All right, good afternoon. Our next presenting company is John B. Sanfilippo & Son, trades under the ticker JBSS on the NASDAQ. 100+ year-old company run by the fourth generation of the Sanfilippo family. A client of Three Part Advisors, so if you have any questions afterwards and Frank and Jasper aren't available or you didn't get a chance to catch up with them, please feel free to reach out to us. We'll be happy to set something up. Here today to lead off the presentation is Frank Pellegrino, the company's CFO, and with him is Jasper Sanfilippo, the company's President and Chief Operating Officer. Frank?
Thank you, John. Good afternoon, and thank you for your interest in JBSS. Before we start, I'm obligated to tell you we'll be making some forward-looking statements, which represent our present expectations and are not guarantees of future performance. Who is JBSS and what do we do? JBSS began in 1922 as a small pecan shelling operation in Chicago. More than a century later, this fourth-generation family-run business is the largest vertically integrated sheller and processor of nuts in the U.S. We proudly manufacture our own natural brands, as well as private label products for retail and food service. Focused on freshness, quality, and service, JBSS offers a complete portfolio of products from recipe nuts to trail mix, as well as snack bars and confection. Our annual sales this year were $1.1 billion, and we have over 200+ distribution and retailers nationwide.
We also take pride in our manufacturing locations and our capabilities. We have five manufacturing facilities in the U.S., which all contain warehouses and distribution, and one main distribution center in Huntley, Illinois. We own all our manufacturing facilities and we lease the facility in Huntley. Across the network, we manufacture over 1 billion pounds of products per year. What makes us unique? We have numerous capabilities and expertise that none of our competitors have. In our nut and trail category, we have over 75 processing lines, 40+ packaging lines, and six different packaging formats. We can coat a nut in numerous manners and package it from cans to jars to small format PET jars and tube nuts. In the snack bar capabilities, we have nine processing lines.
We can manufacture snack bars ranging from your granola bar all the way up to your high-protein bars, and we have three different packaging formats. The bars, we can make extruded bars, co-extruded, and cold form. Because we're also a branded company, we invest money in category and consumer insights. Not a lot of private label companies make that investment. We're able to look at what consumers are looking for, trends in the category, trends in flavor profile, and we're able to bring that to our private label customers. We do pricing studies, we do category management studies, we figure out what consumers are looking for and certain price points consumers are looking for. When we present ideas to our retailers, we present them a complete category management solution. Like John said, leaning off, we're over 102 years old of a company. Now, we have commodity, we experience buying commodities.
Our commodity buyers have over 25 years per individual buyer buying commodities. That's very important. There are no hedges or futures in nut commodities. You can't hedge your costs or buy futures. You have to be able to procure the commodities at the right price. We process all nut types. Trail and snack mixes have the highest dollar share of our portfolio of approximately 25%. This is remarkable since this was a very small part of our business in the past. In FY16, it was only 12%. We grew that snack and trail mix from 12%- 24% over the last 12- 13 years. As a result of this product diversity, we mitigate any major impacts in our corporate performance because of the volatile nut market. If there's a shortage of walnuts, consumers tend to shift to pecans.
We're able to provide consumers a solution if there's an issue on an underlying commodity. In addition, we just began our bar part of our business two years ago, and snack bars already account for 14% of our sales. We have delivered strong financial performance over the years, as you could see through these four metrics. Our pounds sold have increased at a 3.5% CAGR over the last 10 years. Our margins have increased from our gross margin from 15%- 18%. Our EPS has grown at a 6.8% CAGR, and our stock price has grown at a 7.7% CAGR. We've also delivered consistent EBITDA per pound and total EBITDA dollars. As you could see in the last three years, almost four years, we've been at around $100 million of EBITDA since FY 2021, and FY 2025, I believe, was a near record high for EBITDA.
We also like to return cash to our shareholders. As you could see, we started paying dividends back in 2015. Now, we pay a special and a regular dividend. Our regular dividend started in FY 2017 at $0.50, and that's increased by a nickel every year up to the current year where we're at $0.90. We supplement that with a dividend every year since, I believe, 2012 was our first year of our annual special dividend. If you look back throughout our years, I think we've paid over $40 of dividends since 2012. If you look at our stock price back in 2012, I believe it was in the low teens. Our dividends have been more than 3x our stock price. We also invest back in the business. As you can see, our CapEx historically has been in that $20 million- $25 million range.
In FY 2025, we had $50 million, and that was due to our investment in new snack bar lines. Now, we made a very large investment in expanding our capacity at snack bars. We were buying two new high-speed bar lines, which come into production and online sometime at the end of summer of next year. We also have a very strong balance sheet, as you could see through these four metrics. I like to look at the debt to equity. It's been decreasing at 50% since FY 2015, and our debt to EBITDA is well below one. A very strong balance sheet, not very levered. We have a lot of future opportunities to grow and expand through our very strong balance sheet. Let's look at some more FY 2025 results. This chart compares what our business looks like in FY 2015 compared to FY 2025.
The blue part of the chart is our consumer channel. The rustic-looking color is our commercial ingredients. The yellow is our contract packaging, and export was our gray. You could see our consumer business went from 60% in FY 2015 to 82% in FY 2025. This wasn't just by coincidence. This was our strategy. We wanted to shift business away from commercial ingredients, contract manufacturing, and export into the consumer channel, where you have more value-added products and you have more predictable profit margins. If I were to predict what this looks like in five or ten years from now, the consumer will continue to grow. It's at 82% now. We would like to see this more between 85% and 88% in the future. We really want to continue to grow the channel that offers us the best profit profile.
The consumer channel last year grew at 4% of sales to over $907 million. The growth was driven by our private label snack bars. We had some nice wins in e-commerce on our brands, and we had some nice wins at the club store for our OV H brand. The commercial ingredients channel shrunk by just 1% to $109 million. This was mainly driven by some aggressive pricing from our competitors, and we are deprioritizing our industrial business. When I say industrial, that's us selling our products to other food manufacturers. That tends to be high risk and low margin. We're shifting those commodities into the consumer channel. If you back out the decrease in the industrial piece of this channel, commercial ingredients would have increased. Our last channel is contract manufacturing. This is a channel where we focus on utilizing excess capacity.
This channel grew by 8%, driven by an increased contract with a key customer on bulk granola. We're able to toast granola and then sell it to a granola bar manufacturer who uses this granola to make granola bars. We also picked up a new customer in Coleman for our nut mixes. We're not actively looking to grow this channel. This is more of a capacity utilization channel. This is a chart I like to present. This shows the impact of the commodity cost to our gross margin. The bars are our gross margin. The lines are the underlying commodity cost. What we're trying to demonstrate here is that even though there's volatility in the commodity cost, we try to maintain a very consistent gross margin percentage.
You can see in December, in the last couple quarters, that gross margin has come down, and that's mainly due to our bar business. The bar business has an impact on our gross margin percentage. If I backed out the bar business, those columns will also probably be close to the June 2024 numbers. This is how we manage our commodity risk. Like I said before, there isn't a market where you could hedge or fix your cost. What we do in our consumer channel is that we have the right to review pricing every six months, and that helps us mitigate any sort of underlying commodity increases that we may face. We're able to pass pricing along every six months, and that has helped us deliver consistent margin over time. The last couple of slides are focused on retail, what we're seeing at the retail.
The first chart here is for our nut category, and you could see that the category in pure dollars is kind of flat to shrinking. If you look at FY 2023 to FY 2025, between 2024 and 2025, it has increased in dollars. If you look over to the side, the actual pounds have decreased. It's more inflation-driven increases in dollars. The actual category is not growing. As you can see, the pounds sold have remained consistent with FY 2024 and 2025, but have shrunk since 2021 and 2022. The bottom chart kind of demonstrates why the average price per pound is at $6.12 per pound, which is the second highest in the last five years. It was at $5.87 in FY 2021. We compare and contrast this to our bar business. The bar category has grown in dollar sales and has also increased over time in the pound sales.
The price per pound is also going up, but the main driver here is that the increase in volume is based on the higher-end bars, like your protein bar that tends to have a higher selling price per pound. If you factor out the increase because of the protein bars, the actual price per pound for your mainstream bars, which are granola bars, your fruit and grain bars, have been pretty consistent over time. With that, I'm going to turn over to Jasper to walk you through some more of our FY 2025.
Thanks, Frank. Good afternoon, everyone. We'll dive into a little bit more detail of what we did in 2025 and then talk a little bit about what 2026 looks like. We run our business based on three channels. We're always looking to expand consumer reach. We always want to create value with our key customers, and we also want to grow our JBSS brands. We'll talk specifically about some accomplishments across these three pillars. On the expand consumer reach, we're always looking to get new distribution at existing customers. What we have seen, a pretty long-term trend now, is food is just ending up in a lot of new places that you just never saw it before. We see it at hardware stores. We're seeing it in vending machines and places that you wouldn't see it, more college campuses.
Through both our consumer channel as well as our commercial ingredients channel, we're always trying to open doors and get food where consumers are buying them. You can see we gained some additional business at existing customers with our bars, expanded some partnerships that we have, getting into college campuses and a little bit more difficult places to unlock that distribution. The creating value with key customers, obviously, we're continuing to push and grow our bar business with existing and new customers, doing the same thing on the core nut and trail and on the brands, really making sure that we set the stage for continued support and growth on the brands, both with new packaging changes as well as new innovation. We'll talk a little bit about our top two brands' performance. Frank touched on it a little bit. Fisher Recipe is our largest brand.
The categories you could see, which is the red line, have bounced around. Typically, in terms of category growth, you could see that we have lost a little bit of distribution, and it's mostly distribution, not velocity of the category so much. What we haven't seen here is the nuts that we use for that Fisher brand. We just moved that into some more private labels. We still are participating in the category at a higher level than what we had been traditionally doing, but it's now a mix of our branded distribution as well as private label distribution. On the O V H side, a better story. We're up 11% with our volume. You could see the category is a little bit more stable here than what you saw with the recipe category.
Again, working on a lot of new distribution, a lot of new innovation, getting a lot of good partnerships that we haven't typically done before. This brand has a tendency to resonate more with a younger consumer, which is what we wanted the brand to do, a more health-conscious consumer. We're really seeing some pretty terrific results with it. As Frank mentioned, when you look at our overall business, we are predominantly a private label supplier. 83% of our business sits with private label. Only 17% sits within our branded portfolio. When you look at that 17%, you could see between Fisher Snack and Recipe that is 60% of our branded sales. O V H is 21%. All the other brands, the Hunter Mix, Squirrel, they're only 12% of that 17%. Again, really laser-focused on private label.
We also are going to support and invest wisely into our brands as well. Frank touched a little bit about category growth. We'll first talk about the nut and trail category. The red lines are the category performance overall, and the bar graph is our volume. You could see, right, coming out of the COVID area, the category, as things return more to normalcy, you saw the category start to decline, flatten out for a while, and then it's starting to pick up a bit now. That's pre-tariff. Obviously, when we start executing price increases and making things reflective of any cost of tariffs or any other price increases, nuts are pretty... They have a tendency to trade up and down with volume as it relates to the elasticity of our pricing versus the consumption.
Part of what you saw with the category rebound here in 2024 is we worked very hard with our retailers, changed some of our pricing strategies to get the growth in the category back. It was sliding pretty significantly. One of the big reasons was we were offering price concessions to our retailers, but they were still just margining up and not reflecting those new prices at retail. It did hurt consumption. Retailers at the time didn't care. They saw their category go down, but they were making more money, so they just didn't really care. Finally, when they saw the traffic in their stores and their categories really, really performing poorly, it finally got the attention of them and they started reflecting lower retails, which started increasing the volume again in the category. We were glad to see that. Bar category is a different story.
You could see that the category was slightly declining in 2023, then it popped back up in 2024, and then declining again in 2025. It's kind of misleading because within these numbers here, you have a large recall from one of the large bar manufacturers, and that did cause an anomaly here. You could see from our bar business, it continues to grow. In 2025, we're at about a 27% growth for that category. Now, it's a little misleading because we had one less quarter in 2024, but we're continuing to see a lot of demand for our bars and the category is performing well and private label growth within the category is really growing very strongly in double digits in a lot of cases. Talking a little bit about our longer-term strategy, we got a lot of questions about that.
What's the best way to look at where our focus is going to be? For us, it's really kind of hold and maintain our core nut business. It is obviously very important for us to maintain that. We're not going to lose focus on it, but we're not going to prioritize core nut and trail over our opportunities that we see with the bar category. When we first decided to get into the bar category, we were always concerned about the demographic of who's consuming core nut and trail, and they had a tendency to be older and very limited with respect to are they on fixed income, are they not, are they going to be able to continue to support this category. The younger demographic is always accustomed to nuts. They first really get used to nuts, whether it be in peanut butter or in candy bars, right?
They're not very likely to go out and pick up a package of nuts. That's a lot of our focus. It's making sure that our customer base is reflective of all the demographics and not just overweighted in a certain one. We're trying to maintain our core nut and trail business and be laser-focused on growing our bar business. It's the biggest single opportunity we have. We have picked up a lot of distribution. In fact, I'm trying to think of any customer that did not take any of the new items that we offered, and I can't think of any, quite honestly. I mean, they're very hungry about growing their bar category. You can see here, this is a chart showing what private label share is in the category.
If you were to walk down a traditional grocery store, about 20% of what you would see in that aisle is private label. You could see on the core nut and trail, you walked down that same aisle, 55% of that aisle is now private label. 55. Way over indexes relative to the average for the store. On the flip side, you see if you walk down the bar aisle, only 12% or 11.7% is private label. This is why we're so focused on this category. It's a $10 billion category. It's growing at 5%. Private label share is growing even more than that. There is so much more opportunity just to get that 12% to what average would be in the store. Retailers are laser-focused as well, wanting to grow their private label brands. They want to see more of their offerings across all of the store.
They recognize that the bar category is under-indexed in their stores, and they're doing everything they can to get that private label share back up. When we look at the bar category, the pie chart on the left shows you how the category looks as it relates to the type of bars that people are buying, right? You can see the nutrition bar set, which would be a Clif, Kind, protein bar, is the largest portion of that category. The mainstream bars would be something like fruit and grain and chewy, so 30%. Still an important part of the category. All other would be just kind of like the lower bars, the fruit bars, things of that nature.
Then you have the kid-friendly, which is also actually a very growing trend too, as a lot of retailers and a lot of brands are starting to design products for the younger generations. It's been a very successful launch for us when we launched kids' energy bars as well as kid protein bars now. You're going to start seeing a lot more offerings for younger generations in the bar category. That's what the category looks like from a volume perspective. The middle one is what our business looks like. You could see 24% of what we have is mostly, I'm sorry, most of our business is mainstream bars. A lot of that came with the acquisition, right? When we built out our capability in bars, it was in the nutritional side. The business that we acquired in 2023 really was a mainstream business.
We're focused now on making our bar business look more like the category's business and get away from the mainstream and start growing more of the nutrition and kid-friendly offerings. When we look at what do the future pillars look like? Again, this is what we're going to be focused on, laser-focused on growing and expanding our private label bar growth and diversifying that portfolio as well, not just sell on mainstream bars, making sure that we're selling the entire platform. That was one of the reasons why private label was so low: the consumer did not have a choice at many retailers to buy a private label Clif Bar or to buy a private label protein bar, right? Just getting those sets correctly at those retailers is really where we're focused. Maintain our private label core nut and trail business. We still want to focus on our strategic customers.
We have a handful of them. There's still opportunity for us to grow business with them, both with distribution that we currently don't have with some of those retailers, as well as putting more products in different parts of the store where we see consumers looking for alternatives. Be selective about how we want to support our brands. A lot of the brands in our space currently are not performing well, including some of the biggest ones. We want to be smart about where and how we support our brands. That's really what we're going to be focused on for this year and for the foreseeable future. I think with that, we are at the end. I believe we'll open it up for questions. I want to thank everyone for attending and listening to us. If you have any questions, just please feel free to ask. Yes.
Are you seeing any benefit or uptick in your private label due to consumer preferences and the other threats you've done as well? Consumers have done more private label of product, whether it's a detergent or whatever. You've really kind of moved that way, but have you seen that?
Yeah, private label is growing share both in bars and in core nut and trail relative to the brands for sure. The brands are down, in some cases, almost double digits. Consumers are looking for those cheaper alternatives. The other thing that we saw as well with consumers is the younger generations are looking for absolute price points. They're trying to find the cheapest thing on the shelf to get a healthy snack out of. It could be a two-ounce or four-ounce, something smaller in pack size, but it absolutely has lower dollars, where the older demographics are looking for the best value. They're looking for the 24 or 32 oz where the absolute cost per ounce is the best deal. Really where we saw the softness in the category is in the middle.
It's that six-ounce to 16 oz packages is where they left and they're kind of moving to the ends.
What are you on the protein category? I obviously know it's half protein, but I'm adding protein bars.
We are working really with all the retailers on protein. That is one area where you do not see a lot of private label opportunities. Last year, last summer, Abbott Nutrition shut down one of its brands called Zone Perfect, and we were able to go in there and buy two protein bar lines that they were operating with. We have installed one in our Elgin facility now. It is currently temped to run chewy because from a capacity constraint standpoint, that is where we are most capacity constrained. About six months from now, we will actually convert that into a protein, back to the protein bar line it was when we bought it. You will start seeing private label protein bars in market March of 2027.
We are already working with our customers. We have already, through the pilot plants and through our labs, developed, I think probably top four or five protein bar offerings. Our strategy is always take the top two or three brands, take the top two or three flavors, and create emulators against those items, and then look at maybe some of the other harder technologies in terms of innovation. We want to get the set correct first.
I feel like a carb and protein bar that you can eat with or that you can offer.
Yeah, it should be like a kid's energy. You'll start seeing kid's energy, which is really a chewy bar, but it has added protein in it for kids as well as adults. Kids require less protein, so it's not like some of the heavy protein that an adult would look for. There is a tremendous amount of excitement and demand for protein-related offerings. Okay, thank you. Yeah.
Would you please talk just philosophically about your thought process of focusing on private label rather than developing your own kind of brands? I think many of us think of branding as having more value over, you know, over a multi-year time period.
Sure. Want to pick up with some of this?
If you look at the current consumer landscape, private label is really growing share. I think Jasper had a slide there on the nut category. If you saw that slide, go back there. Let's see, it's this slide here. The private label snacks is at 55%. If you look at the slide last year, I'm not sure if Jasper mentioned it, it was only at 47%. Private label is really growing share. If you look at what retailers want to do, the Walmart's and Targets of the world are looking at what ALDI and what Trader Joe's are doing and how they're capturing consumers in their store. If you look at Trader Joe's, everything they do is Trader Joe's brand. You only could find that brand at Trader Joe's. They have a captive consumer.
Consumers go into that store for that brand and then shopping throughout the store for their grocery list. A brand you could find in any store. Consumers could go from store to store and not become store loyal. I think that's what retailers want to do, make sure they capture a consumer only to go to their store because they only could find that at their store. That's kind of like the European model. If you go to Europe, it's mainly private label. The brands are not out there. I think the mainstream retailers in the U.S. will eventually get to a point where they have one major category brand, say for nuts, it could be a Planters who have it, who bring consumers down the aisle.
Once the consumer's down the aisle, they want that consumer to pick the private label because it's right next to the brands and it's a 20% value. They want the consumers to walk down the aisle, but then they want to choose their private label and not the brands. That's where we're shifting our strategy towards more private label. If you look at Europe, it's already private label. If you look at the success that ALDI and Trader Joe's have in the States, it's on private label. Retailers make more money on private label. I think that's where I think the U.S. will eventually get to in the next five or ten years, and we're going to be there to drive that change.
Reference to the Fisher brand lost distribution. Is that in any way tied to this whole shift to private label and what happened with the Fisher?
Yeah, I think it was a little bit of that. Again, though, we didn't really lose the distribution. It just went from Fisher branded to private label. Recipe as well for us. Typically, these retailers will put out their private label business once a year based on when the commodities come in. It just happened to be a year where they had some more attractive pricing from the private label side than we were able to give them on the Fisher recipe. They kind of use the brands to get people down the aisle, but they really hope when they get down the aisle that they buy the private label. Yes.
When you think about the snack bar category or just the bar category generally, what do you think about the ceiling in terms of private label penetration longer term? Why is it a different category versus?
Yeah, I would think, you know, can it get beyond the 20% that you'd see on average? I think time will tell. I know the retailers certainly want to get it beyond that 20%. I don't think you'll ever see it as high as what we have in the core nut and trail. You know, bars in general are far more manufactured. There's not a tremendous amount of value in a raw walnut or a raw almond, which I think consumers could easily swap into the private label. At minimum, it's going to get to 20%.
Yes. What can you tell us about the sales versus cash flow?
We don't provide guidance, but you can look at 2025 compared to 2026. There really isn't anything dramatically changing in our business from 2025- 2026. We think it should be pretty consistent with historical trends. Now, as far as EBITDA, the last three or four years, we've been well over $100 million. I don't anticipate any issues that will cause us to not follow our historical trends. The new bar lines will come in line in our FY 2027. You should see increased sales as we start filling up that capacity in 2027, 2028, and 2029.
Were you guys, you mentioned Trader Joe’s and ALDI? Just talk about your relationship there with them.
Sure. You talked to them more.
Yeah, so we've been doing business with both of those retailers for a very long time, like 20+ years. Typically, they're very loyal to their supplier base, more so Trader Joe's, more so than ALDI. We only selectively participate on different pieces of their business. I would say we probably only have like 10% of Trader Joe's business and maybe less than 10% of ALDI's business. I think we probably have a higher percent share on the private label bars that we're doing with them. Both are, ALDI's pretty transactional. In fact, there are certain bar categories that they run the auction out of Europe as opposed to the U.S. Trader Joe's is a much more innovative, much more collaborative partner with us, particularly around the nut and trail side of it, as well as the bars that we're learning.
They are also growing. Look at some other retailers out there, some mass merchandisers. They're having troubles growing. Those two retailers are successfully growing their footprint and their sales.
Yes.
Is it a special dividend formulated, or is it more or less an ad hoc?
It's in between. We have a capital allocation policy that goes through five different triggers. Again, not to go into details. Number one is we have to make sure we finance the crops we buy from growers because the cash conversion cycle is nine to twelve months because you buy those in shell and then shell it. We want to make sure we pay an increase or regular dividend every year. Their regular started at $0.50. This year was at $0.90. We want to make sure we allocate enough cash to CapEx. We want to make sure we allocate enough cash to any M&A opportunity. The last one is the special. If there really isn't a big M&A opportunity and commodity prices are behaving and CapEx is normal, the odds of a special dividend is high.
Even with the $50 million CapEx we spent in 2025, we were still able to declare a $0.60 special last month. It is very likely we will continue having specials unless the commodity prices really fluctuate or there's a large M&A deal that we have to allocate resources to. We just like the flexibility to make sure we allocate our capital in the manner we think drives shareholder value the most.
On that point, we reached out to breakthrough on another acquisition here last year. Just to kind of know why I take it back to you now.
The Lakeville? Yes. That was our, you know, we were already doing nutrition bars in Elgin, the Clif version and the Kind bar version. The Minnesota acquisition got us into the mainstream bars, as we talked about, the granola, the fruit and grain, oats and honey, high fiber. It was, I would say, a fire sale. It was $140 or $150 million sales. We bought it for $60 million, included a building, five manufacturing lines. It was an opportunity we couldn't pass up. The facility was losing money, but we're able to turn that around within 12 months and that facility is not losing money any longer. It sped up our diversification. We wanted to get into bars. It probably got us into mainstream bars probably two years before we wanted to.
What do you expect the return ?
The bar line? No, we should be, that's probably a payback period probably around four or five years.
Closest month.
I think we're out of time. Thank you for all your questions. We appreciate it.