Frank Pellegrino, the company CFO. Frank.
Thank you, John. Before we start, now we will be making some four.
It's a small pecan shell operation in Chicago. Morning, generation leaders, fourth generation, family-run business is the largest vertically integrated sheller and processor of nuts.
States. We proudly manufacture our national 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 mixes as well as snack bars and confection. Five high-capacity, state-of-the-art production facilities, newest locations in Lakeview, Minnesota, which exclusively produces snack bars. We manufacture around 1.1 million lbs annually. Now we have locations located in the prime nut-growing regions. We have a location in California that handles walnuts, a location in Selma, Texas that handles pecans, and one in Bainbridge, Georgia that handles peanuts. Bainbridge is our peanut-only facility, and Gustine is our peanut-free facility. Our capabilities are what makes JBSS different and a leader in our space.
From over 75 processing lines and 40 packaging lines for our nut and trail business to nine processing lines and three packaging formats for our bar business. We offer also our customers extensive data insights and category and consumer preference and pricing. In addition, we have extensive experience in procuring nuts, and we employ over seven food scientists. It's very critical you have commodity expertise. There's no way to fix commodity prices like pecans, walnuts, or pecans. So there's no hedging. You have to understand the market and be able to buy when the market makes the most sense. We process all nut types. Trail and snack mixes have the highest dollar share of our portfolio at approximately 25%. Now this is remarkable since this was a very small part of our business in the past, and FY2016 was only 12%.
As a result of this product diversity, we mitigate any major impacts on our corporate performance as a result of volatile nut market. Our business model is a differentiator in our industry and provides a competitive advantage and provides a foundation for the company to deliver strong financial results. We have delivered strong financial performance over the years. We sold a record 358 million lbs last year, and our diluted EPS has increased at a 6.8% category over the last 10 years. We have also delivered consistent EBITDA. As you can see, our EBITDA dollars have increased over the years and reached a record high in FY 2025. Profitable growth is one of our main objectives. We're also just as focused on returning value to our shareholders and investing back in our business.
In the year 2017, we established a dividend policy and paid our first yearly dividend of $0.50 per year. In calendar 2025, we paid a $0.90 regular dividend, and in each year, we have supplemented those regular dividends with at least $1.50 per share of special dividends. The management team will continue to focus on returning profits to our shareholders. We have declared $1.60 of special dividends in the current calendar year. Since calendar year 2012, we have paid over $40 per share in dividends, which is around four times the stock price in 2012. We also invest back in the business. You can see we made heavy investments in our manufacturing capabilities in FY2025 as we started to invest in our new bar capabilities. However, we still continue to conservatively manage our balance sheet.
Now we have a very strong balance sheet, and our debt to equity is well below one. Now let's look at some results from our first quarter. Again, we're a June year-end company, so this is our quarter ended at the end of September, our first quarter. We have a very, very strong start to our fiscal year with sales growing by 8% and our EPS growing by almost 59%. Now let's look at sales by distribution channel. We have three distribution channels. We have consumer channel, which is the largest channel, makes up 60% of our business, now followed by commercial ingredients, which is 20%, I'm sorry, consumer is 82%, commercial ingredients is 10%, and contract manufacturing is 8%. As you can see, the business has shifted dramatically since FY15, and this was not by mistake.
This was our strategy to shift business into the consumer channel where you have more value-added products and able to manage costs and pricing better. The channel transition also enables us to deliver consistent gross profit when commodity prices are volatile since we have more pricing flexibility in the consumer channel. The consumer channel grew by almost 4%, mainly due to bar acquisition. We made an acquisition of a bar company from TreeHouse Foods back in 2023, and that was a main driver in the year-over-year increase in our net sales. Now I'll talk more about the bar acquisition later in the presentation. Commercial ingredients channel declined by 1%, mainly due to aggressive pricing from competitors and shifting business to other channels.
Again, some of this business was in our industrial division of the commercial ingredients channel, and we shifted some commodities away from the industrial business to the consumer channel and the food service because, again, the commodities are the nuts are commodities, so you want to be able to sell those nuts at the channel that delivers the highest profitability. Contract manufacturing is our last channel. This channel grew by 8% due to new business and existing customer and new business at a new customer. Contract manufacturing is a channel we use as a utilization of excess capacity. If we have excess capacity in our plants, we try to use the co-man channel to manufacture other people's brands. Think of other national brands out there. We may be co-manufacturing for them.
This is kind of an eye chart, but the bar lines represent the cost of the commodity. You can see there's a commodity associated with each line, and then the bar graph is our gross profit. The bars are our gross profit percentages, and the lines, like I said before, are the cost of commodities. As you can see, nut prices are volatile, but in recent years, we're still able to deliver consistent gross profit. Now that's a key when you're heavily involved in the nut market is that you have to be able to buy the commodities at the right price and then sell it at the right price. Now let's look at the market cost of some of the main nut types and what's happening in retail.
Category pound sales have decreased since FY2021 as price per pound has increased, which had a negative impact on the volume growth of the category. This is pretty consistent across most food companies and CPG companies. We're seeing higher retail selling prices really dragging down the actual volume or pound volume through the category. We believe the nut category will rebound once retail selling prices do come down because nuts do have that healthy halo, and it's a good source of protein and a healthy snack. Consumers are very stretched now, so they're making a lot of decisions when they go to the supermarket, and unfortunately, they're not buying as much as they used to. Again, if you look at nuts as a source of protein, it's a very affordable source of protein still. Now let's compare this to our bar category.
The bar category is growing in dollars and pounds in recent years. The slight increase in price per pound is more driven by volume growth coming from the higher-end bars like protein, energy, and nuts. This is more driven by a product shift away from the low-cost bars, think granola, fruit and grain, oats, and honey, into the higher-cost bars, think your energy, protein, nut-based bars. Now let's take a closer look at our performance by category. We continue to dedicate resources and focus our efforts on three growth strategies: expand consumer reach, create value with key customers, and grow with JBSS brands. Again, expand consumer reach, we want to have our product where consumers look for food. If you go back 15, 20 years ago, it's mainly grocery stores. Now you think of, we sell products at home improvement stores like Menards up in Chicago.
Now we had sales at Home Depot before, now T.J. Maxx. Anywhere someone could buy food, we want to have our products there. Now create value with key customers. Now we have a solid book of business with our private label customers. We want to continue to grow with the private label customers that want to grow with us and expand their offering. We like customers who value what we bring to the table, our innovation, our R&D, and we want to expand with them. Think of retailers that are expanding today. Think Trader Joe's, think Aldi's, think Publix, H-E-B. That's where we want to continue to drive penetration for our business. It's one thing to have strategies, but it's also critical to execute and deliver on those strategies. Here are some highlights from what we accomplished last year.
Now we made strong progress against our growth strategies in FY2025. We expanded distribution of our core nut and trail business in both consumer sales channel and food service. We have increased our bars footprint at our nation's largest grocer. We launched new and exciting items across core nut, trail, and bars and became the exclusive supplier of a new item at a national quick service chain. On the branded front, we have really nice momentum in Orchard Valley Harvest. Not only did we grow 11% in dollars versus prior year in Circana, we won three Effie Awards for our creative campaigns, and we commercialized two innovation platforms that are launching in stores and e-com now. There are actually some samples in the back of some of our innovation if you want to grab some on your way out.
Fisher, which is our main brand, competes both in recipe and snack nuts. I start first by looking at Fisher recipe nut business. Now Fisher had a soft year in FY2025 due to lost distribution in the mass channel. Our Fisher share also fell as our main competitor gained branded distribution in both mass and club. However, we are poised to win most important part of the year, which is the holiday season, which is happening as we speak with strong retailer programs and partnerships. Most of the Fisher recipe sales happens now November, December during the holiday season, and we're seeing some very strong performance currently. We made a conscious decision to exit from a non-strategic customer in FY2025 for Orchard Valley Harvest. If we exclude that customer, we saw extremely strong growth in OVH due to distribution in new channels, updating our packaging, and launching new products.
If we look at our portfolio of brands, we really are focusing on Fisher recipe and OVH as the brands we want to invest in and grow in the future. However, most of our business is private label. In fiscal 2025, private label made up 83% of our sales, and branded only made up 17% of total JBSS net sales. Our Fisher brand, like I said before, is our biggest brand. Approximately two-thirds of our branded sales, followed by Orchard Valley Harvest, which is 21%. The rest of the brands make up around 12%. This chart looks at our private label nut trail business. We rebounded in FY2025 after a weaker FY2024. You can see our performance is the orange line.
You can see the category in total pounds is still declining, and the category is declining, but now we're trying to rebound since FY2024, and we've made a nice comeback in FY2025. Separate story on bars. Now bars, we grew 27% in FY2025. The bar category in total saw modest growth in FY2025 as the category was still seeing the effects of a Quaker Chewy bar recall. However, we grew our private label bar business by 27% last fiscal year due to both our mainstream bar acquisition and strong innovation in the nutrition bar segment. Now let's talk about long-term strategy. I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about our long-term strategy. The future outlooks for both nut and nut trail and bar categories have impacted our long-term growth strategies.
With a softer outlook for our core nut and trail business, we're focusing on maintaining margins and providing consistent supply to our retail partners. Bars will really be our growth engine for the future. It's a tremendous upside to growth for private label share across the retail landscape by offering a full portfolio across the bar category, continuous innovation, and expanding capacity and capabilities. We are one of the only, we believe the only bar supplier in the U.S. that offers a complete portfolio of bars. That means all the way from your Chewy bar to your protein bar. We're in the process of developing three protein bars. All these bars are in private label, and it will be sold to our book of business.
Now, since we already have very key strategic customers in our nut and trail business, we're offering the same book of customers these new bars. Again, when we made the investment back in 2023, we were very excited because the bar category was growing. As we learned the business, we came to understand that there's a very limited capacity in the U.S. There's not many bar capacity manufacturers out there to produce quality bars. Some of our retail partners actually came to us asking us five years ago, "Were you willing to get into the bar category?" After we bought the bar asset in Minnesota, we actually invested in two new high-speed bar lines. They're being manufactured in Europe. They should be hitting the waters in the next month or so.
Those two new bar lines will be able to manufacture Chewy bars and fruit and grain. Those are very high-speed lines and are meant to manufacture long runs for 24 hours after 24 hours. To give you a perspective, our bar lines in Minnesota, our current facility, run around 1,200 to 1,300 bars a minute. These new lines run around 2,000 bars-2,200 bars per minute. Same lines that the national branded players would use to manufacture their bars. This slide kind of demonstrates why we're so excited about the private label bars. The chart on the left is private label penetration on the snack, nut, and trail. Most grocery stores, retail stores want around 15%-20% of any aisle to be private label. Walk down an aisle of a grocery store in the category, you want 15%-20% private label.
For snack, nut, and trail, we're already at 55%. It is very hard to continue growing when you're over-penetrated. If you look at bars, now same goal, 15%-20%, they're only at 11%. Retailers want more private label bars. The reason this is so low is that retailers cannot find a dependable class A manufacturer of private label bars. The bar capacity in the U.S. is mainly tied up by the branded players. Most branded players outsource their manufacturing to co-man. If you co-man for a branded player, most likely, probably 9 out of 10 times, you're not allowed to produce a private label bar for somebody else. It is a kind of conflict of interest. The Walmarts, the Targets, the H-E-Bs, the Costcos, the Sam's do not have a really good source to keep growing their bar business.
That's where we're coming in to fill that gap. The bar category is $9.4 million. Now, pretty much the same size, a little bit bigger than the nut and trail. If it continues to grow, it will be larger than the nut and trail in a couple of years. You can see how the bar category is made up. Most of the bar category is 55% nutrition, which is your KIND bar, your Clif, your protein bar, and then your mainstream is your granola, your fruit and grain. Our business is more shifted towards mainstream because when we bought the assets in Minnesota, their main bars were granola and fruit and grain. They did not produce a nut bar. They did not produce a private label version of a Clif Bar or private label versions of a protein bar.
Now, we're already making a Clif and a Clif Bar, and now we're developing three different protein bars. Our strategy is to have our business get closer to what the bar category as a whole looks like. We probably won't get to 55% nutrition bars, but that mainstream bar will be a smaller part of our portfolio in the next three or five years. The last picture there is just a picture of our investment in three new bar lines. Two are being built in Europe as we speak, and one we bought from a protein bar manufacturer who went out of business a couple of years ago. These are our long-term growth pillars.
Our long-term growth pillars are accelerating private label bar growth, maintaining our core nut and trail business, and selectively investing in high-profitable portions of our business, which will fuel our growth in the coming years. This growth will be enabled by a continued corporate responsibility strategy and culture transformation as we move from a nut and trail-focused company to a snack company of the future. This is a big turning point of our company. For the last 100 years, we were purely a nut and trail business, and now we're really making this large investment to become more of a snack nut company. It really drove home the strategy this year, the last couple of years, when the actual nut and trail category was declining. Now, if you're in only one category and the category is declining, it's very hard to grow.
The only way to grow is to steal business and not just to race to the bottom. By being in two categories now, we're able to, one, leverage both categories against each other because some of our nuts that we manufacture and produce are used in the bars. The bar category is growing. The bar category attracts a different type of consumer. Again, it attracts younger consumers on the mainstream bars, more mid-age consumers on the protein bars. It helps us, especially in the bar category, as we develop high-quality private label bars. You maintain that; you capture that consumer throughout the eating occasions and also as they grow up and buy different bars. You kind of think of as a young child, you're buying more granola and fruit and grain. As you get older, you move into oats and honey, then KIND, then energy, then protein.
If you trust that private label partner, like the Great Value brand or the Kirkland brand, you continue to buy that private label brand, even though the brand might still be out there, but the private label offers you a 20% value. That is unique about the bar because you have a captured consumer that will continue to buy that bar if they trust that private label brand. That concludes my presentation. I'll open up to questions.
Thank you. It's great to see that your private label bar strategy is working and you're investing further in. Can you talk a little bit about the return on invested capital that you're seeing and margins in the private label bar business compared to your first one?
Sure. If we look at the gross profit line, bar business, once we have the mix, the way we want the mix to have between granola, fruit and grain, and the protein, energy will be very consistent with our gross profit of the nut business. It will be consistent with our overall company margin. Currently, since our business is more focused on the granola and fruit and grain, those are lower margin categories because those are more of a volume play. Now, you think of a granola bar, a granola bar cost, I think you could buy a granola bar for $0.15 or $0.20 a bar. Protein bars, you're paying $3 or $4 a protein bar. That's where the bigger margin is.
On the operating level, on the operating margin, it will be accretive to our operating margin as we speak per pound because there's not a lot of SG&A associated with private label bars. Most of the cost is above the line. Yes.
Similarly, can you talk a little bit about a couple of years ago, I think you had a big push in the branded segment. I think there were some learnings from that. Can you talk about, I think you gave the revenue split on the branded versus non-branded? Is there a margin split or is the branded business a bigger profit contributor?
On the operating margins, they're very consistent because you have a lot of brand support below the line. Any additional questions? All right. Thank you for the chat.