Freshpet, Inc. (FRPT)
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Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference

Sep 10, 2026

Summary

The event highlighted a year of strategic shifts, including new leadership, omni-channel expansion, and advanced manufacturing technology. Focus is on deepening consumer engagement, driving innovation, and achieving ambitious margin and growth targets by 2027, with a long-term vision to lead the fresh pet food market.

Speaker 1

Hope everybody has had a good evening, got some rest. I know yesterday was pretty intense. A lot of back-to-back meetings, but it's been really productive, and we're thrilled to have everybody here and back for our fireside today with Freshpet. With us today, we've got the Freshpet team, CEO Billy Cyr, Chief Financial Officer John O'Connor, and Chief Operating Officer Nicki Baty. Thanks to all of you for joining us.

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Great. Glad to be here.

Speaker 1

Maybe the way to kick it off, Billy, is simply, what's changed since your fireside chat here last year?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Yeah. Quite a bit has changed. Let me start with, first, the obvious is John is new to us. John joined us in the last year, with a very deep experience base in the pet industry. He was both the CFO of a roll-up of vet clinics, but yet prior to that, he was at Zoetis, and after that, he was at Zoetis for a period of time. So it brought a whole new voice to the company that gave us a much better lens on the animal health space, and we think that's really value add. From a market perspective, there are three other things that I would call out. First is, obviously, we've had an enormous amount of competition enter the market for the first time. Frankly, we've been waiting for this moment for many, many years.

It came later than what we would thought it would have. We were not surprised to see as many people express interest in this because we believe it further validates that this is the future of pet food. We have seen everybody from Hill's and Blue Buffalo and some items from Mars and even from Nestlé enter the market, and you kind of look at it and you say, "Okay, this validates that this segment is real." A lot of people were wondering whether or not these new launches would somehow find the weak underbelly of the Freshpet business. To date, I can tell you they haven't. I am not even sure what the weak underbelly is at this point, but nobody has certainly exposed any real weakness in our business, and we have moved along quite a bit.

It is our hope and our expectation that all this innovation and new entrants will help make the category a more robust and a bigger category, and we will have a very, very large share of that category. The next thing I would highlight is that we have, in the last year, really made a very strong pivot towards what I would call the omni-channel, what we have been describing as the omni-channel. If you go back two or three years, people loved our fridge network, but they also viewed it as a little bit of a weight hanging around our neck in a world where people are less frequently shopping in-store and were instead shopping online.

We found a way to build a marketing distribution system, which basically created a level of access that is really unprecedented in the pet food space, meaning you can buy Freshpet almost anywhere, almost any way you want. Our fridge network is a critical anchor in the fulfillment part of that. About 80% of the volume that goes online actually comes out of our fridge network in-store. So it is a key enabler to a whole variety of things, everything from Instacart to Walmart+ and other ways in which you get the product. The third thing I would highlight is a fairly significant change since last year, is that we are now commercializing the new technology, production technology we have been talking about for quite some time.

We now have one [full-up] line up and running and two of the light versions of the line up and running, and we are very encouraged. It is a testament to the long foresight, the vision that we had for how we were going to win long-term, how we are going to build an increasingly strong competitive moat in manufacturing, scale, and expertise. It also opens up an enormous number of possibilities for us on product innovation.

Enormous amounts of innovation that can come out of this that is frankly greater than what we can get out of the existing manufacturing system. So it's higher quality, lower cost, much broader innovation. That's a big change. If you put all those together, we kind of feel very good about the progress we made in the last year and feel good about the position that we're sitting in today.

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you for that. Maybe we talk a little bit about your expectations for the dog food category overall, and is your growth in 2027 and beyond dependent on category growth?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Yeah. Obviously, if we had category growth, it creates a tailwind for us. We'd feel much better if we had a strong tailwind. But it's also important to recognize that we're still in the early innings of the growth of the Freshpet food business. Our household penetration is still very small compared to the total size of the market. The MVPs that we have, which are our most valuable pet parents, we're only about 25% into the TAM there. Yes, it would help if we had some tailwind, but the reality is there's a lot of consumers who are interested, who would be high-potential consumers for us who we haven't gotten to yet. They may be a little bit harder to get in this environment, or the bar might be a little bit more difficult, but the opportunity is still there.

We're not dependent on it, but it does help.

Speaker 1

Yeah. As you touched on, competition has certainly recently heated up, as you would have expected. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about how you think Freshpet compares versus competition today. Do you think it ultimately grows the category, or does it ultimately inhibit your growth?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Yeah. I guess I'd start with, as we watched every one of these entries come, we were doing an assessment of what does this tell us about the strength of the business that we've built, because we were building this thing expecting competition. We were trying to define moats that we thought would be most defensible for the long term, and now we had a chance to test them. I can tell you what we feel pretty good is that we are now able to produce the highest quality product at the lowest cost. We also feel very good about the consumer franchise we've built, the loyalty that it has, the strength of the brand equity that we've built, the breadth of the product line that we have.

Because all that together has fairly well insulated us against people who have come after us from a D2C perspective, people who are coming after us from the vet channel. People are doing it in pet specialty, people are doing it in grocery. People are coming at every possible different direction with every different combination. But when you boil it all down, we're still producing the highest quality product at the lowest cost, and we've got an incredibly strong franchise. Do I think it'll help the market? Yes. I think that what we've seen over and over again is when anybody advertises that fresh food is a better way to feed your pet than kibble and can, what you find is that it raises the tide for all participants, and we are by far the biggest beneficiary of that.

Speaker 1

Yeah. What do you view as Freshpet's greatest competitive advantage? More importantly, maybe, how has that evolved over time?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Yeah. I'm going to highlight on this, I think John might have something to add. This business got started with a first mover of, we knew this was a segment that we wanted to be in. We also understood that being able to produce a high-quality product was important. We then built fridges out of necessity, and fridges became the moat for a long period of time. Nobody else was willing to buy fridges, install fridges, maintain fridges, and we built that capability. But we knew that over the long haul, there would be ways that people would say, "Okay, this category's big enough. I'm going to get into it, and I might be willing to buy fridges or go D2C or have a retailer buy fridges."

What we started doing back in 2018 is we decided that we're going to build manufacturing scale and expertise as the critical advantage. We started doing that, and today we have enormous scale advantage, we have enormous distribution advantage. Our manufacturing technology we've invested in is incredibly advantageous to us. But we're not stopping there. We are already under [development] on what the next generation of each of those would look like.

Also knitting it together in a network where 39,000 fridges with a manufacturing scale that we have and the expertise and the product lineup it enables, all that fits together becomes what we think is a very, very powerful network that is very hard for somebody to compete with right out of the box. But John might have some thoughts to add to that.

John O'Connor
CFO, Freshpet

Yeah, I think the only other thing I'd add, Billy, is that competitive advantage needs to be sustained and ideally enhanced, right? When you look at the category dynamics that Billy described, we're one of the few, if any, who are driving considerable volume growth in our business over the last several years. I think that says a lot about the direction of travel, of relative cost structures within the category. I think that puts us in a very advantageous position in terms of how we think about investing in our business to sustain those advantages that Billy described, but also create new ones to further penetrate the category and drive durability into our growth.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Can you describe the strategic evolution of your model, particularly as it relates to your omni-channel strategy, which you touched on, the balance between household penetration and buy rate growth?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Nicki will take that.

Nicki Baty
COO, Freshpet

Thanks, Billy. We've been at this for 20 years. We're going to be celebrating our 20-year anniversary in October, and a big part of Freshpet was all about generating trial. Going door to door, opening up a fridge, opening up a new store distribution, and we did a terrific job generating trial. Billy touched a little bit on the total addressable market we feel the opportunity is for Freshpet out there. We're currently about 40% of the way through our total addressable market. If you think about an innovator's curve, we're in this early majority stage in terms of what we've built. The next stage for us for the future is to build a much more durable consumer franchise. We've had a lot of people trial the brand.

We've had some light users in the brand, and increasingly, we're moving more and more to main meal feeders that are coming in. That's what we call our MVPs. We've started to make more of a pivot, and this is, I think, a perfect time for the next evolution of our journey to build that more durable franchise. Which means you're going to start to see a bit of a higher buy rate coming through from Freshpet. We've had a nice balance of household acquisition, and that's still very important to us, also combined now with a higher proportion of buy rate coming through. As you start to think a little bit about the model, those consumers we bring in, pet parents we bring in on Freshpet, are going to be increasingly valuable to us.

That means a bit of a pivot also on the distribution model, because those that are main meal feeding want to be buying us more frequently. If they need to be buying us more frequently, we need to have access, as Billy puts it, whenever and however the pet parent wants it. That has opened up a very different opportunity for us in terms of distribution. We feel the runway is still very large for Freshpet. We are at a very early stage still in our development.

Speaker 1

Maybe we dig into that a little bit more. You have spoken about your shift to focus on MVPs. Maybe you can talk a bit more about what an MVP is, actually, for those that are not as clear. Are they all high-income? Are they main meal feeders? Are you moving up toppers to main meal feeders? How is that evolution—

Nicki Baty
COO, Freshpet

Yeah.

Speaker 1

—moving?

Nicki Baty
COO, Freshpet

Maybe I will start with the fact an MVP for us is more about behavior than it is about demographic. An MVP can be any income level, lower, middle, or higher income, and we have a really good representation across each of the three groups. Also, we are not just a small dog brand. We are widely represented across small, medium, large dog, and we are also widely represented across all life stages. The MVP is more about the behavior they exhibit. They typically are pet parents that are very health aware. They tend to eat a lot more, I would say, real, less processed food themselves. That is a key part of the behavior set. They are definitely a little bit more clean living, and they want to make sure the pet is by far one of the most valuable members of their family.

Sometimes can be the only member of their family, and they are looking to make sure they feed their pet in the same way that they feed themselves. There is a lot of unlock, really, in the behavior that sits underneath an MVP. For us, what does that mean? These pet parents are very valuable to us. The average Freshpet consumer buys a buy rate of $110 a year. An MVP is 5x bigger than that. It is a significantly more valuable pet parent for us. They are not always fully main meal feeders. They may be half meal, three-quarters of a meal, full meal. It depends also on the size of dog that they have. But they typically are more main meal feeders than not. So they have a higher level of loyalty, a higher level of trust in the Freshpet brand.

As Billy said, we are 25% of the way through our runway for MVPs. We are now starting to do a lot to reimagine how we target MVPs, thinking differently about the media, the creative that we are putting out there, again, thinking through the access. This is a very big opportunity for us, and we are already seeing really nice green shoots of the pivot that we have made to super serving these MVPs coming through in our quarterly results.

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

I would just add one thing to Nicki's description of the addressable market. We are 25% in the MVP part of the addressable market, but the TAM continues to grow. Every time we measure it, and we measure it about every two years, watch the demographics change, the size of the TAM gets bigger. We could continue to grow and still stay at 25% just because the TAM will continue to grow. That is in large part due to a generational shift. As more millennials and Gen Z get into the household formation stage of life, they will enter into becoming our MVP potential candidates. The beauty here is there is a long runway, and the runway keeps getting longer.

Speaker 1

Can you describe maybe what is different this year about your media strategy versus previous years, and if you think you can get media leverage going forward?

Nicki Baty
COO, Freshpet

Mm-hmm. Yeah, great question. What is really different? I think the first piece is obviously it starts with that consumer targeting work that we have done. Everything that we do on our media and our marketing plans has to really address that consumer target. Within that, what we have also been able to do is reimagine some of the creative we are putting out there. We had a linear TV model that was working very well for us, especially linked to a broad-based distribution model. As we start to change our model more into online and very strong penetration into online, as we start to think a little bit about attracting more millennials and Gen Z, we have needed to change the touch points that we are going after from a media standpoint. We have rebalanced our media investment.

We've made sure we hit the right level of reach and frequency on linear and streaming. We've now started to open up much more focus on social, obviously more focus on influencers, a little bit more focus on retail media. We've built out a much stronger integrated agency team. We've also brought in a lot more tools at our disposal to really assess the ROI of media. That's been a big step change for us over the last year to bring those capabilities to the table. That's giving us more flexibility to move money around as we see the return on investment coming through for each of the media touch points. It's a very different approach to what we were historically doing. I think it's really coming alongside the new model, the new consumer target that we're following.

Speaker 1

Right. John, maybe for you, can you describe the path to achieve your 2027 margin targets of at least 49% adjusted gross margin, 20%-22% adjusted EBITDA margin? At this point in the company's journey, I guess, would you say you're more focused on sales or profitability growth?

John O'Connor
CFO, Freshpet

Sure. First, regarding 2027, we've had some really nice gains in gross margin this year, adjusted gross margin this year versus 2025. All of that really has been coming from just operating with greater performance, doing what we do every day better, and that's driven a lot of our gains. We're expecting small benefits from some of the new manufacturing technology that we have on a portion of our bagged portfolio, but only 25 basis points this year. As we continue to perfect that new technology and run that faster, we expect to get greater gains from that over time, ultimately 100 basis points on an annualized basis. We'll hope to get as much of that as we can in 2027. I mentioned cost structures earlier. We're also still very early on in driving productivity within our manufacturing organization.

Every line that we've put in looks a little different than the last line. We've got opportunities to step back now with a little bit slower growth than we had in the past to focus our efforts a little bit less on building capacity at breakneck speed and perfecting our manufacturing organization to get a lot greater productivity out of that. That can also be a big margin driver for us over the next 18 months or so as well. We've had a pretty big step-up in SG&A this year in 2026. That's from a few different things. One is we fell pretty far short of our goals in 2025. We have a big step-up in variable compensation in 2026 versus 2025. That's not a dynamic that we expect to reoccur in 2027, so you wouldn't see that kind of SG&A growth as well.

We have made some investments in a number of different capabilities that have driven significant SG&A growth in 2026 over 2025 as well. We don't see anything out there today, at least, that would drive that kind of growth in our SG&A. We expect to get leverage below gross margin. There are some other variables out there that we're of course keeping an eye on. Logistics has been a headwind for us this year, particularly on fuel costs. We always keep a watchful eye on commodities, which is something that comes clearer into view much later in the year than where we are today. We always have the ability to reformulate our products, which we're doing constantly to drive greater efficiency in our portfolio.

Price is something that we keep our eye on and take a very strategic approach to, but have that as an opportunity as well for 2027. You asked about focus in terms of sales or margin. I think our focus is broader than it has been in the past, and I think that's a result of where we are today in our evolution. We are still very much a growth company, and we are focused on driving sales. With where we are in our market share position in the category, there's a lot of headroom we believe to go. You've seen the TAM numbers, and we've talked about them here today. There's a lot of gains to be had, particularly in MVPs, which are high-value consumers. Sales is still our primary focus.

What the deceleration in revenue growth over the last two years or so has given us is a point in time to step back, along with the scale that we've gained that Billy mentioned, to look at other ways in which we can create financial value out of Freshpet. We have opportunities further down the P&L to drive margin. We have opportunities also now on the balance sheet and the cash flow statement to be offering more vectors to create value out of Freshpet besides just growing revenue. Again, that being said, driving sales growth is still our number one priority.

Speaker 1

Great. Can you share a bit more maybe about the new manufacturing technology that you all have sort of touched on this morning, and what that can unlock for future margin and innovation?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Yeah, let me take a shot at that. First of all, you have to start with a realization that the process for making Freshpet food is still very immature. I've been in the food business for my 40-year career, and I've seen this evolution in a lot of different categories. What you can see is that where we started with taking pieces of equipment and technologies from other industries, cobbling them together to create Freshpet food, is similar to what happened in other industries very early on. There's this steady evolution where you move to much higher quality, much higher consistency, much lower cost operating systems, till ultimately you end up with very mature manufacturing systems that exist in most food manufacturing today, where operators push a button and the system basically runs on its own. We're not there today.

We have a long runway ahead of us, and we had that realization back in 2018. We said, "You know what? There is an opportunity here to create enormous value by improving the manufacturing system to deliver a significant improvement in the consistency, the quality, lowering the cost, improving the capital efficiency of the manufacturing systems that we operate." We focused our efforts initially on what is now the bag technology that we have rolled out. The belief was that we could drive much higher throughputs, much higher yields, much lower quality costs, and do that in a more efficient footprint. Because in our business, the lines are expensive, but they're nowhere near as expensive as the buildings and the infrastructure that surround them.

Anything that we can do to get more out of every square foot of our buildings makes a huge difference in the capital efficiency of the business and ultimately drives some amount of the margin. The technology we rolled out is basically a new cooking technology. It changes the way we cook and cool our product. Ultimately what it ends up doing is drives higher throughput, higher yields, and then lower quality costs for us. That's a huge step forward. It also coincidentally enables enormous new innovation. The product forms that we can make on our existing lines today are somewhat limited. We make rolls, we make bags, and in bags, we make little meatballs, and we make shredded meat, but it's somewhat limited in the forms.

The forms that we can produce using this new technology are much wider than that and will enable us to meet a wider range of needs in dog food, but also extending into other things like cat food. We're very excited about the possibilities for innovation that we can create using this technology. We're in the early stages of it, and we've already done work to pioneer what would be the next generation, the generation after that of this technology, and we think this is a very good vector for us to lean into. We have a big team of people who do nothing but work on manufacturing technology improvements.

We have a long path of improvements ahead of us, and our challenge is to just do this and do it in a way that, as John described, is consistent with the margin improvements that we want to make over time in enabling us to, in essence, create the fuel that can then drive the growth. The more margin we generate, the more we can drive growth and also take money to the bottom line.

Speaker 1

Great. You were free cash flow positive a year earlier than anticipated, and now we have a $150 million share repurchase authorization. John, how do you view capital allocation? How are you thinking about the capital structure going forward with the convert coming due in April of 2028, I believe?

John O'Connor
CFO, Freshpet

Sure. Well, back to our priorities, right? Number one priority is driving revenue and pushing further and further into those growing TAMs, right? So we invest over $150 million or so in media every year as our primary avenue to be driving growth, and we will continue to look at investing in that area on the P&L to be driving our revenue growth. Other investments we can make to drive more capabilities that extend our competitive advantage and help support that demand generation are always things that we are going to be looking at. Then, of course, supporting that growth by having the manufacturing capacity to deliver that demand that we are creating is also a big investment for us. Our CapEx in total this year is $150 million, with two-thirds of that roughly going towards manufacturing capacity.

Another piece going towards maintaining the equipment and buildings that we have, and then a small portion to the chiller network, which we continue to add to, but is a smaller portion of that total CapEx picture. In terms of other opportunities, I think for us, as we look at any inorganic growth, the strategic fit is a critical piece for us in terms of what we look at there. Anything that helps us helps us occupy the space that we want to be in the category. That is a much, much lower priority, because we think we have so much opportunity to be driving our growth organically with where we sit today. Then if we have covered all those investments that are helping us drive our growth and fill that demand, then we may have some excess cash, and we would look to deploy that.

We've been a little bit more aggressive early on since we first put that authorization in place, in part because we received $100 million at the beginning of the year from the sale of Ollie, which we had a stake in. We felt the best use of that cash, given what our capital structure looked like, was to return that to shareholders. We are fairly down the path of completing that first $100 million of that authorization. I think we'll take a little bit more judicious approach going forward so that really is kind of an after all we've done everything else. In terms of the capital structure, if you think about how we've evolved over the years, we're now free cash flow positive.

We've got stronger margins than the last time we raised capital. I think we're getting a more and more visible path to further margin improvement that we've outlined for 2027. So what that makes us, I think, is attractive to a number of different financial markets, and there's a lot more opportunity available to us in terms of how we might select to fund ourselves in the future. We've got about 18 months left on the convert that's in there today, and we're looking at all sorts of different opportunities that are now available to us, and we'll be opportunistic in terms of how we address that maturity that comes up. But my expectation is, given our profile, we will have some debt or debt-like capital in there for the future.

Speaker 1

Got it. One of the more interesting shifts in the story, I think, over the past year has been the growing emphasis on buy rate, right, and household quality, rather than simply maximizing household acquisition. As you think about the next several years, where do you believe the bigger opportunity lies? Is it getting more households into the franchise or driving deeper engagement among existing Freshpet users? How does that answer, if it does, differ across channels?

Nicki Baty
COO, Freshpet

We need to do both, I think is the answer to it. We've got opportunity ahead both in household acquisition and also in buy rate. Partly the economic environment as well. Billy touched on this a little bit earlier. Where you have an economic environment and a category where you're bringing in a lot of new households, Freshpet historically and today very disproportionately gains a lot of new households with new pet parent formation. In an environment, as you look out perhaps over the next couple of years, in an environment where those household gains at the category level may be a little bit harder to come by, I think the bigger opportunity may well be buy rate for the next couple of years. You will still see us gaining new households, but you will see an acceleration in buy rate.

You will see that balance out. I would expect to see that buy rate metric will continue to improve. We have seen that recently over the last couple of quarters. Coming back to your question, we are still seeing trade up from current households to become greater buy rates. We do get a buy rate bump from that. If we disproportionately bring in more MVPs in new households, you are going to see that come through also within the buy rate number.

Speaker 1

Got it. Historically, you have argued that Freshpet creates a compelling economic proposition for your retail partners, through their productivity, stronger shopper engagement. As retailers increasingly evaluate alternative fresh offerings and private label solutions, how do you think Freshpet value proposition has evolved, and what feedback are you hearing from your key retail partners?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

You want to take that?

Nicki Baty
COO, Freshpet

Great. I think you are seeing, and you have seen this really in the market through this year, you are seeing a number of retailers really take a little bit of a step back and think about what they want their pet category to be for the future. You are seeing more moves being made into the fresh and frozen space. You see new competition coming into that space, and you are seeing retailers really start to reimagine what does that category look like from an in-store destination perspective. Freshpet food drives much higher frequency of traffic down the aisle for retailers, which is a really important metric. Also, the average fresh food shopper in pet food is also a very valuable shopper across the rest of the store. Typically, they are buying a lot more fresh food. They are a little bit more of a loyal customer.

That really matters to retailers as they're thinking about the layout of the category. Also, many retail partners are now looking to grow their online business. So they're needing to think about what does that mean in terms of capacity for number of chillers I have if I'm going to pick all of those products now from store. We would anticipate seeing, from a retailer standpoint, more space being opened up for fresh and frozen offerings. We would expect to see more holding capacity really coming into store. And then we would expect clearly to see us as a clear beneficiary leading the category in that space.

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you. You provided a fairly clear framework for reaching at least 49% gross margins, 20%-22% EBITDA margins by 2027. As you look beyond those targets, do you view them as important milestones in a longer journey, or do they begin to represent a more normalized earnings profile for the business?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Let me take a shot at that, and then John will fill in. Let me just start with, we haven't given guidance beyond 2027, and we've oftentimes given long-term guidance because we are raising capital. We no longer need to raise capital, so the need to put targets that are much longer-term targets out there doesn't exist, or at least not to the same degree it did before. But we believe that ultimately Freshpet, because of its strong position in a highly attractive market with highly proprietary products, has every reason to earn a very strong margin and deliver strong growth at the same time. At different points in time, there's going to be opportunities to lean more into one than in the other. But over the long haul, the franchise that we're creating, this iconic franchise, it's a rare thing.

You think about what's in the world of consumer packaged goods, the number of brands that have actually revolutionized or completely transformed a category and redefined it. Starbucks did it for coffee, and Chobani has done it for yogurt, and you can say Nike did it in sporting goods. Freshpet's a brand like that, and you'd expect us to, over the long haul, command the kinds of financial performance and the margin structure and the growth profile of businesses like that. I don't know if, John, you want to add to that.

John O'Connor
CFO, Freshpet

Yeah. Similar to my earlier comments about having a little bit of a different balance in terms of how we drive value, I think it is very much a milestone on the journey. Again, without getting into specifics beyond that, we are very early on in terms of our cost journey, in terms of standardizing our network, driving efficiency across it. I think there are opportunities to drive both cost reduction, which gives, as Billy said earlier, choice and flexibility to invest in driving more demand and strengthening our competitive advantages, but also allowing some of that to flow down to the bottom line.

We have opportunities as well to unlock what I call latent manufacturing capacity within our existing footprint that will help defer capital investment into the future and reduce capital intensity. Again, I think we're very early on on each of those journeys today.

Speaker 1

Maybe a good way to wrap up, if we're sitting here five years from now, Billy, and Freshpet's executed exactly as you hope, what would look, I guess, most different about the business relative today?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Yeah.

Speaker 1

Maybe what would be most similar?

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Yeah. I go back to the comment I just made about the evolution and the transformation. We're leading a transformation of this category, and if you look at any other category that's gone through this kind of a transformation, what you can see happening is you get better, you get broader, and you get bigger. On the better side, it means the products consistently get better. Consistency, quality, reliability. Consumers come to expect an incredibly high standard of product performance, and we fully expect to lead in that area. We invest a ton of time and energy in R&D, process development, manufacturing scale, and expertise, the market research to identify the products. You should expect us to consistently get better, and that will also come with getting broader. By broader, I mean broader availability, means broader product lineup that reaches a wider range of consumer needs.

It may even include extending ourselves into things like the cat food business in a much more significant way. The business will be much broader than it is today, and it will be much bigger. As a consequence of being better and broader, you will be bigger. But bigger, in this case, means that the consumer franchise is larger. We are a bigger part of the household, the diet of the dogs in those households. We're also bigger in terms of the retail footprint that we have, the way in which consumers buy us, and our manufacturing scale will be bigger, and all that will drive efficiency. That bigger is going to drive a highly efficient manufacturing operation, highly efficient marketing tools, and whatnot. We will be better, we'll be broader, and we'll be bigger than we are today.

I'd expect that if this category evolves like others, if we do those things well, we will have a disproportionately large share of the very, very big fresh, frozen pet food market, and fresh and frozen will be a very big part of the pet food market. I think that it's going to follow a similar evolution to what we've seen elsewhere, and we are in a position to lead it and drive it.

Speaker 1

Okay, good. Okay, I think that's a great place to cut it off here and go to the breakout. Please join me in thanking Freshpet for being here, and we'll see you over there.

Billy Cyr
CEO, Freshpet

Thank you.