Thank you, Phil. Good morning, everybody. It's nice to be here. Appreciate the invitation to come to the Industrial Conference. We're first up on presenting this morning on the packaging side, which is great. We appreciate that and your interest in Graphic Packaging . I'm going to start by basically going through these, say, part of our statements, making the case for why Graphic. That's really what I want to do over the next 20 - 25 minutes of my prepared comments. We'll open it up for questions from the floor. Hopefully, there are some there. Phil's got some too. I'm sure we'll use our 35 minutes in a productive way. If you think about Graphic, one of the things we've really done over the last seven years is transform this company. I'll go into some details in terms of what that really looks like.
The last of the major expenditures are getting ready to wind down with our Waco investment in a recycled paperboard manufacturing facility in Texas. We will inflect to serious cash flow generation, really driven primarily by the reduction of CapEx going down to a more moderated level at about 5% of sales, as well as the EBITDA that will come from Waco, as well as some working capital reductions, given we just really shrunk our paperboard manufacturing platform to make us more efficient. That really will all nurture significant value creation for shareholders, and something that I want to make sure that we outline for you. We do have some near-term headwinds that we're dealing with. Some of those have been pretty well chronicled. I'm going to spend some time talking about those when I get to a slide. We believe they're temporary.
We've got a lot of confidence in our long-term algorithm and the business model that we built. Let's jump right in. Here's Graphic at a glance. You can see we're almost $9 billion in sales. We operate principally in two markets, North America and Europe. We do have a little bit of sales outside of those regions, which is primarily all beverage, servicing our large beverage customers. About 70% of it's in North America, 30% of it's in Europe. Europe is a growth market for us. We earn our cost of capital in Europe. We have good ROIC in Europe, even though we're not an integrated business in Europe. We do ship some of our own paperboard over there. I think the other note that I'd make here is the portfolio we have is really not commodity-based.
We've got over 3,000 patents and a lot of intellectual property that we use for the packaging we supply our customers. We spent the last seven years really transforming the business as part of our Vision 2025, for those of you who are familiar with us. There were really three main things that we tried to do when we did that. The first thing we wanted to do was have more capabilities. For example, we didn't even have a food service business in 2017. What that caused is if the consumer was eating out, we weren't getting those sales. It impacted our ability. I'll show you a slide here a little bit later on in the deck that'll kind of profile that in a lot more detail for you and why it's important.
The big thing we did to address that is in 2018, we purchased International Paper's consumer packaging business, making us the number one player in paper cups. Roughly 30% of all the paper cups in North America we manufacture. We make the paperboard for that, as well as have five low-cost cup converting facilities there. We've also invested in innovation in a big way. Many people thought our expansion with AR Packaging in Europe was simply just to get more geography. There was an element of that. It allowed us to get into Eastern Europe, which are great markets for us. The biggest part of it was they were the most innovative company in the space. Combined with ours that we had, we now have five global innovation and design centers that routinely develop new and different solutions to replace primarily plastic and foam packages.
That's allowed us to really expand our markets. I'll talk a little bit about that more in a minute. Lastly, we invested for competitive advantage. We have some bespoke opportunities on the coated recycled paperboard area here to take a significant step forward in terms of cost leadership. Our first investment was in Kalamazoo, Michigan. That one's pretty well chronicled and has gone extremely well. After that, we announced that we were going to do a greenfield facility in Waco, Texas, which we'll bring online here in Q4 of this year. As I mentioned earlier, at that point in time, we will have all our major investments made in this kind of long cycle CapEx that we've been doing, high CapEx, upwards of 12% of sales here will revert back to a more balanced level around 5% of sales or below. We're excited about that.
This is where we were in 2017. I mentioned this earlier. Before we got our food service platform, we were largely dry foods and beverage. We kind of centered the store primarily. Our top 25 accounts represented almost 80% of our sales. It was nice from an SG&A standpoint. If one of those customers got a cold, we got the flu. We really needed to build out our portfolio, and that's exactly what we've done. When you look at that same picture of the store now, we actually put a drive-through in there because we're getting the drive-through window as well. A lot of the work that we've done around plastic replacement really allows us to get that perimeter of the store.
We'll be profiling some of those packages in our upcoming earnings report here with Q3 with some things that we've done in Europe that are going to continue to accelerate that. Really excited about that. Real balanced customer portfolio, which allows us to drive consistency across our revenue base. I guarantee you that in the last 24 hours, you've touched something that we make. Here's some examples of what we do. You can see there on the slide the balance that we have really across our portfolio between food, beverage, food service, household, and health and beauty. Health and beauty is the smallest business. It came from AR Packaging, and that really allowed us to get into that space primarily in Europe. We're learning a lot about what it takes to be a successful provider of those cartons.
We really provide a limited amount of that in North America, but we see that as an opportunity for us. Here's that slide that really shows that. You can see AR Packaging's addition with the lighter green balls there. We really have a nice platform in Europe with 38 facilities now geographically located in the right spots to take care of customers. As I mentioned earlier, this is a non-integrated business. We do ship about 250,000 tons of our own paperboard to ourselves into that market, and we buy the rest of the paperboard, which is a great position to be in given the supply and demand dynamics of paperboard in Europe. Excellent business, great innovation.
AR Packaging has really been a home run for us. Here are our five platforms that we drive as part of our innovation, and they're primarily $13 billion of that $15 billion is really focused on plastic and foam replacement. What this has allowed us to do is really outperform our customers in the markets that we participate in. Look, we're not immune to our customers having volume challenges. I'll talk a little bit more about what we're doing about that here in a minute. What innovation has allowed us to do consistently, quarter after quarter, is outperform. It's really a function of the innovation efforts that we have. That's why we spend so much time investing in that space. Here are some examples of some of the innovations we've done.
You can see these are types of products that are available every day in the marketplace, things that you and other consumers use routinely. This will continue to be a key focus for us as we go forward here. Here's our Vision 2030. We put this together and we rolled this out in February of last year. You can see there are really four pillars of this. It starts with innovation. I've commented a lot on innovation already and why that's so important to us, allowing us to outperform in markets that are a bit challenged. With innovation really kind of driving that uptick that we have, we focus on culture. We focus on people. At the end of the day, we have 23,000 associates that come to work every day. They're driving our business forward, taking care of customers. We need them motivated. We need them to be committed.
We work hard to create a culture that really fosters that kind of engagement and innovation across our entire company. We focus on making the planet a better place. We do invest heavily to reduce the amount of carbon that we generate. I've got a slide in here. I'll show you how we're going to do even more of that. The investments on recycled packaging, I think, speak for themselves. We spent almost $2 billion in the last five years to create North America's lowest cost, highest quality recycling platform. We can now take dirtier fiber, clean it all up, and put it into high-quality packaging. We've got a significant cost advantage in being able to do that. Most importantly, that's where the end-use customers really want us to go. They really appreciate coated recycled paperboard where it can be used in a package.
They want it used in a package. All of that really inners itself into a good job on those three things, the results for both our customers, our shareholders, and all our employees as well. As I mentioned earlier, what I'm excited about with our Vision 2030 is once Waco is complete, we have everything that we need to drive this Vision 2030 and commitments that we've made on this. It's not like we've got another big acquisition or another big capital investment that we need to make to go out there and do it. This is going to be about innovation and execution on the asset base that we have. I like this slide. It kind of organizes a little bit some of the things we're doing around sustainability commitments. I get asked all the time, are you still committed to reducing the amount of carbon that you generate?
The answer is yes. We're going to be thoughtful in how we do it. You have to remember, almost half our customers are domiciled in Europe. They specifically called us and said, look, are you still committed to driving the reduction of carbon out of your company? The answer is yes. We will be able to do that. You see here on the lower section there that we expect to generate almost a 50% reduction in our overall carbon by 2032 with investments that we'll make in the business, all part of our 5% of sales on the CapEx line. It's all in the numbers. It's not like there'll be some big capital call that we have to do. We've laid that out.
If you haven't had a chance to take a look at our impact report, it's very detailed in there what we plan to do, how we plan to do it, and the timelines that we've put together to do it. That's really resonating well with our customers who have made some pretty significant pledges, even though some of those have been moved back a little bit. We need to be there to be able to support them. We will be there. Investing in people, I've mentioned why that's important. All of you understand that. We need to make sure that we've got the right workforce and it's trained the right way to be able to do what our customers need them to do. Of course, the packages that we generate each and every day need to be more circular, more functional, and more convenient.
Otherwise, they just won't resonate with our customers. Those are the things that we have to do. Every time we have a new innovation, we've hit the mark on those three things. That's really a differentiating point for us in the marketplace in terms of what we do with innovation. Here's our arrow slide that really shows our end-use markets. I think this really speaks to the diversification I mentioned earlier with some of the things that we did on Vision 2025 relative to building out our portfolio in that kind of that overall picture I showed you of the supermarket with the drive-through in there. Look, you can see in quarter two, we actually went sideways on a number of those. Health and beauty was up a little bit. I think that's a pretty good testament.
If you think about what has happened here on the food service side of the business, it's been pretty well chronicled, some of the challenges that the QSRs have experienced. Yet the last two years, our business has been up pretty substantially. The reason for that is we've been replacing plastic and foam in terms of cups. Again, kind of giving you some real examples of how that works. Being able to shift and move with the consumer is essential. That's what allows us to drive that consistency. The innovation allows us to drive market expansion and really make sure that we outperform in terms of volumes, in terms of what our customers are buying from us each and every year. One thing I will add, I was asked a question in the hallway, and I want to make sure that I address this too, in terms of Q3 volumes.
Those of you who follow consumer packagers or consumer goods companies, I should say, food companies and beverage companies, several of them have released in the last couple of weeks. Some of our customers have. You're probably not surprised to know that our Q3 is off to a little bit of a mediocre start. We had kind of forecast it to be plus or minus flat. We're probably down about 2% volumetrically through the middle of August, really a little outperforming relative to what we've seen in terms of Nielsen and some of the other data. I am willing to share that with you today. Let's spend a little bit of time on this slide. This is an important slide because it's really part of the case that I need to make around why Graphic .
If you look at the far left-hand side of that and take a look at the volumes, you can really see what we've been dealing with for the last couple of years. If you look at 2023, as our customers kind of rolled out of COVID, they dealt with the destocking, got their inventories back in line with where they wanted them to be. I get asked a lot, is there still destocking going on? If there is, we don't really feel it as a material impact on our business. I think most of that's in our rearview mirror. You can certainly see where it was in 2023. Our volumes held up pretty well. We did take a fair amount of market-related downtime in our paperboard manufacturing facilities to make sure that we dealt with that, matching our supply and demand like we always do.
You can see the margins held up pretty good during that period of time. There are really three things that are impacting us right now. We view them as unusual, and we view them as temporary. They're real for us in the near term. I need to talk about them and make sure you understand how we're viewing them and what we're doing about them. The first one is really the fact that food is expensive. If you take a look at really what's happened, this has been, again, well chronicled. Our customers raised prices pretty dramatically during the COVID era. They've been reticent for all the right reasons not to reduce those costs or reduce the pricing. In many cases, their costs are up pretty substantially as well. Affordability remains a challenge. The consumer is stretched. That's impacting our customers' ability to drive their volumes.
I have to tell you, it's gone on a little longer than I anticipated it would. There are some green shoots that seem to be happening. Of course, you read the journal as I do. This weekend, there was a fair amount of news in there around what's going on with the big CPGs. Four of our big customers were mentioned in there. From our standpoint, we believe it's being addressed by those companies and those boards. They've got a long history of reformulating and repositioning their business in order to resonate with customers. I anticipate that they will. All that said, that takes some time. Reformulation doesn't happen overnight. Repositioning some of these brands takes the time as they're going through some of the changes that are going to happen in corporate structure and things like that. We'll have to deal with that over that period.
They will get it right. I'm quite confident. These are well-capitalized companies with great brands. They've been through different events in the past and been able to do it. The second part of that is really dealing with what I'll call the MAHA movement and GLP-1 drugs. They're different. The MAHA movement is really somewhat expensive for our customers and comes at a very inopportune time for them. They're already dealing with some of their volumetric challenges. Now they're having to go to reformulations that almost always are more expensive. It's just kind of a fact in terms of what's happening. They're replacing some of the artificial flavors and colorings that are out there. That takes away from money that they otherwise could be using for promotional activity, slotting fees, and things like that. It impacts some of their demand. They'll work through that.
Most have made pledges to do it, 2025, 2026, and I think some early 2027. It'll kind of flow through there. It is something that they're having to address. It's a near-term headwind for them, for sure. GLP-1 drugs, I could make a case those actually are probably more of a friend for Graphic than a foe. We don't participate in kind of the salty snack category in a material way. That's mostly film and plastics that do that. Customers will reformulate. Some have already started doing this with higher protein type additives in food. Anytime they reformulate or look at a different size, that's an opportunity for Graphic . It's churn that our customers are dealing with. They're having to figure out how they put their resources on this. It takes some time for them to get it right. I believe that they will.
A third element that's impacting us right now is really kind of a truly interesting and unusual situation. That's on the paperboard market, specifically SBS. That's the white paperboard. We're a small player in that market. Almost 80% of everything that Graphic does is on recycled paperboard or unbleached paperboard. The biggest thing we do on the bleached paperboard side is paper cups. That's a really good market, as I already mentioned to you. On the coated SBS market, there's been capacity added here in North America to a market that was already well supplied. It's driving operating rates down pretty dramatically, one analyst wrote this morning. He's right. There was a 520,000-ton machine added into a market that was operating rate of around 82%. What that's doing is that's keeping a bit of a collar on our ability to push pricing on coated recycled paperboard and unbleached paperboard.
It's really kind of a unique phenomenon because if you look at the spread on coated SBS and go back 10 years, it used to have a 40% premium over coated recycled paperboard. That premium right now per RISI Fastmarkets is down to 7%. It's a very, very unusual spot to be in, particularly when you think about it. It costs 50% more to make that paperboard than it does to make coated recycled paperboard. The CapEx requirements are substantially higher, almost 4x that of coated recycled paperboard annually. Our opinion is that really no producer that's making that right now is probably earning the cost of capital. It will get solved, but that's an issue in the near term that we're dealing with. Those three things are really what's impacting us. You see it in our adjusted EBITDA margin. Our confidence remains high in our business model.
The investments that we've made, again, we've more than doubled down on coated recycled paperboard. We're the lowest cost producer of that grade. These issues do impact us, particularly the SBS one, in terms of what those markets are doing in the near term. It's something that we have to watch. It's not ours to solve. We're a small player. We're actually busy on our coated bleach side of the business and our cup business. We have two machines in our Texarkana paperboard manufacturing facility. One makes cup, the other makes coated bleached. Both of those are very busy because they're over 95% integrated in our own stuff. It'll be someone else that needs to do it. It won't be us. In the near term, that's a headwind that we have to deal with. Here's our base capital allocation model.
As you look there in our algorithm, we're obviously behind a bit on our base model. We're not generating those results right now. Our confidence over time that we will is very high. You see low single digits on the annual sales growth, which really assumes kind of called a flat market. Innovation really being what gets us into that low single digit. Right now, that innovation is getting us closer back to zero. So far, year to date in 2025, with markets being down a couple percent, we're not hitting on that right now. We believe we will over time for the reasons I just got done talking about with what our customers are doing reformulating. That drives adjusted EBITDA growth of mid-single digits. It's pretty mechanical for us to get good absorption relative to that level of growth. That drives high single-digit EPS growth.
I've already mentioned that our CapEx is going to revert back to 5% of sales or less starting in 2026. That's like six months away from now relative to what you can expect from us. That drives our capital priorities, which are listed there, to reinvest back in the business. We need about 2% of that 5% is what I'll call true maintenance CapEx. Even at 5%, we're investing into new markets, into lower-cost assets, things that make the company better. It's not like we're starving the company at CapEx. We have a well-invested company, very well-invested company, as a matter of fact. We'll continue to be smart about how we allocate capital to do that from an investment standpoint. We want to grow the dividend. You see us made a couple of moves here. About every 24 months, we take a look at that.
We think a growing dividend attracts investors, investors that want to invest in a company like Graphic . We're committed to that. We've been pretty upfront around our desire to reinvest, repurchase our own shares, if you will. We have allocation right now about $1.6 billion out there. You saw us in our second quarter made some moves. We have to manage that in accordance with our leverage ratio, which we've said will finish the year around 3.5 x. With our stock trading where it's at, it's pretty clear what the best priority for us in 2026 is. You can expect us to continue to be very focused on that. Getting investment grade as part of Vision 2030, that's in the cards here too. We need to get our leverage down a bit, which we will.
It's pretty mechanical with the cash flow generation we're going to generate over the next few years. We think that's important. That'll be another leg of the stool in terms of our overall financial stability. I have to tell you that M&A, do we look at it? Sure. Is the bar extremely high in this environment? Absolutely. It's even higher now given where our stock is trading relative to what we can do with our own reinvestment back in our company and purchasing our own shares. That's how we think about capital allocation as we roll into 2026. This slide basically just shows the cash flow. We've adjusted it to kind of show the jump-off point a little bit lower than where we had anticipated to be.
I think the point you really need to take away from this is the vast majority of what's driving that uptick in the free cash flow is the reduction in CapEx. Then you've got a little bit of Waco coming on $80 million next year and $80 million the following year, a little bit of working capital. There is some growth in the overall business. The big uplift here isn't around, hey, our volumes have to come back and be 3% in order to make this all happen. Certainly not in the near-term years that we've got. Our confidence in our ability to generate that free cash flow is very high. You should take some comfort in the fact that we know how to repurchase the company back. This slide's in there.
We bought back almost 25% of the company since we did the acquisition of International Paper's consumer business in 2018. You can see it there. We've been pretty smart about how we do it, and we've retired those shares in a way that has been value creating for our shareholders. There's our guidance and commentary, which is unchanged. With that, Phil, I've got about 10 minutes left.
Sure. I'll kick things off, and then we'll open up to the group. Mike, so appreciate all the great color. The three headwinds you talked about, whether it's SBS, MAHA, and just volume challenges as consumers seek value, those don't seem to be an easy fix in the medium term. In that backdrop, what are some of the levers that are at your disposal to kind of grow earnings? Is it going to be a pretty muted EBITDA environment and just focus on cash and things that you can control? Just kind of help us think about the longer term, the medium-term algo.
In the near term, with those as the headwinds that we're facing right now, our focus is clear. We've got to get Waco up and running, which will start up here in Q4 of this year. We're heads down, really focused on that. You should have a fair amount of confidence that it'll be successful, given it's an identical paper machine to the one we started up successfully in Kalamazoo in 2022. We got a lot of people there that know how to do that. We need to continue to drive innovation. We have to help our customers win in this crowded market space with the things that they're dealing with. Suppliers that help them win when they're going through all these changes and struggles are the ones that are going to be rewarded with additional volume. We have to earn that.
Our cost structure is such that we can be smart about where we decide to take strategic share and really focus on the investments that we've made and leveraging the investments that we've made to make sure that we hit the volumetric targets that we put out there. I think when you look at all that, those are kind of operationally what we're focused on. The capital allocation piece of it, Phil, as I mentioned, is another area we generate alpha for our shareholder base. I've kind of alluded to what our priorities are there. Near term, that's what we have to do.
Super. Questions in the audience?
Yeah.
Can you just clarify a little bit about this reduction in free cash flow long term that you guys talked about with your Q2 call and how we should think about that?
Yeah.
What does that all mean?
Thank you for the question. As I mentioned, our jump-off point is a little lower as we go into next year. That is why it was the $800 million that we talked about. I think you're specifically asking around when do we get back to a billion, which is kind of what we guided with the Vision 2030 piece. The question is, I don't know for sure when those three things really kind of take care of themselves. They will take care of themselves. Our customers will find their mojo. They will reformulate. On the SBS side of the business, people aren't going to operate paperboard mills that aren't earning the cost of capital in infinite. Sooner or later, someone's going to make a decision. I've been doing it 35 years. It always happens. It seems like it takes longer than it should.
As I mentioned, this is one where we're kind of on the sidelines watching and waiting. It does impact us. There's not a lot we can do in the short term there because our facility, as I mentioned, in Texarkana is running full. We get some collateral damage on that. It certainly puts a cap on what we can do on our other two grades, which, by the way, the backlogs on both coated recycled paperboard and unbleached paperboard are very solid, as you saw and Phil actually wrote about coming out of Q2 with the AF&PA data that was released. Those are, again, the things that we can do.
I think the thing that you can count on is that we're positioning Graphic to be spring-loaded when that does get resolved, and it will, that we're in a good position to take advantage of it and kind of close that gap. I can't give you an exact timing on it.
Just the technical one related to the same question. For 2026, you gave us the cash providers from $700 million- $800 million, and then you said cash requirements from $750 million - $850 million. We want to pay $100 million. Looking at three components, count as $450 million, 45% of our bills. Financials, $220 million, and then taxes based on that, $230 million. That puts me at $900 million. Where's this left, like $100 million coming from? Isn't it lower next to the $100 million mill , or how do you build this $800 million cash?
It's a combination of things. The big beautiful bill is a portion of it, as well as working capital reductions on the downsizing, specifically inventory, the downsizing to five very well-capitalized paperboard manufacturing facilities. There's an inventory optimization in there that we couldn't do before Waco. We needed to build up our inventory to get ready for the closures. Inventories, and then, of course, with customers coming in short, we ended up with inventories even higher than we expected. The big beautiful bill has a significant positive for us with the bonus depreciation. Our timing was quite good with Waco as a result of that legislation.
The shop-up changes happened in the product gain activity. Expectations were flattish, and you say 2% - 3% down.
Yeah. Through what I've said is through the middle of August right now, we're seeing we had guided to plus or minus flat, and we're down 2% through the middle of August volumetrically. That plus or minus flat is for the year. Third quarter tends to be a good quarter, and it's starting off slow. We had a number of customers that actually took the week of the 4th of July just down. They didn't manufacture anything, and that impacted us a little bit there. Other questions, Phil?
From a pricing standpoint, I think you guys have been trying to move off of RISI and have more of a cost-plus type approach. You introduced value-based pricing where it's off of public indexes. How's that evolution coming along as you kind of negotiate contracts for next year, perhaps?
Thank you for that. You're absolutely correct. That is a stated strategy of ours. We were early in moving away from RISI, as you well know. We've been at this now for the better part of six or seven years for reasons that make a lot of sense, at least for Graphic . We continue to make progress there. It takes a while to do it. We don't play to an empty chair. That's number one. Customers still have options there, and we need to make sure that we're thoughtful in terms of how we do it with them. Those who have made the move really like the transparency.
They've got the ability to sit at their Bloomberg terminal and really know what's going on with their pricing because it's very transparent in terms of how it goes, as opposed to, as you know, the RISI process, which is far from transparent.
You guys were roughly 50%. Is there an aspirational target call in the next two to three years where you want it to be more cost-plus versus RISCI?
Yes, higher.
OK. You talked about some of the MAHA dynamics, GLP-1s, and some of your customers going through some transition. How do you kind of tackle that? Are you making incremental investments in both lines to be more perimeter store? Do you expect some of the changes at the customer level, MAHA, or creating some disruption this year in terms of demand?
To this point, it really hasn't been our response has not been M&A. I don't think it will be it. The bigger opportunity for us is just to continue to take advantage of this excellent innovation team and process that we have internally with Graphic . We get asked a lot. Europe is still very, very committed to innovation and moving away from plastic. It's slowed down a little bit in the U.S. for reasons that are pretty well understood here. That doesn't mean that it's going to go away. It just means in this dynamic where you have customers splitting themselves up and selling their businesses, they're focused on different priorities right now. We have to continue to come forward with those ideas because ultimately, you have to win in the marketplace. They ultimately have to sell more products.
Our products help get it off the shelf and into the cart for our customers. That's really where we plan to help them win.
OK, super.
You got a question on the other side.
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you for the question because we get asked a lot around, is it volumetric set? No. If volumes just completely crash, the answer is yes. The first $80 million is really driven by cost. The better part, if you remember when we rolled it out, we said $100 million of the $160 million is cost, shutting down Middletown, shutting down East Angus, and tying out that EBITDA that we got from those because it's a lot lower cost facility. The remaining $80 million will have to be impacted by volumetric growth. That's in 2027. In 2026, we're actually adding tons at Graphic . The industry has taken tons away. The industry removed about 330,000 tons this year. When you tie that all out, the net add into the industry with Waco is about 80,000 tons. It's pretty small. CRB is a really good balanced market.
It's in high de mand by consumers as well, particularly the high-quality material that we're generating.
East Angus will come down after Waco starts because we can't, we'll get too short. The market is tight in recycled. You don't see it in pricing right now because of what's going on in bleached. The market is tight. If we shut East Angus, we'd be shorting our customers right now.
We're tight in unbleached too. We've actually had to purchase more tons this year than we anticipated to take care of that business. It really is a phenomenon with bleached paperboard that we're dealing with.
With some of the investments you've made on the coated recycled paperboard side, anything you'd call out from a customer penetration for some of your newer products where you've taken share or any new innovation that you could point to where you've seen adoption?
The Rainier product that we launched competes directly with coated SBS. That kind of creates another headwind for coated SBS. That particular product has got the brightness and smoothness capabilities of the high-quality SBS materials, which I mentioned to you earlier, usually take about 50% more cost to make. That is resonating with some customers. We anticipate, I think, over the next three years that we'll have upwards of 80,000 tons in that grade. We started with zero. It's been a nice win for us. Good innovation.
Thank you, Phil. Good morning, everybody.
Basically, through these safe harbor statements, making the case for why Graphic. That's really what I want to do over the next 20- 25 minutes of my prepared comments. Then we'll open it up for questions from the floor. Hopefully, there are some there. Phil's got some too. I'm sure we'll use our 35 minutes in a productive way. Look, you know, if you think about Graphic, one of the things we've really done over the last seven years is transform this company. I'll go into some details in terms of what that really looks like. The last of the major expenditures are getting ready to wind down with our Waco investment in a recycled paperboard manufacturing facility in Texas.
We will inflect to serious cash flow generation, really driven primarily by the reduction of CapEx, going down to a more moderated level at about 5% of sales, as well as the EBITDA that will come from Waco, as well as some working capital reductions, given we've just really shrunk our paperboard manufacturing platform, which makes us more efficient. That really will all nurture significant value creation for shareholders and something that I want to make sure that we outline for you. We do have some near-term headwinds that we're dealing with. Some of those have been pretty well chronicled. I'm going to spend some time talking about those when I get to a slide. We believe they're temporary. We've got a lot of confidence in our long-term algorithm and the business model that we built. Let's jump right in. Here's Graphic at a glance.
You can see we're almost $9 billion in sales. We operate principally in two markets, North America and Europe. We do have a little bit of sales outside of those regions, which is primarily all beverage, servicing our large beverage customers. About 70% of it's in North America. 30% of it's in Europe. Europe is a growth market for us. We earn our cost of capital in Europe. We have good ROIC in Europe, even though we're not an integrated business in Europe. We do ship some of our own paperboard over there. I think the other note that I make here is the portfolio we have is really not commodity-based. We've got over 3,000 patents and a lot of intellectual property that we use for the packaging we supply our customers.
We spent the last seven years really transforming the business as part of our Vision 2025 for those of you who are familiar with us. There were really three main things that we tried to do when we did that. The first thing we wanted to do was have more capabilities. For example, we didn't even have a food service business in 2017. What that caused is if the consumer was eating out, we weren't getting those sales. It impacted our ability. I'll show you a slide here a little bit later on in the deck that'll kind of profile that in a lot more detail for you and why it's important. The big thing we did to address that is in 2018, we purchased International Paper's consumer packaging business, making us the number one player in paper cups.
Roughly 30% of all the paper cups in North America we manufacture. We make the paperboard for that, as well as have five low-cost cup converting facilities there. We've also invested in innovation in a big way. Many people thought our expansion with AR Packaging in Europe was simply just to get more geography. There was an element of that. It allowed us to get into Eastern Europe, which are great markets for us. The biggest part of it was they were the most innovative company in the space. Combined with ours that we had, we now have five global innovation and design centers that routinely develop new and different solutions to replace primarily plastic and foam packages. That's allowed us to really expand our markets. I'll talk a little bit about that more in a minute. Lastly, we invested for competitive advantage.
We had some bespoke opportunities on the coated recycled paperboard area here to take a significant step forward in terms of cost leadership. Our first investment was in Kalamazoo, Michigan. That one's pretty well chronicled and has gone extremely well. After that, we announced that we were going to do a greenfield facility in Waco, Texas, which we'll bring online here in Q4 of this year. As I mentioned earlier, at that point in time, we will have all our major investments made in this kind of long cycle CapEx that we've been doing, high CapEx, upwards of 12% of sales here will revert back to a more balanced level around 5% of sales or below. We're excited about that. This is where we were in 2017. I mentioned this earlier. Before we got our food service platform, we were largely dry foods and beverage.
We were kind of center of the store primarily. Our top 25 accounts represented almost 80% of our sales. It was nice from an SG&A standpoint. If one of those customers got a cold, we got the flu. We really needed to build out our portfolio. That's exactly what we've done. When you look at that same picture of the store now, we actually put a drive-through in there because we're getting the drive-through window as well. A lot of the work that we've done around plastic replacement really allows us to get that perimeter of the store. We'll be profiling some of those packages in our upcoming earnings report here with Q3 with some things that we've done in Europe that are going to continue to accelerate that. Really excited about that. Again, real balanced customer portfolio, which allows us to drive consistency across our revenue base.
I guarantee you that in the last 24 hours, you've touched something that we make. Here are some examples of what we do. You can see there on the slide the balance that we have really across our portfolio between food, beverage, food service, household, and health and beauty. Health and beauty is the smallest business. It came from AR Packaging. That really allowed us to get into that space primarily in Europe. We're learning a lot about what it takes to be a successful provider of those cartons. We really provide a limited amount of that in North America. We see that as an opportunity for us. Here is that slide that really shows that. You can see AR Packaging's addition with the lighter green balls there.
We really have a nice platform in Europe with 38 facilities now geographically located in the right spots to take care of customers. As I mentioned earlier, this is a non-integrated business. We do ship about 250,000 tons of our own paperboard to ourselves into that market. We buy the rest of the paperboard, which is a great position to be in given the supply and demand dynamics of paperboard in Europe. Excellent business, great innovation. AR Packaging has really been a home run for us. Here are our five platforms that we drive as part of our innovation. They're primarily $13 billion of that $15 billion is really focused on plastic and foam replacement. What this has allowed us to do is really outperform our customers in the markets that we participate in. Look, we're not immune to our customers having volume challenges.
I'll talk a little bit more about what we're doing about that here in a minute. What innovation has allowed us to do consistently, quarter after quarter, is outperform. It's really a function of the innovation efforts that we have. That's why we spend so much time investing in that space. Here's some examples of some of the innovations we've done. You can see these are types of products that are available every day in the marketplace, things that you and other consumers use routinely. This will continue to be a key focus for us as we go forward here. Here's our Vision 2030. We put this together and we rolled this out in February of last year. You can see there are really four pillars of this. It starts with innovation.
I commented a lot on innovation already and why that's so important to us, allowing us to outperform in markets that are a bit challenged, with innovation really kind of driving that uptick that we have. We focus on culture. We focus on people. At the end of the day, we have 23,000 associates that come to work every day. They're driving our business forward, taking care of customers. We need them motivated. We need them to be committed. We work hard to create a culture that really fosters that kind of engagement and innovation across our entire company. We focus on making the planet a better place. We do invest heavily to reduce the amount of carbon that we generate. I've got a slide in here. I'll show you how we're going to do even more of that. The investments on recycled packaging, I think, speak for themselves.
We spent almost $2 billion in the last five years to create North America's lowest cost, highest quality recycling platform. We can now take dirtier fiber, clean it all up, and put it into high-quality packaging. We've got a significant cost advantage in being able to do that. Most importantly, that's where the end-use customers really want us to go. They really appreciate coated recycled paperboard where it can be used in a package. They want it used in a package. All of that really inners itself into do a good job on those three things, the results for both our customers, our shareholders, and all our employees as well. As I mentioned earlier, what I'm excited about with our Vision 2030 is once Waco is complete, we have everything that we need to drive this Vision 2030 and commitments that we've made on this.
It's not like we've got another big acquisition or another big capital investment that we need to make to go out there and do it. This is going to be about innovation and execution on the asset base that we have. I like this slide. It kind of organizes a little bit some of the things we're doing around sustainability commitments. I get asked all the time, are you still committed to reducing the amount of carbon that you generate? The answer is yes. We are going to be thoughtful in how we do it. You have to remember, almost half our customers are domiciled in Europe, and they've specifically called us and said, look, are you still committed to driving the reduction of carbon out of your company? The answer is yes. We will be able to do that.
You see here on the lower section there that we expect to generate almost a 50% reduction in our overall carbon by 2032 with investments that we'll make in the business, all part of our 5% of sales on the CapEx line. It's all in the numbers. It's not like there will be some big capital call that we have to do. We've laid that out. If you haven't had a chance to take a look at our impact report, it's very detailed in there what we plan to do, how we plan to do it, and the timelines that we've put together to do it. That is really resonating well with our customers who have made some pretty significant pledges, even though some of those have been moved back a little bit. We need to be there to be able to support them. We will be there.
Investing in people, I've mentioned why that's important. All of you understand that. We need to make sure that we've got the right workforce and it's trained the right way to be able to do what our customers need them to do. Of course, the packages that we generate each and every day need to be more circular, more functional, and more convenient. Otherwise, they just won't resonate with our customers. Those are the things that we have to do. Every time we have a new innovation, we've hit the mark on those three things. That is really a differentiating point for us in the marketplace in terms of what we do with innovation. Here is our arrow slide that really shows our end-use markets.
I think this really speaks to the diversification I mentioned earlier with some of the things we did on Vision 2025 relative to building our portfolio in that overall picture I showed you of the supermarket with the drive-through in there. You can see in quarter two, we actually went sideways on a number of those. Health and beauty was up a little bit. I think that's a pretty good testament. If you think about what has happened here on the food service side of the business, it's been pretty well chronicled, some of the challenges that the QSRs have experienced. Yet the last two years, our business has been up pretty substantially. The reason for that is we've been replacing plastic and foam in terms of cups. Again, kind of giving you some real examples of how that works.
Being able to shift and move with the consumer is essential. That's what allows us to drive that consistency. The innovation allows us to drive market expansion and really make sure that we outperform in terms of volumes, in terms of what our customers are buying from us each and every year. One thing I will add, I was asked a question in the hallway, and I want to make sure that I address this too, in terms of Q3 volumes. Those of you who follow consumer packagers or consumer goods companies, I should say, food companies and beverage companies, several of them have released in the last couple of weeks. Some of our customers have. You're probably not surprised to know that our Q3 is off to a little bit of a mediocre start. We had kind of forecasted to be plus or minus flat.
We're probably down about 2% volumetrically through the middle of August, really a little outperforming relative to what we've seen in terms of Nielsen and some of the other data. I am willing to share that with you today. Let's spend a little bit of time on this slide. This is an important slide because it's really part of the case that I need to make around why Graphic . If you look at the far left-hand side of that and take a look at the volumes, you can really see what we've been dealing with for the last couple of years. If you look at 2023, as our customers kind of rolled out of COVID, they dealt with the destocking, got their inventories back in line with where they wanted them to be. I get asked a lot, is there still destocking going on?
If there is, we don't really feel it as a material impact in our business. I think most of that's in our rearview mirror. You can certainly see where it was in 2023. Our volumes held up pretty well. We did take a fair amount of market-related downtime in our paperboard manufacturing facilities to make sure that we dealt with that, matching our supply and demand like we always do. You can see the margins held up pretty good during that period of time. There are really three things that are impacting us right now. We view them as unusual. We view them as temporary. They're real for us in the near term. I need to talk about them and make sure you understand how we're viewing them and what we're doing about them. The first one is really the fact that food is expensive.
If you take a look at really what's happened, this has been, again, well chronicled. Our customers raised prices pretty dramatically during the COVID era. They've been reticent, for all the right reasons, not to reduce those costs or reduce the pricing. In many cases, their costs are up pretty substantially as well. Affordability remains a challenge. The consumer is stretched, and that's impacting our customers' ability to drive their volumes. I have to tell you, it's gone on a little longer than I anticipated it would. There are some green shoots that seem to be happening. Of course, you read the journal as I do. This weekend, there was a fair amount of news in there around what's going on with the big CPGs. Four of our big customers were mentioned in there. From our standpoint, we believe it's being addressed by those companies and those boards.
They've got a long history of reformulating and repositioning their business in order to resonate with customers, and I anticipate that they will. All that said, that takes some time. Reformulation doesn't happen overnight. Repositioning some of these brands takes the time as they're going through some of the changes that are going to happen in corporate structure and things like that. We'll have to deal with that over that period, but they will get it right. I'm quite confident. These are well-capitalized companies with great brands, and they've been through different events in the past and been able to do it. The second part of that is really dealing with what I'll call the MAHA movement and GLP-1 drugs. They're different. The MAHA movement is really somewhat expensive for our customers and comes at a very inopportune time for them.
They're already dealing with some of their volumetric challenges, and now they're having to go to reformulations that almost always are more expensive. Just kind of a fact in terms of what's happening there, replacing some of the artificial flavors and colorings that are out there. That takes away from money that they otherwise could be using for promotional activity, slotting fees, and things like that. It impacts some of their demand. They'll work through that. Most have made pledges to do it, 2025, 2026, and I think some early 2027. It'll kind of flow through there. It is something that they're having to address. It's a near-term headwind for them, for sure. GLP-1 drugs, I could make a case that was actually probably more of a friend for Graphic than a foe. We don't participate in the salty snack category in a material way.
That's mostly film and plastics that do that. Customers will reformulate. Some have already started doing this with higher protein type additives in food. Anytime they reformulate or look at a different size, that's an opportunity for Graphic. It's churn that our customers are dealing with. They're having to figure out how they put their resources on this. It takes some time for them to get it right. I believe that they will. A third element that's impacting us right now is really kind of a truly interesting and unusual situation. That's on the paperboard market, specifically SBS. That's the white paperboard. We're a small player in that market. Almost 80% of everything that Graphic does is on recycled paperboard or unbleached paperboard. The biggest thing we do on the bleached paperboard side is paper cups. That's a really good market, as I already mentioned to you.
On the coated SBS market, there's been capacity added here in North America to a market that was already well supplied. It's driving operating rates down pretty dramatically, one analyst wrote this morning. He's right. There was a 520,000-ton machine added into a market that was operating rate of around 82%. What that's doing is that's keeping a bit of a collar on our ability to push pricing on coated recycled paperboard and unbleached paperboard. It's really kind of a unique phenomenon because if you look at the spread on coated SBS and go back 10 years, it used to have a 40% premium over coated recycled paperboard. That premium right now per RISI fast markets is down to 7%. It's a very, very unusual spot to be in, particularly when you think about it.
It costs 50% more to make that paperboard than it does to make coated recycled paperboard. The CapEx requirements are substantially higher, almost 4x that of coated recycled paperboard annually. Our opinion is that really no producer that's making that right now is probably earning the cost of capital. It will get solved. That's an issue in the near term that we're dealing with. Those three things are really what's impacting us. You see it in our adjusted EBITDA margin. Our confidence remains high in our business model. The investments that we've made, again, we've more than doubled down on coated recycled paperboard. We're the lowest cost producer of that grade. These issues do impact us, particularly the SBS one, in terms of what those markets are doing in the near term. It is something that we have to watch. It's not ours to solve. We're a small player.
We're actually busy on our coated bleached side of the business and our cup business. We have two machines in our Texarkana paperboard manufacturing facility. One makes cup, the other makes coated bleached. Both of those are very busy because they're over 95% integrated in our own stuff. It will be someone else that needs to do it. It won't be us. In the near term, that's a headwind that we have to deal with. Here's our base capital allocation model. As you look there in our algorithm, we're obviously behind a bit on our base model. We're not generating those results right now. Our confidence over time that we will is very high. You can see low single digits on the annual sales growth, which really assumes kind of called a flat market, then innovation really being what gets us into that low single digit.
Right now, that innovation is getting us closer back to zero. So far, year to date, in 2025, with markets being down a couple percent, we're not hitting on that right now. We believe we will over time for the reasons I just got done talking about with what our customers are doing, reformulating. That drives adjusted EBITDA growth of mid-single digits. It's pretty mechanical for us. We get good absorption relative to that level of growth. That drives high single-digit EPS growth. I've already mentioned that our CapEx is going to revert back to 5% of sales or less starting in 2026. That's like six months away from now relative to what you can expect from us. That drives our capital priorities, which are listed there, to reinvest back in the business. We need about 2% of that 5% is what I'll call true maintenance CapEx.
Even at 5%, we're investing into new markets, into lower-cost assets, things that make the company better. It's not like we're starving the company at CapEx. We have a well-invested company, very well-invested company, as a matter of fact. We'll continue to be smart about how we allocate capital to do that from an investment standpoint. We want to grow the dividend. You see us made a couple of moves here. About every 24 months, we take a look at that. We think a growing dividend attracts investors, investors that want to invest in a company like Graphic . We are committed to that. We have been pretty upfront around our desire to reinvest, repurchase our own shares, if you will. We have allocation right now about $1.6 billion out there. You saw us in our second quarter made some moves.
We have to manage that in accordance with our leverage ratio, which we have said will finish the year around 3.5x . With our stock trading where it is at, it is pretty clear what the best priority for us in 2026 is. You can expect us to continue to be very focused on that. Getting investment grade as part of Vision 2030, that is in the cards here too. We need to get our leverage down a bit, which we will. It is pretty mechanical with the cash flow generation we are going to generate over the next few years. We think that is important. That will be another leg of the stool in terms of our overall financial stability. I have to tell you that M&A, do we look at it? Sure. Is the bar extremely high in this environment? Absolutely.
It is even higher now given where our stock is trading relative to what we can do with our own reinvestment back in our company and purchasing our own shares. That is how we think about capital allocation as we roll into 2026. This slide basically just shows the cash flow. We have adjusted it to kind of show the jump-off point a little bit lower than where we had anticipated it to be. I think the point you really need to take away from this is the vast majority of what is driving that uptick in the free cash flow is the reduction in CapEx. Then you have got a little bit of Waco coming on, $80 million next year and $80 million the following year, a little bit of working capital. There is some growth in the overall business.
The big uplift here is not around, hey, our volumes have to come back and be 3% in order to make this all happen. Certainly not in the near-term years that we have got. Our confidence in our ability to generate that free cash flow is very high. You should take some comfort in the fact that we know how to repurchase the company back. This slide is in there. We bought back almost 25% of the company since we did the acquisition of IP 's consumer business in 2018. You can see it there. We have been pretty smart about how we do it. We have retired those shares in a way that has been value creating for our shareholders. There is our guidance and commentary, which is unchanged. With that, Phil, I have about 10 minutes left.
Sure. I'll kick things off. Then we'll open up to the group. Mike, so appreciate all the great color. The three headwinds you talked about, whether it's SBS, MAHA, and just volume challenges as consumers seek value, those don't seem to be an easy fix in the medium term. In that backdrop, what are some of the levers that are at your disposal to kind of grow earnings? Is it going to be a pretty muted EBITDA environment and just focus on cash and things that you can control? Just kind of help us think about the longer term, the medium-term algo.
In the near term with those is the headwinds that we're facing right now. Our focus is clear. We've got to get Waco up and running, which we'll start up here in Q4 of this year. We're heads down really focused on that. You should have a fair amount of confidence that that'll be successful, given it's an identical paper machine to the one we started up successfully in Kalamazoo in 2022. We got a lot of people there that know how to do that. We need to continue to drive innovation. We have to help our customers win in this crowded market space with the things that they're dealing with. Suppliers that help them win when they're going through all these changes and struggles are the ones that are going to be rewarded with additional volume. We have to earn that.
Our cost structure is such that we can be smart about where we decide to take strategic share and really focus on the investments that we've made and leveraging the investments that we've made to make sure that we hit the volumetric targets that we put out there. When you look at all that, those are kind of operationally what we're focused on. The capital allocation piece of it, Phil, as I mentioned, is another area we generate alpha for our shareholder base. I've kind of alluded to what our priorities are there. Near term, that's what we have to do.
Super. Questions in the audience?
Yeah.
Can you just clarify a little bit about this reduction in cash flow long term that you guys talked about with your Q2 call and how we should think about that?
Yeah.
What does that all mean?
Thank you for the question. As I mentioned, our jump-off point is a little lower as we go into next year. That is why it was the $800 million that we talked about. I think you're specifically asking around when do we get back to a billion, which is kind of what we guided with the Vision 2030 piece. The question is, I don't know for sure when those three things really kind of take care of themselves, but they will take care of themselves. Our customers will find their mojo. They will reformulate. On the SBS side of the business, people aren't going to operate paperboard mills that aren't earning the cost of capital in infinite. Sooner or later, someone's going to make a decision. I've been doing it 35 years. It always happens. It seems like it takes longer than it should.
As I mentioned, this is one where we're kind of on the sidelines watching and waiting. It does impact us. There's not a lot we can do in the short term there because our facility, as I mentioned, in Texarkana is running full. We get some collateral damage on that. It certainly puts a cap on what we can do on our other two grades, which, by the way, the backlogs on both coated recycled paperboard and unbleached paperboard are very solid, as you saw and Phil actually wrote about coming out of Q2 with the AF&PA data that was released. Those are, again, the things that we can do.
I think the thing that you can count on is that we're positioning Graphic to be spring-loaded when that does get resolved, and it will, that we're in a good position to take advantage of it and kind of close that gap. I can't give you an exact timing on it.
Just the technical one related to the same question. 2026, you gave us the free cash flow providers from $700 million- $800 million. You said cash requirements from $750 million- $850 million, so we want to pay for them. Just looking through components, it's 450% of those financials, $220 million, and then taxes based on that. $230 million, that puts me at $900 million. Where is this like $100 million coming from? Is it lower? That's the one you need to do the bill? Or how do you go to this $800 million?
It's a combination of things. The big beautiful bill is a portion of it, as well as working capital reductions on the downsizing, specifically inventory, the downsizing to five very well-capitalized paperboard manufacturing facilities. There's an inventory optimization in there that we couldn't do before Waco. We needed to build up our inventory to get ready for the closures. Inventories, and then, of course, with customers coming in short, we ended up with inventories even higher than we expected. The big beautiful bill has a significant positive for us with the bonus depreciation. Our timing was quite good with Waco as a result of that legislation.
The short-term pattern for the fourth quarter is the expectations were flattish. You say 2% to 3% down.
Yeah. Through what I've said is through the middle of August right now, we're seeing we had guided to plus or minus flat, and we're down 2% through the middle of August volumetrically.
Yeah, that plus or minus flat is for the year. The third quarter tends to be a good quarter, and it's starting off slow.
We had a number of customers that actually took the week of the 4th of July just down. They didn't manufacture anything, and that impacted us a little bit there. A couple of questions, Phil.
From a pricing standpoint, I think you guys have been trying to move off of RISI and have more of a cost-plus type approach. Yeah, and you introduced a value-based pricing where it's off of public indexes. How's that evolution coming along as you kind of negotiate contracts for next year, perhaps?
Yeah, thank you for that. You're absolutely correct. That is a stated strategy of ours. We were kind of early in moving away from RISI, as you well know. We've been at this now for the better part of six or seven years for reasons that make a lot of sense, at least for Graphic . We continue to make progress there. It takes a while to do it. We don't play to an empty chair. That's number one. Customers still have options there, and we need to make sure that we're thoughtful in terms of how we do it with them. Those who have made the move really like the transparency.
They've got the ability to sit at their Bloomberg terminal and really know what's going on with their pricing because it's very transparent in terms of how it goes, as opposed to, as you know, the RISI process, which is far from transparent.
You guys were roughly 50%. Is there an aspirational target call in the next two- three years where you want to be more cost-plus versus Receipt?
Yes, higher.
OK. You talked about some of the MAHA movement dynamics, GLP-1 drugs, and then some of your customers going through some transition. How do you kind of tackle that? Are you making incremental investments in both ones to be more perimeter store? Do you expect some of the changes at the customer level, MAHA, or creating some disruption this year in terms of demand?
To this point, it really hasn't been our response has not been M&A. I don't think it will be yet. The bigger opportunity for us is just to continue to take advantage of this excellent innovation team and process that we have internally with Graphic . We get asked a lot. Europe is still very, very committed to innovation and moving away from plastic. It's slowed down a little bit in the U.S. for reasons that are pretty well understood here. That doesn't mean that it's going to go away. It just means in this dynamic where you have customers splitting themselves up and selling their businesses, they're focused on different priorities right now. We have to continue to come forward with those ideas because ultimately, they have to win in the marketplace. They ultimately have to sell more products.
Our products help get it off the shelf and into the cart for our customers. That's really where we plan to help them win.
OK, super.
Yeah, we got a question on the other.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, thank you for the question because we get asked a lot around, is it volumetric? No, if volumes just completely crash, the answer is yes. The first $80 million is really driven by cost. The better part, if you remember when we rolled it out, we said $100 million of the $160 million is cost, shutting down Middletown, shutting down East Angus, and tying out that EBITDA that we got from those because it's a lot lower cost facility. The remaining $80 million will have to be some impacted by volumetric growth. That's in 2027. In 2026, yes, we're actually adding tons at Graphic . The industry is taking tons away. The industry removed about 330,000 tons here this year. When you tie that all out, the net add into the industry with Waco is about 80,000 tons. It's pretty small. Coated recycled paperboard is a really good balanced market.
It's in high demand by consumers as well, particularly the high-quality material that we're generating.
East Angus will come down after Waco starts because we can't, we'll get too short.
The market is tight in recycle. You don't see it in pricing right now because of what's going on in bleach. The market is tight. If we shut East Angus, we'd be shorting our customers right now.
We're tied in on bleach too. We've actually had to purchase more tons this year than we anticipated to take care of that business. It really is a phenomenon with bleach paperboard that we're dealing with.
With some investments you've made on the coated recycled paperboard side, anything you'd call out from a customer penetration for some of your newer products where you've taken share or any new innovation that you could point to where you've seen adoption?
Certainly, the Ranier product that we launched that competes directly with coated SBS, that kind of creates another headwind for coated SBS. That particular product has got the brightness and smoothness capabilities of the high-quality SBS materials, which I mentioned to you earlier, usually take about 50% more cost to make. That is resonating with some customers. We anticipate, I think, over the next three years that we'll have upwards of 80,000 tons in that grade. We started with zero. It's been a nice win for us. Good innovation.
Sounds good. I think we'll just wrap it up here.
Wonderful. Thank you for your time. Appreciate your interest in Graphic Packaging Holding Company.