper drawer, and most people in the U.S. are in a grocery store at least once a week, and in Europe, they're in a grocery store even more often.
So we want to be tied to the milk, eggs, produce trip. That's when we want to get tied into that shopping trip.
Yeah, great.
Because you went through the numbers earlier on that basically per household should be around $100 per-
Average household.
Yeah. So how much of a daily spend does somebody have?
Obviously, that's an average.
Yeah
So you have people that bought you once for $4, and you have people that bought you all the time for over $1,000.
Mm-hmm.
It's a big range in there. We talked about these HiPPOs. The HiPPOs are the people that we really want to develop, and those are the people that should spend $4, $5, $6, $7, and $1,000 per year with us, and that's really the focus of the brand, and if you even look at the advertising, the advertising is targeted towards HiPPOs-
Yes
... and that's why that group is outgrowing much faster than our average penetration.
I just can tell you, it's around $1,000 a year for a, for a big dog. That's what you have to spend.
For sure. Yep.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yep, and we would like to have you as a customer.
I want to get the fridge, too.
Yeah.
So we have a deal, eh?
We can talk.
I think we're out of time.
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.