All right, we can make our way to our seats. We're gonna kick off this morning with Freshpet. And before we start, it's funny, like, dog food for breakfast. I thought about that a little bit, but I wanna thank Freshpet for actually sponsoring breakfast tomorrow morning, and they're gonna bring puppies. So thank you. They're not gonna serve dog food for breakfast, so you know, Freshpet really pioneered creating a completely new subsegment of the pet food category, centered on fresh, nutritious food, and cultivating the pet-parent trend. Its impact is still reverberating through the industry now as its competitors begin to figure out how to try to, you know, compete against it. This morning we have Billy Cyr, CEO, Todd Cunfer, CFO, and Scott Morris, Founder, Co-Founder, and President. Billy, I'll turn it over to you, and we can get started.
Great. Thank you very much, Brian. It's a—and it's a pleasure to be here. This is our third time presenting at CAGNY, and we very much appreciate the opportunity to do this. Particularly appreciate Brian, the song, you know, picking up on what our—we had our earnings call this morning, and I always end with a quote, and this morning's quote came from that same song. So thank you very much. Today we wanna talk to you, the theme of today's talk is leveraging high growth into scale advantages and profitability. We wanna talk to you about is how we are converting the rapid growth that we've had over the last several years into new scale advantages we haven't had before and in an inflection to profitability.
There's our usual safe harbor statement: we will make forward-looking statements, and we will use non-GAAP measures. This is available on our investor relations website. As Brian said, today, Scott is here. Scott Morris, our President and Co-founder, will be joining me. Todd Cunfer is here as well, and Rachel Ulsh, our VP of IR, will help facilitate the Q&A portion of the day. There are three key takeaways I want you to have from today's presentation. The first one, Freshpet is rapidly converting the scale it has created in fresh pet food into a unique and strengthened business model.
The second, that we are tightening our focus, our consumer focus, to a group that we call the Most Valuable Pet Parents, or MVPs. And the third, the scale that we have created has enabled us to reach a profitability inflection point that puts us well ahead of the pace that's required to deliver our fiscal year 2027 goals, and so we are raising those goals. I'll cover the first point. Scott will cover the second point, and Todd will come along and cover the third point. But I have to start with the consumer. You know, if you had a dog 50 years ago, the dog was sleeping in a doghouse in the backyard, or maybe you slept—it slept in your garage, or if you had a barn or a shed, or it had a chain-link fence around it, or it had a chain attached to its collar. That's not the role that dogs play in our lives today.
Dogs are ring bearers at weddings. They are autism support dogs. They are bomb-sniffing dogs. They are dogs that provide sympathy and empathy for us in our most difficult moments. They are our best friends, our most precious child, and a critical member of our family. Part of what we are trying to accomplish as a company is to elevate the food experience that the consumer has and that the pet has to match that changed relationship. The relationship that existed when the dog was sleeping in the doghouse in the backyard was canned dog food or kibble. The food looked much more like animal feed than food. We want the food to match the relationship. So our mission is to elevate the way we feed our pets with fresh food that nourishes all.
The category we compete in is an incredibly attractive category, and it has changed over time. We believe it's going through one of its most significant transformations in a long time. What started as animal feed and table scraps emerged into commercial pet food like cans and then ultimately kibble. And then came the birth of super premium pet food and then ultra premium pet food. But the part of the market that we're driving, the transformation that we are creating, is the migration from animal feed, in essence, to food. That's the transformation we're gonna talk to you about today. We are transforming the way you think about dog food. The food that we make starts with the kinds of ingredients that you would expect to have in food, the food that you would feed someone you care about and love.
So it starts with fresh ingredients like cranberries and carrots. To that, we add proteins like chicken and beef. We bring in hundreds of thousands of pounds of fresh chicken into our kitchens every single day. We then cook those products in ovens the way you would cook food. We don't retort it. We don't turn it into something that's dry and pebbly. We create a product that is food. We cook to USDA and FDA standards, and then we lock in all that freshness by refrigerating our product and putting it in a refrigerated distribution system all the way through the store.
There's no powdered meat, no preservatives, and no fillers in anything that we do. Our products are sold predominantly at retail, although we do have some portion of an e-commerce business, but our product is sold at retail in company-owned fridges. This is a core competency of ours that we have more than 35,000 fridges at retail that we own, we install, and we maintain in service. They are also micro-fulfillment centers for the e-commerce business that we do, where whether you're buying from Instacart or Shipt or curbside pickup, those become 35,000 remotely located fulfillment centers for Freshpet.
Now, as part of our, the emergence of this company, you know, as an insurgent, somebody who's trying to change the category forever, you can imagine there were naysayers along the way. People originally said, "Oh, this is just gonna be a niche. Nobody's gonna wanna be a part of this." Or they said, "Oh, it'll only ever be used as a topper," or "It's too expensive," or "It'll stink up your fridge. Why would you put dog food in your fridge?" "Oh, the model won't work. It's too expensive. The capital costs of this are too high. You'll never make money. Competition's gonna eventually enter and squash you." All those were the naysayers.
The reality is it hasn't slowed us. It hasn't stopped us. This chart is 10 years of weekly Nielsen Mega Channel data. It is one of the smoothest curves over the longest periods of time that I've seen in my 40 years in the CPG industry. And this curve should tell you two things. The first is the fundamental trends that are driving this category and driving the transformation of pet food into fresh-fresh pet food like Freshpet are very long-term and sustainable and sizable. The humanization of pets, the desire for fresh and natural food is a long-term sustainable trend.
But there's a second point that I want you to take away when you look at this curve, and that is along the way, it hasn't always been smooth, meaning there are some bumps along the way that over time don't appear to be very significant, but in the moment, they may have appeared to be very sizable. We had situations where we had to take a 27% price increase in 18 months. You can't find it on the chart because we responded. We adapted to that set of circumstances and found a way to navigate our way through it very quickly. We had massive out-of-stocks during the pandemic. We adapted, navigated our way through it. We had quality problems where the consumer didn't get the experience that we intended them to do.
We navigated our way through it. We had competition who entered the space. We navigated our way through it. The core competency of our company and of our people has enabled us to sustain this long-term growth over a very, very long period of time. Now, this chart is measured in dollars, and in a world where a lot of people have made their growth by price-taking pricing, it's always important to look underneath at the volume. This is the shorter period of time. This is going back to sort of pre the inflationary period we've seen, and you can see, again, weekly data over a long period of time. This is pounds of product that we sold.
We are building this business with volume growth, not pricing growth. Yes, we will take pricing when we need to, but we're building a business with strong volume growth. Retailers are recognizing that, and they're recognizing that and providing incremental support for the Freshpet brand by giving us more retail space, whether it was the first fridge, which might have been a small fridge, to a larger fridge, then to a second fridge or a third fridge. More TDPs, total distribution points, is the best reflection of the increasing support that we get from retailers because they believe in the category and the ability of Freshpet to drive category growth. At a household level, again, this is five years' worth of data, and along this five years, there have been all kinds of hiccups. In fact, when we took that 27% pricing, household penetration growth dropped to 6%.
And I heard people in our investor base say, "Oh my God, Freshpet can't live at 27% higher pricing. The consumer just won't pay that anymore," and the household penetration dropped. And we managed to work our way through that. And you can see incredibly strong, consistent household penetration growth over an incredibly long period of time. That's what we're trying to do is build an incredibly strong consumer franchise, and we are succeeding at doing that. How do we do that? We do that predominantly with advertising. We don't build this business off of pricing or discounting. We want a consumer franchise that recognizes the value of the product that we are selling and repurchases it based on the value that it creates for their pet.
This chart shows you the relationship between our cumulative advertising spend and household penetration over a very long period of time. The R-squared is 0.98. That tells you that we are an advertising-driven business, and it also should tell you that we have a very good CAC, customer acquisition cost, is attractive, and we get a very fast payback on the advertising investment. Some quick facts on what this has created is we just reported this morning our final 2024 results: $975 million in net sales. We guided to approximately $975 million, came in $975.2 million. We are in 28,141 stores as of December 31st. That we have 36,500 fridges because some of those 28,000 stores have more than one fridge, and we have 1.9 million cubic feet of space at retail.
We have built a very large consumer franchise and a very large retail franchise. It's to the point now that in the grocery channel, we anticipate that in 2026, fresh pet food will surpass canned or wet pet food, which was the original commercial pet food. So fresh will supplant the original pet food and become the second largest segment of the pet food category behind dry. And we think there's an opportunity to continue that growth for a very long period of time. Today, as a company, we are predominantly a U.S.-based dog food business. That's been by choice because, frankly, keeping up with the growth on a U.S.-based dog food business has kept us very busy and has delivered very strong results.
So we have 98% of our businesses in the U.S. 96% of it is fresh dog food. We have a very small treats business. We have a very small cat food business, both of which are long-term opportunities for us. And our business is predominantly at retail, particularly in retailers that sell food, so grocery, Mass, club. But we have a decent Pet Specialty business and a fledgling international business as well. By the end of this month, we expect that Freshpet will have trailing 12-month sales of $1 billion.
And a lot of companies get up and talk about the scale that they have as a company. And we're not here to tell you that we have $10 or $20 billion of scale. We're here to tell you that we finally, for the first time, have meaningful scale. But the scale is more meaningful than just the $1 billion. That's $1 billion in a single brand and in a single category in pretty much a single country. It's the kind of scale and leverage that we think can create significant economic value and significant strategic opportunities.
We're gonna talk more about that today. The recipe for success for Freshpet is really, really simple. We're in an attractive category where consumers are increasingly interested in their pets and treating them better and better. We have a differentiated product. If you take the kibble that many of our competitors make and you sprinkle it all on a table, you'd be hard-pressed to tell one brand from another. But when you put Freshpet there in a bowl, you'd be able to tell what's Freshpet, and your pet would surely notice the difference.
And beyond that, we're building a company that is specifically focused on and targeted at just creating what's necessary to be the absolute best fresh pet food company. That means fresh pet food manufacturing systems, distribution systems, retail availability systems, technology that we invest in, the branding that we do. Everything is built around creating the absolute best fresh pet food company. In that journey, we've created significant competitive advantages. It started with Scott and Cathal, our two of our three co-founders, and the idea for fresh pet food. From that, we started building technical know-how about how to create the products that we have. From that, we built a fridge network to now where we have 36,000 fridges scattered across the country and Canada and the UK, and knowing not just how to get them there and paying for them, but how to maintain them and service them and probably extend the technology capabilities that they might have.
As part of that, then we built manufacturing scale. We now have three producing kitchens, geographically dispersed with evolving technology and producing at scale. We're investing in new technology, and I'm gonna talk more about that in a minute, but new technology that can deliver higher profit and higher quality, a better experience for our consumer and a better experience for our shareholder, and then within that, all that is an advertising-driven brand where we spent $100 million in advertising last year. We'll spend even more this coming year, and it's creating a brand equity, a brand equity that owns and stands for fresh pet food, much the way consumers think about Gatorade being the sports drink, Tesla being the electric car.
Freshpet is the category standard bearer. It is an icon that represents the category, and we will invest to establish and create that further. Our growth is an incredibly virtuous cycle. This is a chart that we first unveiled back in 2017. We call it Feed the Growth. It's a very simple model. We invest in advertising and some product innovation at the top. And from that, we get higher consumer penetration, increased consumer penetration. That increased consumer penetration turns into greater velocity at retail. It turns into retailers, then putting in more fridges to keep up with that demand and the expanded consumer franchise. So we've expanded visibility and availability, which causes us to expand our manufacturing capacity, and we've been doing that.
From that, we then build organizational capability to expand our capability to build manufacturing facilities, create new products to drive efficiencies, and ultimately reinvest in the cycle. And that's what's enabled us to deliver the rapid growth we've had over a long period of time. And this is what that growth looks like. The company has doubled in size basically every three years since its founding. We did $975 million in net sales last year. You can see what our guidance is on the chart here for this coming year, 2025, and our long-term target of $1.8 billion.
We think there's a huge opportunity, and Scott will talk more about that in a minute. Part of what makes this an attractive business is consumers find our product to not only be an incredibly good product, but it's sold at a reasonable price compared to other super premium or ultra premium pet foods. If you look at this chart, we're the brands in the middle there, and you can see that we have, depending on the form, a roll or a bag, the type of protein or the flavor. Think of it as chicken or turkey or beef or salmon.
You can also look at it as the channel you might buy, whether you buy it in pet specialty or grocery or club. The price will vary. This chart shows you the cost to feed a 30-pound dog per day. We have items that are comparable to other super premium and ultra premium brands. This chart doesn't show you a lot of the very cheap stuff that you could buy in some of the outlets. That's way down on the low, would be down on the left-hand side. It doesn't show you the stuff that'd be on the upper right, like many of the DTC brands, which would be very expensive. We have products that are approachable and affordable for a wide range of consumers.
I also want you to take a look at this and think, if this pet, this dog that lives with you and sleeps in your bed isn't worth $2 a day, then you're probably not a consumer for Freshpet. Freshpet is for the person who thinks that a pet food, feeding your pet for a day, is worth the price of a cup of coffee. We exist in a large category. The category is $54 billion in U.S. pet food. The segment that the bulk of our business is in is the dog food segment, which is about $37 billion, and we have a whopping 3.4% market share today. Incredibly long runway for growth, so two years ago, when we appeared on the stage in Boca at this event, we set out what were rather aggressive goals for the company.
We were just in the process of completing a fiscal year where we had generated $595.3 million in sales, and we set a goal to be $1.8 billion in fiscal year 2027, five years later. We also told you that we could take our Adjusted Gross Margin from 36% to 45% over that same period of time. And we would take what was then an incredibly low, probably embarrassingly low, Adjusted EBITDA margin of 3.4% and turn it into an EBITDA margin of 18% by fiscal year 2027. And we become free cash flow positive along the way by 2026. We would build a consumer franchise from the 9.9 million households we had when we stood on the stage two years ago to 20 million households in 2027. Well, how have we done? We're ahead of the pace required to deliver the 2027 net sales target of $1.8 billion.
The most recently completed fiscal year, we grew 27%. Our guidance for this year will definitely keep us on track for that $1.8 billion net sales target. We were ahead of pace to deliver the Adjusted Gross Margin. In the most recently completed fiscal year, we had a 46.5% Adjusted Gross Margin against a long-term target of 45%. We made more progress faster than we had anticipated. Our EBITDA margin went from that paltry 3.4% to 8.7%, and the next year it went to 16.6%, the year we just completed, and we've guided to greater than 17% this year. We see significant upside there versus the target that we had previously set of 18% EBITDA margin. Our cash flow performance, our cash performance has been fabulous.
Our operating cash flow has been much better than we expected, in part due to the stronger operating performance and some good work on cash management. We still project that we'll be free cash flow positive in 2026, and we have no need for incremental capital. We can fund our growth going forward. Our household penetration is on track for the 20 million households. The year we just completed, we ended with 13.5 million households on the trajectory we need to be on to hit the 20 million households. All that adds up to creating scale. We've created scale in this business for the first time. Now, I listened to a lot of presentations this week and at other conferences like this, and a lot of the very large companies get up and talk about leveraging scale in their business.
We've never had scale. We never had any significant scale. And we're now finally figuring out how we can leverage the scale that we have created in this business to create long-term strategic advantage against a very tight, very focused business: a single brand, a single category, and a single country. And it creates enormous opportunities for us to create structural advantages that deliver significant profit improvement and significant barriers to entry. We would describe this as the Freshpet ecosystem. It starts with exceptional ingredients. Our product, the quality of our product is what stands out. It's what draws people into our franchise. We have to start with exceptional ingredients, and we do.
But we see more opportunity to invest in that area to create cost and quality advantages. Best-in-class cooking techniques. The way we cook our food is our advantage. It's what enables us to produce a distinctly different product than other products in the category and deliver a superior consumer experience. But we think there's more opportunity there. We're building scale and distribution. In the perishable world, distribution is critically important, and scale delivers a significantly bigger benefit in fresh than it does in ambient products. We'll talk about that. Our fridge network, visibility and availability.
There's huge opportunities for us to continue to expand our advantage at retail. Scott will talk to you about that, and from a marketing perspective, as we are creating scale in this business, we now have the opportunity to get much more tailored, much more focused, both in our product lineup and in the messages that we deliver to our consumers to create huge advantage. I'm gonna start with the first one, which is the ingredients. Our single biggest ingredient that we buy, the ingredient that has the biggest impact on the quality of our product and the cost of our products, is chicken. About 40% of our input cost is fresh chicken that we buy every day. Scott has responsibility today to work upstream to help us create even greater advantages, and we've been doing a little bit, a little bit of this as we've gone along.
If you go back to when the company got started, it literally got started in the side of a chicken processing operation because chicken is such an important ingredient. When we were subscale, we bought whatever chicken the suppliers could give us. We had high-quality standards, but frankly, we were too small to be important to the suppliers, and over time, as we've added scale and growth, suppliers have increasingly paid attention to us and given us increasing resources. We ultimately end up dual-sourcing our chicken to get a much more reliable and sustainable supply chain. Those of you who know our story know that we've gone so far as we've now invested in a chicken processing operation where we own the building and a partner, a chicken processor, owns the equipment and operates the equipment on-site in our Ennis, Texas facility so we get a lower cost of chicken and fresher chicken every day. But that's not where it ends.
We think there's more opportunity beyond that to move upstream to get higher quality and lower cost. We've hired PhD meat scientists who are working on technologies to do exactly that. You can expect over the next several years, as we build out our competitive advantages, you should expect to see us make more changes that are gonna drive greater competitive advantage and lower cost in our chicken. We'll get quality, cost, and marketing claims, the ability to claim higher quality chicken, human-quality chicken, many things that will make a big difference to the consumer proposition that we have. Going down the supply chain to our cooking process, this is where the money is made in our business. You convert the ingredients that you blend together, you cook them, and you package them. And in the cooking process, lots of things happen.
If you were a can or kibble business, you would cook the hell out of the product, and it loses some of its palatability. It loses some of its nutrient bioavailability. That's not what we do. In that process, there's some value that's lost. There's yield loss. We lose some value of the chicken in the cooking process. There's also quality issues that can be created in the cooking process. So what we've been investing in since 2019 is a group of people who do nothing but work on process improvements in our cooking techniques. We think we've found a couple of ways to do that.
Those of you who know our story know that we've been talking for a while about the first technology that we've created that we'll be installing in the kitchen in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, this year, starting up in Q4, that we believe is a breakthrough that delivers higher quality at a lower cost, greater throughput, and better return on invested capital. If that technology works at scale, as we believe it will, but we have to prove it at scale, it will have a major impact on the returns we get on incremental production lines for our bag business going forward. But that's not the only technology that we've worked on. We have a second technology that doesn't deliver the magnitude of benefits that the first technology does, but it can be implemented more quickly at lower cost, and we can retrofit our existing lines to deliver higher quality at lower cost.
That technology will also be scaled up for the first time in a production line in December of 2025. And if it works, we can retrofit our existing lines with that technology at a relatively low cost and very quickly. We have other technologies that are under development that, again, are designed to further our competitive advantage in this category and create barriers to entry that make it very difficult for somebody to keep up with us. Third, as I said before, in the fresh business, scale delivers enormous benefits to your product. If you don't have velocity and scale in your distribution system, you don't have full truckloads, your product turns slower, you have higher level of spoils, your product has to travel further on a truck and the freight costs are higher because it's a refrigerated truck, your warehousing costs are higher because the product just sits around.
In our business, scale is worth a fortune, and we intend to build that out. We added a second DC two years ago. We're working on other advancements in our logistics system to get more full truckloads, lower cost of warehousing, lower cost of distribution. Fourth, our retail visibility and availability. You know, when this company got started, retailers took a flyer on it. They put a small fridge in the middle of the island or middle of the aisle, and then they got some confidence as it grew, and they put a larger fridge in the aisle, and as they got better, they put a second fridge in, and they might have put a third fridge in. The benefits of scale were that we got to a place where you could see the retailer giving us greater visibility and greater availability. But it doesn't end there, and I want Scott to talk to you about our next greatest breakthrough in the area of retail visibility and availability.
So, as you can imagine, this has been quite a journey from 2006. I used to joke that in 2006, our strategy was, "Bakers can't be choosers, we'll take whatever we can get," and obviously, we put lots of fridges in, and it's evolved tremendously over time. I wanna start with a small little anecdote. In 2019, Billy and I were in Paris, very romantic, by the way, being there with Billy. We were sitting in the train station, and I looked across the train station and there was a Pret A Manger. That's French with a New York accent, by the way, and so we're looking at that, and literally there was an entire wall of fridges. At that point, we were literally just starting to get large fridges everywhere.
And I, Billy and I were talking. I'm like, "That's where we need to go in the future. We need to literally set a vision to kind of push out and make sure we have multiple fridges into the aisle." And that's really where we actually basically went back to the team. We shared it with the marketing team. We basically started sharing with retailers and sharing our vision and, like, where we thought the category could go. And now we're starting to see a lot of these. It's really tremendous. It's been really amazing what we've seen in the progression there. And we're seeing more and more of these fridges over time.
But it, as Billy said, doesn't end there. So we started talking more and just started to see these three fridge islands, right? And now this really feels like a very significant difference. This is in a Kroger, where there's literally three fridges together, and it's basically put into the center of the section. And retailers are starting to think, "Well, how can I use fresh pet food and really kind of change the dynamic of my entire section, of my entire pet category?" So we start seeing more and more of these. Well, we believe now we're at a really interesting time where we have had tremendous growth. We really have scale.
People are starting to look at us, and the things that we're talking to our partners about are really, they're getting a ton of traction. And they're starting to think, "Wow, what I did in fresh human food, if I can bring those attributes of it, if I can bring the frequency, if I can bring some of the margins, if I can bring the overall, like, traffic in, if I can do that in pet, I can really win." And oh, by the way, this is not something that's easily available online, right? Fresh food is not easily available online to be delivered to many people. So the retailers are really, I mean, it's been just a really interesting journey. So we started laying out kind of the next part of this vision, which is, what does this look like into the future?
And again, it takes the attributes that they're seeing in the fresh category and bringing it into the pet food category. And the way we see this progressing and progressing into the future is it becomes a grocery store for pets in that pet section. Now, that could be in a pet store. It could be a large Mass retailer. It could be in many, many different places. But it's really the vision that we're starting to lay out for the category. And the thing is, this isn't just a cool picture that we put on a piece of paper. We've had basically a whole series of meetings over the past six months with basically top-level partners, top-level, you know, different at our retailers.
And there is a lot of traction behind this idea. Now, this idea only works. Billy talked about, like our virtuous circle. It only works if we continue to drive the penetration and we continue to drive the growth. We're now at a stage where we think there's like a giant leap forward in that virtuous circle, and we'll start to see these over the next 12 to 18 months. We're gonna start seeing this basically in store.
The last piece of the scale that I wanna talk about is the scale that we were creating in the consumer offerings and the way we communicate to those consumers. The scale that we have has enabled us to create a much broader product lineup that meets the wider range of consumer needs. If you think about human food, there's, we're all humans and we're all, you know, basically similar. We have a wide variety of food interests. But when you're feeding a pet, the variation between pets is pretty sizable. We serve six-pound dogs and 150-pound dogs.
The 150-pound dog is 25 times the size of the 6-pound dog. So you have a need for a small dog product, a large dog product. We serve puppies. We serve senior dogs. We serve dogs with specific allergies or issue, health issues. And that creates opportunities, but you can only service those if you have a big enough consumer franchise that it justifies having unique SKUs for those items, for those consumer needs. And we have that. And then on top of that, as we've gotten scale, we have a marketing budget that's sizable.
We can reach in and deliver a very different message to the 6-pound dog pet parent, which is different than the 24-year-old guy who's a 100-pound dog. Or the message might be very different if your dog is in its waning years versus if you have a puppy. The scale in our marketing is gonna allow us to deliver very specific messages. But at the end, the brand equity we're building and the consumer franchise we're building is very much focused on people who are either dog, who are dog people. And if you're not a dog person, we're pretty much not interested in you. And here's how I can tell you why. Run the ad, please.
So he's driving and driving. The guy made a left, right, left into the river. Yeah. Yeah. He was following the GPS. Daddy's home. Hey, you got that thing? What's it look like? Yeah, I got that thing. Good. Throw it in the fridge. Over here? No, over here. Yeah, over there. Okay, okay, okay. We need a roadmap. Oh. What's this? You keep dog food in the fridge? Oh. It's not dog food. That's Freshpet. Real meat, real veggies for my boy, Junior. I digress, but, what are we doing here? Anybody asked, we were at Grandma's. Freshpet. It's not dog food. It's food food.
That's the New Jersey version of "You're a dog person or you're not a dog person." So anyway, so that's our current advertising. It broke on Christmas Day on the Netflix, Kansas City Chiefs versus Steelers game. I wanna summarize this section and turn it over to Scott, but in the end, we are creating the Freshpet food ecosystem that delivers the best quality, the lowest cost, and the most compelling presentation. We are creating a better consumer experience through our cooking and our ingredients. We are delivering the lowest cost production and distribution through the scale advantages we're putting in our manufacturing and distribution system.
Scott showed you we're creating greater visibility and availability and transforming a packaged good sold on the shelf in a can in the middle of the aisle in the dusty center of the store and creating grocery shopping for your pet. And we're delivering stronger financials as a result of all of that. In the end, if we do all this well, we'll only, we will not only have a great competitive moat, but it'll help our pets with longer, healthier, and happier lives while being kind to the planet. Here, Scott's gonna talk to you a little bit about our tightening consumer focus to build loyalty.
All right, thanks, Billy. Okay, so back about two years ago, we started sharing the idea of we wanted to focus on Hippos, basically really focusing on people that were the most involved with their dogs, and it's really important in their lives. We started making modifications across the entire business in order to do that. We've been very, very successful. We've seen great growth with that group that we call the Hippos or the higher value pet parents. Starting off, though, what we've seen over many years, we started in 2020. We actually started sharing our TAM, and that was the first time we shared it. Every time we share our TAM, every couple of years, we take the same methodology.
We look at basically who this idea and this concept of fresh pet food appeals to, and we see it getting bigger and bigger and larger. It's really exciting, and the reality is part of it is we are educating consumers, but part of it is consumers are trying to eat fresher, healthier, less processed, more natural diets, right? The center of your plate should be fresh food, and the center of your pet's plate should be fresh food too, and that's really helped us facilitate that, so our education and plus what's going on from a consumer standpoint just on the human food side. The other thing that we see is, and Billy talked about this earlier, but we are right on track on exactly what we wanna do when we build penetration.
Our model has consistently delivered year after year. We pretty much know how many consumers we're gonna have at the end of each year based on the advertising spend that we have in place. Right now we're at 13.5 million, but we always like to look into the market and see what the opportunity is, and you take a more established and more mature brand like Blue Buffalo, and you see over 30 million households that, that basically participate with Blue Buffalo or buy Blue Buffalo, so we look at this and we say, "Well, how do we continue to increase that, that penetration?" Well, obviously it's the marketing that we put in place. In our marketing, they seem like funny commercials, but we are making, we're basically asking people to make a choice basically between their dog and someone in their life, maybe someone they don't like so much.
Like it was the dinner date was one of the first commercials. You know, there might be a mother-in-law in another commercial. In this case, you know, "Hey, someone in the mob didn't do so well." So, but we are very conscious of that. They seem like fun commercials, but we are actually basically trying to appeal to a specific consumer and a different ideology. Also, visibility, availability. We just shared with you the fridges, what we're doing from a fridge standpoint. And also, now we're seeing our TAM growing, and obviously there's this humanization of pets, which is a great tailwind for the entire category, which continues to happen.
All right, the other piece. I think this is one of our single greatest opportunities. When we talk about buy rate, our buy rate right now, the average consumer spends about $100 a year, $105 a year. It's been growing 2%-5% a year over the past several years. We're making nice progress. When someone is on subscription for Freshpet, they spend about $700 a year. We don't need that many people spending $700 a year being on subscription, and what's happening is we're still one of these things where people buy episodically, but they, some people don't buy it as much. If you can get it on subscription, you kind of start locking that in.
The other thing is to buy Freshpet food, you'll see in a second, we have people that are buying us 20, 30, and 40 times a year. Our frequency is way off the charts, and we're training more and more people to have that behavior, so subscription we think is a huge piece, but also larger dogs, multi-packs. You're starting to see more and more multi-packs. If you look at what's going on in wet food, the majority of wet food is sold in multi-packs.
The majority of dry food is sold in big bags. So it's a very, very different purchase occasion for the consumer. We need to kind of meet somewhere in the middle. We want the frequency of fresh food, but we want them to buy more at the same time. Tons of opportunity in this area. Very exciting. Now, the one thing we do wanna really focus on is we talked about Hippos for the last couple of years, and we've made great progress with those Hippos. You'll see the people in, you know, the Hippos, that's heavy, super heavy, and our ultra users. What we're gonna do is we're gonna tighten it just a little bit further again. I'm gonna call them MVPs.
And basically because no one likes to be called a Hippo, so we're gonna change the acronym. The nice thing with the MVPs you'll see is the average buy rate, $470 a year with that group, okay? Now again, if you can get 'em on subscription, it's $700, and the change versus a year ago, we're seeing leading edge growth with these groups that we're targeting. So we feel like we're being very successful. So you have 2 million consumers representing about 70% of our total business. We wanna grow that piece of the business. We think that's a more powerful consumer franchise over time. All right, so who are these MVPs? Well, obviously they're dog people. They are really, really into their dogs.
They may actually make decisions on vacation and travel and actually different things that they will attend and do based on their dog. Their dog is their best friend. It's their buddy. It's their child. I can tell you right now we have a third kid. I have two kids, you know, that are older. We have a new baby in the house, and it's one of our cats. It's unbelievable, and everyone's seen that. We believe fresh food is really essential in their lives. So they believe that basically I need to eat a fresher, healthier diet. I wanna do the same for my dog.
So that's really a little bit of who they are. Well, what's important to these people? Obviously fresh ingredients. It's real food, and then also it's the next best thing to homemade food. Something that literally like I could almost make. They wanna be able to take it out of their fridge and basically look at it and go, "I feel so good about feeding this." So that's really important. But these are the aspects that are important to these MVPs, and we think we really have the right products for them.
Okay, so obviously focusing on those people, we wanna make sure we're available and visible wherever they are and however they wanna buy us, right? We're in 28,000 stores today, the 1.9 million cubic feet, and 22% of our stores have second fridges, second or third fridges, and you're gonna see more and more of that going on, and you're gonna also see us be more available from different types of subscription services out there today. Billy mentioned Instacart as an example. There could be many of our retailers we're working on doing subscription with them too. We think that's a real piece of the puzzle, using it as micro-fulfillment from those 27,000 stores that we're in. This is a really interesting piece of information.
You start thinking about it. If you look at where we are today in food, we are basically 20% of dry and wet dog food in the food category, 20%. And you can kind of see we're way underdeveloped in pet specialty, and honestly we're actually pretty underdeveloped in Mass. Our fastest growth rate is in Mass right now. And we also are deploying new strategies across pet specialty, and we wanna make sure that they're growing well way ahead of the category. We wanna grow even further ahead. So those strategies will be deployed in the back of this year. You'll start to see like rebranding efforts and a double down in pet specialty. We think there's a lot of opportunity in that channel also, in addition to everything we're doing from a kind of a digital e-commerce standpoint.
This is a pretty interesting chart. So if you take a look at food specifically, we are the largest brand in food, right? Now we go back to that buying dynamic. The people that are buying us the most, we're getting put into that Freshpet. So that's really one of our biggest opportunities, but we're a large brand. We also think that this 20% share is really indicative of what the potential is out into the market for the longer term across multiple channels. The next one is we actually over-index with small dogs. So as Billy mentioned, we're gonna focus more on large dogs. We think also medium and large dogs. So we created a product recently. That's another opportunity to kind of increase our overall buy rate. And then the last piece, Todd's gonna talk, take us through and talk about leveraging our scale and delivering more and more profitability.
All right, t hank you. We're short on time, so I'll go very quickly. We've made significant progress in our profitability. Obviously, 2022, very little profitability. We really started to pick up some pace in the second half of 2023 when our operation truly started to stabilize and obviously had a terrific year in 2024, EBITDA over $160 million. And more importantly, the cash flow was significantly improved. 2022, we actually had negative operating cash flow. We just generated $154 million and are well on our way to being free cash flow positive in 2026. ROIC, this is incredibly important. We talk about it literally every day, and we have an efficient capital efficiency framework based on three strategies.
Number one is just to get more efficient and throughput and yield out of the existing lines that we have. There's a couple hundred margin points just getting more efficient with the existing lines, the existing technology. We need to get more out of the existing sites that we have. The lines themselves are not that expensive. It's that capital investment of the building, the wastewater treatments, everything that goes into that facility are extremely expensive. So we wanna be able to use every single inch. And then as Billy talked about earlier, we're just starting now to scratch the surface on some new technologies, and none of this is baked into our forecast. Today we have 14 lines running in three different facilities.
Ultimately, we will have at least 24 in the footprint, and again, we wanna maximize that footprint before we have to go to another facility down the road. We all, we feel very strongly with that existing footprint. We will have up to $3 billion of capacity, and this will ultimately be about half of that capacity. And we haven't, again, the technology that is coming. The Bethlehem facility, the seventh line in Bethlehem has an enormous possibility, especially on the bag part of our portfolio, to increase throughput, yield, improve quality, drive higher margins. It's really, really exciting. We haven't gotten to it at scale yet, but if it, if it scales out the way we think it's going to do, there's tremendous margin opportunity with this, with the new technology that we're working on.
Let's really quickly talk about 2025 and longer-term guides. We came out this morning and gave top line growth of 21%-24%, at least EBITDA of $210 million for 2025. And we're gonna spend about $250 million of capital this year. If you remember, some projects pushed out from 2024 into 2025, so we spent about $25 million less this past year than we anticipated. We'll have a little bit more sales growth in the second half of the year. In the first half, it'll be fairly balanced, but a little bit more as the household penetration starts to build up. Modest Adjusted Gross Margin expansion. We will spend advertising close to what our net sales growth is.
If we see an opportunity to spend a little bit more, we think we have the financial flexibility to do that. And cash flow, I think we'll have another terrific year. We will end the year with at least $200 million of cash on our balance sheet. And again, we feel very strongly in 2026 we will be cash flow positive. Quickly, just talk about the 2027 targets. Again, we've had about 28% growth CAGR over the last two years, which is phenomenal. We're holding the $1.8 billion in top line for 2027. Realistically, we probably could grow faster if we spent some more media, but it also requires us to spend more capital, have more projects going on, and it kind of pushes out where we potentially can be free cash flow positive. So we're very comfortable with this $1.8 billion.
The margins Billy talked about earlier, we're way ahead of schedule. We're already ahead of the 2027 target, and now we're predicting we can be at least at 48% in 2027 from an Adjusted Gross Margin perspective. And the thing that we're most excited about is the EBITDA margin. Coming off a very low base when we were here two years ago, we're now already over 16%. We'll probably be around close to 18% this year, which was our previous target. And we feel very strongly we can get to a 22% EBITDA target in 2027 and more to come. How are we gonna get to the gross margin? It's fixed cost leverage. We've gotten great input cost reduction. Quality costs have come down. The labor and overhead piece, the fixed cost structure of the plants we really haven't leveraged yet, and there's huge opportunities there.
And from an Adjusted EBITDA perspective, besides the gross margin, there's a lot of G&A leverage. We haven't gotten much of that the last couple of years. We'll probably get at least 100 basis points of that this year, and that will grow about half the rate of sales. A tremendous amount of leverage there. We spend a lot of, it's a very capital-intensive business, but about 80%-85% of that capital is really to, is capacity expansion. We spend some money on fridges, a little bit on maintenance, but again, when we're growing this quickly, we need to spend a lot of money, on capital, and we'll spend between $2 to $250 million per year for the next few years. This will become a free cash flow positive business. This is probably the last frontier for us to prove out.
We proved out the margins. The ROIC is starting to really, improve dramatically. This is the last piece that we have to prove out. Look, this business will moderate over time from a top line perspective. When that happens, the capital intensity will obviously decline. The margin structure of our business continues to improve, and we think there's tremendous opportunity to drive free cash flow in the future. With that, I'll hand it over to Billy for some closing thoughts.
Yep. Sorry to run as long as we have. Got so excited by this, but these are the points we made at the beginning, and the reality is I hope you understand we are building scale. It's creating an advantage business model. We're tightening our focus on consumers, and we are building a business that has hit an inflection point on profitability. So with that, we are the future of pet food. Thank you very much. We are not trying to avoid questions. We would love to take questions, and Rachel will facilitate that. Brian, if you wanna ask any questions or.
I think we're gonna go straight to the breakout, Billy. Straight to the breakout. Thank you very much and let's again thank Freshpet for presentation and breakfast tomorrow.