Okay. Welcome back, everybody. Thanks for joining. I am thrilled to welcome Freshpet back to our conference. With us today from Freshpet, our Chief Executive Officer, Billy Cyr, Chief Operating Officer, Nicki Baty, and Chief Financial Officer, John O'Connor. Together, Billy, John, and Nicki are going to run us through a presentation. At the end, we should have some time for Q&A, which we intend to open it up to the audience, if there are audience questions. With that, I will hand it over to Billy, and we'll get started.
Thank you, Steve.
Yes.
All right. Thank you. For the benefit of those folks who are listening online, our presentation was just posted to the investor relations website, so you can see as we flick along, go through this session. As always, we have our safe harbor statement. Today on the stage with me, we have Nicki Baty, who is our COO, and her two cats unfortunately couldn't make it today, but that's Muffin and Ollie. The newest addition to the Freshpet family, John O'Connor, and that's his dog, Bryce. Also, Bryce could not be with us today. For those of you who've been around for a while, you recognize that dog with me is my dog, Appa. She's been in many of our presentations. What we want to talk to you about today is why we think that Freshpet is building an advantage position in the future pet food category.
I want you to take away four key messages today. The first thing I want you to take away is that there is a generational transition that is happening in the pet food category. The baby boomers and the Gen Xers are being replaced by Millennials and Gen Z, and that transition changes the buying habits and the brand preferences and changes what this category is going to look like going forward. The second message I'd like you to take away is that our investment in manufacturing scale and expertise is delivering a more appealing and diverse portfolio of products at low cost that insulate our business from the narrowly focused competitors. You're going to see how we are leveraging our investment in capital and manufacturing technology to create a strong, diversified portfolio of differentiated products. The third is that we're building a consumer franchise of increasingly main meal consumers.
Nicki will take you through what that looks like, but we want to build a consumer franchise that is people who use Freshpet not as a mixer or topper, but as the main meal. The last thing I want you to take away is there's also a transition going on at retail, and that transition at retail is creating fresh delivery options on the backs of our customers and Walmart and Amazon and other retailers. What that's done is it's turned our 39,000 fridge infrastructure into a competitive advantage that drives velocity and buy rate in those stores and in those fridges. I want to take a step back for a second and just remind you a little bit of what makes Freshpet such a unique company. We have been in business now for almost 20 years, and we are nourishing pets, people, and the planet.
We focus on the humanization of pets as a driving tailwind for this category, the people's increasing desire for fresh, wholesome, all-natural foods, and it is increasing focus on wellness. The company that we're building, it's really focused on building and pioneering fresh food technology, creating the absolute best possible food. We want to create products that are widely available and accessible, meaning accessible price points, and we want to lead the category growth, and we think we are doing that. What's the opportunity for those who invest in our company? Well, first, the pet food category is a very large category, and we are growing market share in that category with lots of upside. The addressable market is a large addressable market and has consistently grown over time, consistent with that generational transition that I talked about.
We're also increasingly focused on improving our returns on capital and have shown that we can actually deliver that, and you'll see that in our focus. Let me talk a bit about the category. The category is about a $56 billion U.S. pet food category that we compete in. We have opportunities to go beyond that, but that is the core business that we focus on today. Within that, the segment that we are most focused is the $38 billion dog food and treats category. That's where the vast majority of our sales are. We believe the segment that we're talking about, the segment that we're pioneering, which is the fresh and frozen category, which we believe is ultimately replacing kibble and can, is about a $10 billion category opportunity. That's the market we are focused on.
What's interesting and encouraging is that this transition, this generational transition that I described from a population perspective, is driving a form or preference transition. What you can see is between 2014 and where we are today, and the data here is from grocery stores, this is sort of the leading edge of the transition, but in grocery stores, fresh pet food has now surpassed canned dog food and become the second-biggest part of the dog food category. What's more interesting, though, is that the bulk of that share has come out of the dry dog food. Dry dog food's dropped from 73.3% down to 51.2% as the wet part or the fresh part has gone from 2.2% to 23.1%. Fresh is the future of this category, and this chart is the best way to see that. Whoops.
When we talk about the addressable market, I described it for you as this addressable market that's driven by the generational transition. We measure it very regularly, and we showed you some data a couple of years ago that showed it was 27 million households, then it went up to 33 million, and now it's at 36 million. We firmly believe that as this generational transition happens, by that I mean Boomers moving out of the category and Millennials and Gen Z coming in, that we will see this TAM grow in line with that population transition, and that will create this future $10 billion category. Oops. Of the TAM that I described, the 36 million households, though, Freshpet's currently only in 16 million of those households. We've been growing quite steadily over the years. You see we are in 4.8 million in 2018.
We're into 16 million households today, that growth has been pretty strong and pretty steady, but that does leave an awful lot of upside for us. Many people mistakenly perceive Freshpet as a brand that is skewed as sort of a luxury item, or to the high end of the market. The reality is that the consumers who buy Freshpet are middle-income consumers. We have become much more of a mainstream brand, we expect that trend to continue over time. The bulk of our users are middle-income consumers. I will be very clear that in the current K-economy that everybody talks about, the consumers on the high-income side are doing better than the people on the low-income side. We have a very diversified portfolio of consumers, this is what helps drive our growth.
This generational transition that I've talked about, you can see how the Millennials and Gen Z are driving growth rate that's double what we're getting out of the boomers and Gen X. When you look at it from a category perspective, boomers and Gen X are actually declining as they kind of phase their way out of the category, and the category is seeing its strongest growth amongst younger users. Our growth exceeds what the category's growth is amongst those audiences. The thing that's interesting, and it's caused us to make a significant change in our strategy that Nicki will talk more about, is these consumers are a little bit different than the consumers that existed 10 years ago. These consumers buy in more channels than one. It used to be the consumer would look for and buy a product in their preferred single location.
What we're seeing now is the consumer who can buy you in more than one way or in more than one place. Think of that as they can buy you in a grocery store, they can buy you from Amazon, they can buy you from Instacart, or they can buy you in a DTC format. The more channels of availability you have, the higher the buy rate is, and that's a core competency for us because we are the only Freshpet food brand that has this broad distribution availability advantage. As we talk about moving from being a niche brand to being a mainstream brand, you can see that in the adoption that happens early on. One out of every five dog food buyers today is buying Freshpet, but Freshpet is the second most popular brand amongst the new Gen Z or Millennial households.
In other words, if you get a dog and you get a new dog and you're a Millennial or Gen Z, we're the second-choice brand amongst all the pet food brands that they might consider. That gives you a sense for where our future might lie. That also gives us the confidence that we have a long runway of growth ahead of us. We're still in the early stages of the growth journey that we have. We think we're in the early majority part of the Rogers' diffusion of innovation curve, and that tells us that there's significant number of new households yet to be gained as this category becomes more of a mainstream category.
The thing that's interesting is, as we've gone through this journey, when we focused on creating more and better products that meet the unique consumer needs, what you can see is the headstart advantage that we have versus everybody else has allowed us to go from the most basic products that we had in 2006 and in 2010 to the much more sophisticated and much more aesthetically appealing products, which also command higher price points, that we offer today. Every couple of years, we've launched another new platform that brings along higher and better quality products. The competitors that have come in after us, the products that they've launched today so far are competitive with the things that we launched between 2006 and 2010.
We are well beyond that with the products that we have available today, and we intend to continue to lead that or create a greater advantage there. You've heard us talk quite a bit, those of you who've been around the story, about how we continue to invest in our manufacturing capability and expertise to deliver those superior products, and the latest innovation that we've just begun rolling out and commercializing is this new bag technology. By that, we mean we have a different cooking technology that is available for the products we pack in our bags, and this delivers much simpler recipes, meaning cleaner label. It delivers better shapes, much more food-appetizing shapes, brighter, more robust colors, a really rich, smoky aroma. The texture is incredibly good texture, and the quality of the products, the visual quality and the consistency of the products is very high.
This new technology has been pioneered by us. We've been working on it for seven years, and we are now in the process of scaling it up. It produces a meaningful difference, and it does it at a lower cost. Today, we have three Freshpet kitchens, 16 production lines, and we have three different product forms. When I say three product forms, I'm talking about our rolls, and then two different forms of bags, our mini meatballs that we call Roasted Meals, and then our shredded product that we call Fresh From The Kitchen and products like our Homestyle Creations products. That gives us the highest quality, best products that are available in the category, it gives us robust and healthy shelf life, and it gives us the lowest costs, and we think that's the winning formula to be in this category. Oops.
That also has enabled us to have a depth and breadth of our product lineup that covers a wide range of affordability, starting with more basic products and going to the ultra-premium products. Today, 81% of our product sales can be bought for less than $5 a day to feed your average 30 lbs dog. 41% of our sales is in products that cost less than $3 a day. We have about 40% of our sales are in products that are $3-$5 a day, and 19% of our sales are in $5+ a day. That's a very low-cost way to feed an important member of your family. Oops. I'm going to leave you with this, and then I'll pass it on to Nicki.
The company that we are building and we expect to deliver in the next several years is one that's built on fresh manufacturing technology and expertise and scale. Think of this as all the investment we've made in both people and equipment and technology. All of those things are defining the strength of our manufacturing footprint. We have an unmatched fridge network, which is 30,000 stores and 39,000 fridges that are the underpinnings of our omni-channel business. We've built a brand with a very strong and healthy brand equity. We've invested very heavily in advertising, not promotion and discounting. The brand is built on strong advertising and continuous product innovation, the kinds of innovation that meet emerging consumer needs and the needs of the Millennials and Gen Zs. That unique mix of assets and capabilities, we believe, gives us scale advantage that no competitor can replicate.
With that, I'm going to turn it over to Nicki, and she'll tell you how we're going to win this $10 billion opportunity. There you go.
Thanks, Billy. I'm excited to stand here today and talk to you a little bit about what is the next opportunity for our business. As Billy indicated, we've built some very, very strong foundations that we believe are going to be critical to taking us forward to that next evolution. For us, it starts with building a much stronger new main meal household franchise. Household penetration is the key KPI that we track today and will continue to track in the future. You see from the chart the evolution of our business, where we've grown our household penetration very fast. As we've grown household penetration, we've also grown buy rate. That's average buy rate per year.
As we start to move into the next strategic phase of our development, we are very focused on new households coming into the brand that have the appetite to be main meal households. We will be very closely monitoring penetration plus buy rate as we plot the next path. We'll be looking much more at the faster growth that we will deliver for these households, and we call these households MVPs, most valuable pet parents. Who are these MVPs, and why are they important to us? Well, Billy talked a little bit about the number of households we have in the brand, 16 million. Well, we also have, within the 16 million, 2.5 million of these MVP households. These MVPs today are 71% of our total company revenue. They're very important for us, despite being a smaller part of the audience.
Billy also outlined that we have an opportunity ahead for the segment to be $10 billion. Well, we're very early on the path of building into this new addressable market. At 2.5 million households, we believe there is an opportunity for 10 million MVPs to be in the category, and that's really who we're going after. The importance of these households is they deliver a lot of lifetime value. Even when we look over the last three years, and bear in mind, that's not the full lifetime of these pet parents, but we've been tracking now for three years, and these MVPs have already delivered us a lifetime spend over the last three years of $2,500. Every new household we bring in that delivers this is obviously a very good ROI for our media dollars. Who is this MVP?
Well, they're definitely across all income segments because a big part that defines an MVP is the attitude that they have and the prioritization that they put in to their pet. Their pet is the most special member of their family, and they would typically exclude other members of their family or prioritize their pet above others. Also, our MVP is very conscious about what they themselves eat and what they choose to buy in their own shopping basket. They typically over-index on fresh, healthy, non-processed food, and they're looking to make sure that their pet eats very much in the same way that they choose to eat, and that it's a shared experience that they have. Our focus is really going to be on attracting both new and retaining MVPs.
The two key strategies we'll be following to do this is stretching and expanding the real food leadership that we believe we have today, not just versus kibble and wet, but also versus any new entrants that come into the fresh and frozen space. We will also be driving much more of that omni-channel access and demand generation model. As Billy said, more access equals more buy rate and more spend. What does expanding our product leadership look like in real food today? We've done a lot of sensory work, and a big part of our sensory work is showing us that our MVP and our consumer that's very interested in buying us is particularly interested in the aromas, the textures, and the visible difference that the product can bring.
By visible difference, they're looking at not just how the experience is for them as they're feeding their pet, but they're also looking at what the experience is for their pet as they're eating. That can mean anything from looking at the after effects from eating, so whether that's skin and coat quality, whether that's health benefits, more activity, better joint movement, everything that sits there in terms of visible difference that as a pet parent, they would notice. The latest studies for us show that 93% are seeing a visible difference on feeding Freshpet as the main meal. This is an area that we're really going to be making sure that we double down on in the future. We've had a lot of questions, really around the competitive market that we play in.
Clearly, we are sitting in the nice sweet spot of the fastest-growing part of the category today. As we've just outlined, there's $10 billion, we believe, of opportunity in this fresh and frozen segment. That's going to attract competition, we've not been alone in this category now for a number of years, new entrants will continue, we believe, to come into play. What we're showing really on this chart is how do we continue to grow our share, overall, within the dog food category, but how do we continue to stay one step ahead of all competition coming into play? The chart on the left-hand side shows versus a large new entrant competitor coming into the Nielsen XAOC database.
Since that launch, Freshpet has not only grown its velocity, but actually is eight times bigger than the next largest competitor that's currently in this segment. On the right-hand side, we also show a different channel, which is a club retailer, and how when a club retailer really starts to invest in fresh and really starts to invest in the category, this can raise all boats. We've been a very large beneficiary of a club retailer's investment that they have decided to put in to this very attractive segment that's emerging really within the dog food category. Since this club retailer started to invest in the business, they put in extra-large fridges, and we were the beneficiary through extra holding capacity on two items. We were the beneficiary with an additional product being listed.
Over the last four weeks, despite more competitive entries coming in, we've been able to grow our velocity by 45%. We feel very good about the competitive environment that we're operating in, knowing that it's not a zero-sum game. At the end of the day, there is a lot really to be going after in this segment as structurally more Millennials, Gen Z starts to transition into this new way of feeding. Moving into our plans really to grow our business through having better and stronger omni-channel access. We're sharing in this chart the opportunity we believe still for a lot of shared growth and gains to be made across different channels. As Freshpet, we started a large part of our business with grocery retail.
This was the place where you did your own fresh food shop for your own family, and this was very akin to us then being able to launch successfully a fresh food dog food proposition a number of years ago. We have a very strong share in this channel of grocery at 23%, and we believe that we've got incredible share gains to be made across mass, club, pet, and pure play still to go. Pure play, if you take a look at that number, has a very high buy rate as well. If we are able to open up our fair share in a number of channels, it will also come with a very strong buy rate attached to it, and that's very much our focus.
We believe we're uniquely positioned to play in all channels rather than one, this will really unlock that MVP consumer. Looking a little bit about how we're going to unlock that consumer, it starts really with the foundation that we've spent two decades in part building, which is the 39,000 fridges that we have nationally available. Again, I think we've really benefited over the last two years from a number of retailers also deciding that they want to win online and opening up a fresh grocery network. Big retail partners are really democratizing fresh delivery. The largest retail partner in the U.S. now has a third of their orders being delivered within 30 minutes. That last mile speed is really going to be a differentiator.
We are able to take advantage of that through our national distribution that is enabling the most convenient delivery to be put through. Our multiple chiller expansion will get us to a place where we're able to get holding capacity to support online and in-store sales, but it will also give us the broadest possible assortment to be available nationally. To become a successful omni-channel business, we're very focused on discovery. This is also winning in store as well as winning online. Discovery is really starting to evolve for us. As we start to get a stronger share of market in a number of retailers, they're looking to us for a category vision and leadership. What does that mean? Well, they're looking really to bring the fresh perimeter into that center aisle and to really try and drive more traffic through.
We're having a number of conversations really about how do we help with that discovery and how do we help bring a halo to the overall category by featuring fresh in a different way. Now, that can be through new island units that sit within seasonal space, it can be through open-air end caps, or it can be through multiple chiller expansion. All of this is really helping us to get to the holding capacity we need and the discovery we need to start to really introduce MVPs to the brand. The other part of our focus has been building online capabilities. For the last 18 months, we've successfully delivered over 40% growth in our e-commerce sales each quarter. That's been a very consistent pathway we're on, and as you can see, we definitely have an under-trade and under-share position in this critical area.
Why is Pure Play and direct-to-consumer important? Pure Play is online retailers, in the U.S., that would be an Amazon and a Chewy, direct-to-consumer is another important part. As we've started to learn and test into these spaces, we found a very incremental audience of new buyers. As we've expanded our offerings, certainly within Chewy and Amazon, 57% of our audience has been new to brand. As we've started up our direct-to-consumer business over the last year, over 70% is discovering us for the first time. This comes with a very high annual buy rate. The buy rate of $492 in Pure Play compares very well to the $112 that we have, which is an average Freshpet consumer. We're already up to, in just a year, $1,800 per year of buy rate sitting with our direct-to-consumer audience.
As we continue to expand these channels, which today are a very small part of our business into a larger part of our business, we think there's a big opportunity ahead for us. As we move more into building out real food leadership and really differentiating our product proposition versus any of the competition, and we couple that with omni-channel access, it means a change to that media model that's been so critical to our growth in the past. We will continue to very much be a media-driven growth model business. What we are doing and have been doing really over the last six months or so, is really pivoting our media model to be more digital first. When we were more of a brick-and-mortar business, we were very focused on linear TV, traditional TV model.
As we start to become much more available across multi-channel, we're really switching that media model around, we will be moving more and more of our money into social, into influencers, and into sort of broader engagement digitally to attract those consumers. We're also making sure that our message is very relevant to deliver that real food leadership. You'll see us feature more and more of our fantastic products, all that beautiful food flowing through the air. You'll see us continue to double down on the relationship and the specialness of the relationship between pet and pet parent. The final area is, as we increasingly start to scale our business and spend more money on media, it's really important that we have the right tech stack and the right measurement tools to be able to deliver the strongest possible return on investment.
Really, that's been a big focus for us, and we will continue to build out these areas. In a snapshot, this is a little bit of the explanation of how we are going to be delivering our omni-demand-driving experiences. It starts with a large bulk of our money continuing to be in a form of streaming or linear TV, which is the first part where you can drive strong reach and awareness of the brand. As Billy said, we still have a massive total addressable market of 36 million. This is the critical part that drives reach and frequency to that audience.
As we start, however, to get more and more into the specific needs of MVPs, that's where building consideration with influencers, making sure that we have some presence with vet engagement, and there's more and more questions coming from vets, and interest to understand more about fresh food. Ensuring that we show up well from a search and display from an interactive shopping experience. With that, I'm going to leave you with a latest clip of our advertising, so that you can get a feel for how this is coming to life.
How'd you sleep? Oh, you want to know how I slept? Oh, that's so nice of you to ask. I'll tell you how I slept. With someone's paw in my face. I'm not going to say whose paw. Your paw. It was your paw. When your person's not a person, you feed them Freshpet. Healthy meat and veggies, no preservatives. Do me a favor, wake me in an hour. Freshpet. Better food for your better half.
Thank you. With that, I'll turn over to John.
Thank you, Nicki. Let's start with 2026 real quickly. In May, we let everyone know we were off to a very strong start to the year, and that positioned us to increase our range for net sales growth to 8%-11%, and maintain our Adjusted EBITDA guidance despite increased fuel costs across our distribution network. So far this year, our Nielsen consumption growth remains strong through late May and a higher-cost fuel environment remains. However, we are reiterating our 2026 guidance today, and we remain confident in our ability to achieve it. We also have longer-term targets out there for 2027, which were first released in 2023 and have been refined over the last few years. In February, we indicated that we expected to exceed our prior target for adjusted gross margin of 48%.
We're very proud of the improvement in gross margin we've had over the last several years, and we expect further gains to come in 2026 and 2027 through improvements in our yield, throughput, and leveraging of fixed costs from revenue growth. Our new technology that Billy described also has the ability to meaningfully improve our margin on some of our bagged product, which will also contribute to gross margin improvement in the future. Those gross margin improvements, in addition to leveraging of SG&A costs, lead us to be in a range of Adjusted EBITDA of 20%-22% in 2027. Where we land in that range is somewhat dependent on revenue growth.
All else equal, if we grow in the teens, we'd expect to be towards the higher end of the range, and if we were to grow in the high single digits, we'd expect to be towards the lower end of the range. In terms of capital allocation, we are very clear-eyed, as I think you can see in our capital allocation framework here at Freshpet. With the tremendous opportunity that both Nicki and Billy talked about, to grow our share in this large category, investing internally in our business to drive revenue generation and revenue growth is far and away our number one priority. We make significant investments in media. We expect $150 million approximate investment in media in 2026 to drive awareness and conversion. We also invest in portfolio innovation and expansion, new recipes, new items to continue to grow our consumer appeal.
We invest in new go-to-market capabilities to ensure that we can enhance the way that we reach, win, and retain loyal MVPs in our Freshpet franchise. We also invest significant sums in capital expenditures. First, to drive capacity expansion as we grow. Also to grow our refrigerator network, our chiller network, to continue to grow distribution, as our presence and our assortment grow. We also invest CapEx in product technology innovation, and that leads to the outcomes that you've seen today in terms of the improvement in the product that we offer. We also invest in manufacturing productivity improvements to continue to drive down our cost to produce, to position us to take as much share as possible in this category in the future.
To the extent we have been able to fund, through internally generated cash, all of those high-return investment opportunities that I've described, we may look to return any excess capital to shareholders. Now, in May, we announced our first ever share repurchase authorization for $150 million, and we were in a position to do this in part because we recently started generating positive free cash flow, and we received nearly $100 million in cash proceeds from the sale of a business called Ollie, in which we held a minority stake. We come from a very strong financial position at this point in time. We're very happy to announce that authorization, and through late May, we have already purchased just under $40 million of our shares.
In closing, we remain very excited about the generational transition to fresh pet food, which we believe will lead category growth for many years here. We feel very strongly positioned through the investment in our own internal manufacturing networking capabilities and our large network of chillers, which position us to win with our MVPs and loyal fresh customers in the future. Thank you.
Okay, great. Do you have any closing remarks?
Nope.
No, that's it?
It's up to you.
Okay. No, you can-
No.
No.
You did a nice job.
We have about seven minutes or so left. If there are questions in the audience, I don't know if we have a mic, but feel free to raise your hand. Maybe we just pick up a little bit, just on the state of the broader category and demand conditions, because we've had some mixed signals from different-
players in terms of the resilience or lack thereof in the market.
Yep.
What are you seeing in the overall category juxtaposed against the run rate of your own business?
Yeah.
How are you thinking about that in the context of the full year?
I'll take a shot at it and I'll have Nicki-
Sure
add in. First of all, you have to remember about on our business, our business is one where the existing user base is very loyal. The reality is that when we talk about anything that's happening in the macro or anything that's happening about adoptions, it's about does it impact your ability to add new users to the franchise, but it's not like we're going to lose or trade down the existing users. You start with a very strong, loyal franchise. The second part of the category story here is, remember, we're in a very large category, and we have a very small share today, and we're leading this generational transition.
While there may be some ups and downs as the economy goes along, where it makes it easier or a little bit harder to bring in new users, the reality is the upside is so big, over time, it'll dwarf any of those little bits and ups and downs. Where are we right now? Right now, we're feeling very good. Anybody who looks at the Nielsen sees our data and says that we're running in a quite strong place, and we feel very good about that. We're also very cautious, like everybody else is, about what's going on in the broader world. So far, in the data we have, we're doing very well, and we feel very good about it. I don't know, is there anything I missed that you'd want to hit on?
Just the Millennial and Gen Z.
Yep.
The part that's weathering and holding up well within the category is Millennial and Gen Z, and that's the part that we are also disproportionately winning in.
Yeah.
Okay, great. I wanted to pick up on the journey from 2.5 million to 10 million MVPs. To what extent is that incremental recruitment? Is it recruiting 7.5 million new MVPs, or is there a graduation of existing non-MVP users into the MVP universe?
Yeah, it's a great question, Steve. Most of it is actually new MVPs, and that's really where our focus is. We do see a little bit of trade-up over time. If you start maybe mixed feeding and you realize that your dog is loving it and you're giving more and more, we see a little bit of that, but we let that naturally happen. We don't put strategies in place to try and drive that. Really, our focus is to gain those new MVPs that are existing within the category or are new to the category, where they've got their dog for the first time, and they have the attitude to come in and become a main meal feeder.
Okay. I don't know if there are any questions out there. Hard to see through this blinding light. Can we focus a little bit on the club channel? Because it's been a focus. As you say, there's been a lot of investment, mostly by Costco, in terms of new fridges, larger fridges, as well as the competitive launch. As you think about those two-piece parts as we move through the balance of the year, what is the runway for future fridge expansion relative to future competitive push?
I take that? Yeah. No, go ahead.
We're still very under-penetrated, I would say, in terms of what could be a potential share of market within the club channel, where obviously we're in the two largest club retailers. We're actually in all three club retailers in the U.S.
Yep.
If I take the two largest ones, the very largest one, clearly there is still a big opportunity for expansion. We've just increased to 3 SKUs in there. The third SKU's not yet in full distribution, that remains an opportunity ahead. Also, that club retailer is very under-penetrated in pet overall. That club retailer has a very large share within grocery, a very small share within pet food. It represents, for them, a big strategic focus. They're clearly trying to drive growth overall through fresh from the investment that they've made. We definitely still see runway within the largest club retailer. Then the second-largest club retailer, we haven't even annualized our sales there. We are in the process of selling 2 SKUs in that second-largest club retailer. We have agreement now to move forward with a third SKU in test.
Clearly, we've only got one chiller in there today, and there's clearly scope and opportunity for us to expand to multiples in the future. Personally, I still see a large runway ahead for our club business.
Okay. I guess one of the things that the moat around your business has often been is the chillers that you own and you put in place. In the club channel, where there's, especially in Costco, with more of an open fridge, does that change the calculus at all for you in terms of your competitive position?
Yeah. Obviously, once somebody else puts the fridge in, they have much more control of the space that goes there. I think what's misunderstood about what's happening there is that every one of our customers is trying to win in the category, and their definition of winning isn't taking business out of us, it's growing their total category. In the move that they've chosen to make, they've increased the amount of space that we've got, they increased the visibility that we've gotten. In the end, while we would prefer to maintain and manage the fridges on our own because we do a really good job of that, in this case, we got a win out of it.
Yeah.
Do I think other retailers are going to want to do the same thing? Most other retailers don't have the resources and capability that that retailer does. I'd say it's unlikely. At the end of the day, we like owning the fridges for two reasons. One is it's the branding that we get in store, and the second is we do a really good job managing and servicing those fridges. I think people often miss the fact that those fridges, if a fridge went down and it wasn't performing, one, you're not selling anything, but $1,000 worth of product goes bad.
Yeah.
It's different than a can of Coke getting warm.
Yeah.
It's a very different dynamic. For us, it's really important to do the maintenance and management of that fridge network, and we're really good at it. To us, that is one of the most important things that we've built and capabilities we've built, and we really don't want to take any risk in that part of the network. If the retailer can take it on, as they have done with this club retailer, that's great, but we want to make sure there's a high quality and high integrity to the product.
Time for one more question. Another thing you've been really good at is improving the efficiency of the manufacturing process.
Yeah.
You, John, alluded to the new bag technology. At what point, and it sounds like you're getting increasingly incrementally confident in that, at what point do you think you can credibly quantify the benefits of that specific technological leap?
Yeah. Look, it is still early on, right? These processes take a while to scale up and make sure you've got it run over several cycles, and you're measuring everything, and anything that could go wrong you've seen happen, right? There's always risky changes. We're still early on. I'd say in another few months we might be able to more specifically quantify that, but we're learning every day still on this new process.
Okay. Right as we hit zero. Very well done.
That's great. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, guys.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Thank you all for joining us.
Thank you. Thank you.