Good afternoon. Welcome. For those online, Adam Michaels. I'm fortunate enough to be the Chairman and CEO of Mama's Creations. First, I wanna say thank you to everybody that's here. Brave the Northeast snow to make it here. Hopefully, the food, the plant tour. For joining today. I wanted to do three things. One, continue to highlight the macro tailwinds that we see and hopefully you get it happening in the deli today. It was amazing. When I started, it is even more amazing today. I do remember when I got up, how this story is. So you guys all had the great fortune of spending time in Senior Gargo, hearing this stuff. And again, you can't fake that. That's not something you. That's the second piece about a differentiated story.
The third one is the one that I, again, I told you guys as a, I don't know, let's call it a vision and aspiration 18 months ago about this one-stop shop deli solution strategy. I hope to share with you is what I think pretty cool. This strategy is already working. And I also hope to share with you today, along with Lauren and Anthony, what you expect to see in the year ahead. So those are my three goals: macro, this differentiated story, and now that coming to action with results and sharing that future. The slide two, obviously my favorite, most innovative slide in the deck, our forward-looking statements. There is more information on our website if you have it. So slide four, hoping to share today.
So the first thing is, as I mentioned before, how powerful ongoing started together the macro trends continue to be, cash consumed, more expensive to be eating out. Showing us with the CPI, it's just getting it was more expensive and it is actually getting more expensive relative to home. So you see the latest, out-of-home is over 5%, whereas in-home 1%. So it's expensive and it's getting even more expensive. The other thing is I just don't have the time. I don't have the time to spend six hours braising my own meatballs. I wanna spend time with my family. I don't have much time, free time to begin with. So it's all this idea of a way home having a freshly prepared meal, spending over cooking at home or takeout or eating at restaurants. In addition, the other thing might be the full meal.
So it's prep, for lack of a better word. So that's another and it's a vicious circle. Looking for it, retailers know that it's actually one of the highest margin parts of their store. So they're putting more into there, which makes consumers want it more 'cause there's more diversity of flavors and offerings, which makes retailers do even more. So we were talking earlier about, you know, some of our competitors. And right now, my competition is actually restaurants. My competition is actually free space because what you're seeing, hopefully, I know I'm seeing it, in my stores, my grocery stores that I shop at, they're actually expanding the shelf set for these deli-prepared foods. They need the product. We've been doing this now for more than 10 years. They trust high quality, high service. We're their first port of call. And we're getting the new items in.
So the macro trends are absolutely, and again, we could talk longer. You guys could, you know, find out that this company might not be right for you. This might be. I might not be right for the company. That's a possibility. It is undeniable that the macro trends are in our favor, undeniable. Slide. So in the second element, there really is a Dan Mancini. You guys here today, and again, I appreciate you guys being here. You got to see him in the flesh. It is something really special that we have with Dan. It's really special, how we just had a plant tour of our East Rutherford facility. You guys just saw a video of our Farmingdale facility. This is a competitive advantage for us.
The fact that we could, I can make a phone call right now and in five minutes, we could be making blueberry meatballs if that's what we, we wanna do 'cause we own it. If we have to work a little extra because we got a major order in that we weren't expecting, we could just work a little longer. I don't have to grovel to a co-packer. I don't have to hope that someone else cancels so I get more line time. This is all of our stuff. That is massively, massively competitive versus where some of our competitors are. So I told you we have the macro trends. I told you we have this differentiated story with differentiated capabilities. That is what's building towards our 2030 vision. Again, this happened. I meant to draw it and that five years later, the strategy hasn't changed.
If it's wrong, do we tweak? Yes. Do we refine? But this slide that I have here today, these is the same slide that I shared with you 18 months ago. That's pretty good. I feel better about it today than I did even back then. So I'm gonna show again, when we started together, we Three Cs strategy. i am not a smart man. Andrew would tell you that right here. It's very Three Cs: cost, controls, and culture, which hasn't changed. So what have we done as a team? And it really is a team effort. What have we done over the past 18 months, past 12 months? From a cost perspective, I'll let you use the adjectives. Gross margin when we started together as a team, we're north of 30% now. Everything.
If I told you, you know, I get the question all the time is, "So what's the one thing you did?" It is a thousand small things. Executing with excellence. That's how we work as a team. So all the work that we've done on, combined so we have three businesses, brought them all together. We have. I talk about having one facility with two locations. We do everything together. Logistics. We just send two trucks, half empty, to the same store, same day. We have one logistics director that does everything for us. Making now our major products, whether it's either our chicken or our meatballs, in both of our facilities. That gives us flexibility. That allows us to optimize our one facility with two locations. Our focus on procurement. We're procuring everything together.
When I first started, we would have two different types of liquid eggs in our two facilities. That's just not efficient. So we had that focused. What gets measured gets improved. And we measure everything. Controls, Anthony Gruber, our—I can't even call you a new CFO anymore. Our, our CFO that came in with me, everything what we do is just absolutely focused. Our controller, Peter, is just doing an incredible, incredible job to manage everything in our business. We'll talk about that. Gives us full visibility to everything we're doing. Massively powerful. Just cash management, right, as Anthony's thing, cash management. Just vigilant about how we are making sure that everything that we get paid for, everything we get the most favorable terms possible. And everything that we invoice for, we don't need stuff all over the place. Let's be efficient with everything that we're spending.
Cash is king. That third one, culture. I know I'm supposed to love all my Three Children of Cs equally. I will tell you, culture is the one that's special to me. That is the one that will win 10x out of 10. And what we've been doing, you guys at the, you met Abbey Meeks, our VP of HR, at our pre-breakfast. You'll meet her at the happy hour later tonight. It is incredible what she is doing on performance reviews. Simple things. We're all doing performance reviews now. We're all having benefits. We're talking about what we can do for our employees around healthcare. We're talking about what we can do for our employees around bonuses and around how we're doing and how we align our KPIs. We're all transparent on what we're all doing.
When the company wins, our individuals win. Critically important. I am so proud of what we're doing. I'm gonna let Lauren talk about the Love Awards. Ask her about the Love Awards. But just incredible things we are doing to build a tighter and stronger community and culture. It's one thing that I'm actually really happy. It was great to see when I came in. Our two facilities. It's amazing, actually, how committed they already are. So many of our employees have been here many, many, many years. How many husbands and wives met here. It's super cool. And that's the heart of our company. Slide eight. Let's not use words. Let's just look at the actual numbers. So we're, you know, huge revenue growth, which is great. And I promise you it's gonna get even better, right? It was very transparent.
First year was about building and fixing the foundation. Now we have a strong foundation. Now we can grow. Profitability, as an example, when I came in, now we're doing pretty okay. Then gross margins that I've spoken about. So yes, I want you to hear all the things that we're talking about and all the words we're using. But I also want you to keep us honest on the financials and showing that it's not just a theory. It's not just a vision. It's not just a strategy. It's being realized every day. Slide 9 just shows you good examples of the strength of our business. I think it's great. I got a double win when I joined Mama's 18 months ago. The first win is the fact that we've been around for 10+ years.
That means we have great relationships already with our customers. The second win I got is with the acquisition of Creative Salads and Olive Branch. I now have all of these new items that we could sell into these distributors. I mentioned earlier how customers, if not more often than that. I mentioned earlier, Georgia and I were talking about how when, they have new ideas for things, they come to us first because we have that relationship. So we have a strong relationship. And now we'll get to share all of these new items. And that's what's driving greater AIC, average items carried. It's giving us more flexibility to get into new customers. Again, I'll use, you know, Costco as an example. Yeah. Historically, we've had good relationships. Costco has eight regions. They all run independently. Hey, did you hear about these meatballs? This year.
Got into L.A. this year. L.A. took sausage and peppers. Wait a minute. I wanted the sausage and peppers. Now the Northeast, we got the largest ever order we've ever gotten there. We got multiple orders last year from the Midwest. Multiple rotations. New items, new regions, multiple rotations and biggest orders ever. That's just one example of Costco. It's also great to see the breadth and diversity of the customers, million-dollar-plus customers. When I presented this to you guys and I should have started it off with, again, thank you for coming. But guys, this is the second annual well, guys, you're killing me here. A little bit of clapping. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know what? Eric gets extra credit here. Absolutely. Second annual Investor Day. When I presented this slide to you guys before, it was half empty.
That's how many new customers that are getting bigger, right? Customers are getting bigger. Why? We're getting more items in there. We're bringing in. We're gonna talk. Lauren is doing from a trade room master. It's a reinforcing wheel that's just getting us stronger and stronger and stronger. So here's why you guys came. Wasn't meeting Dan. Wasn't the food. It wasn't the main plant tour. You guys were all wondering if they're gonna be a fourth C here today. There is a fourth C. So, you know, as sincere as I could be, I'm a pretty, you know, I try to be funny. I need some levity in life. Three Cs aren't going away. We will forever be focused on cost, controls, and culture.
But as a leadership team, we felt we were making such great progress on those first three that we were ready for a fourth C. And that is Catapult. Catapult is all about growth. We have the financials strong. We have the operations stronger. Now we feel confident. We have the team in place with Lauren and Nick and others. Now we could actually start to grow the business. And that's what I wanted to share with you guys today. So the first element of our Catapult, of our growth strategy, is build. We need it. You guys saw it today. I don't know if I'm proud or I'm not sure what the right word is. You guys saw it yourself. It is a pretty manual process today. We have, and I've spoken about this at early at other earnings calls.
The board gave us approval for the largest ever capital investment in this company's history. All paid for from cash flow from operations. I hate debt. All paid for from cash flow from operations. And you're already seeing some of this stuff, being bought. So trimmers. I mentioned earlier that we were moving earlier in the value chain. If you go onto the spot market and you buy yourself a breasted chicken, you have the, you know, hundreds of it, but one breast, we almost paid double today to turn take that piece and take that 8-ounce piece and turn it into a two 4-ounce pieces. Almost double the cost. We're gonna do that ourselves. Literally, without exaggeration, it started this weekend. They're playing with it now. And we're gonna use the month of February and March to play around and be ready for the second quarter. Massive, massive savings.
Depositors. You guys saw amazing men and women in our facility, which I am so proud of and thankful for. They are hand-depositing the sauce into the meatballs in the cup or into those items. Personally, I shouldn't be doing that. And second, because we always wanna make sure that our consumers are getting the most product they can, we're absolutely overfilling every one of those items. This is an automated depositor. Now these people could be doing more important things in our plant. And we're going to save on. I don't like to use the word waste, but we're gonna save on the overage. It's a slam dunk. Grill lines cannot make enough chicken. We cannot if anyone has in their house an extra grill out, just give me a call afterwards. I'd love to start making some chicken that we are doubling our chicken capacity.
We have two linear grills today. We've actually already ordered the other two. It should be coming in the next couple months. We're ready to go. I mentioned to you you guys saw Fire 11. For all intents and purposes, almost double the capacity of our products. Pretty cool. And then Dicer's is similar to the trimmer in the sense that today, we pay someone to cut off our chicken. We can do it ourselves. Faster, cheaper. That means I don't have to carry inventory. Amazing. And then freezers and others. So this is just a flavor of how we're investing in the business. We'll dramatically reduce our costs. We'll dramatically increase the agility of our business to get to do more faster. Massively powerful. Other margin expansion opportunities, we're doing some you saw the video of Farmingdale.
Actually, I'm gonna make up the numbers and tell you. A quarter of our facility is for an office. It just so happens 'cause, you know, someone likes me. Literally across the street. You could streak across the street. Opened up a small office. We're taking out the entire office staff doing it across the street. Now I just increased 25% our production facility. Whole host of other things. Again, what gets measured gets improved. The work we're doing with NetSuite. Thank you, Steve Burns, our Chief Administrative Officer. It is so powerful. I mean, silly for the company to give me a login for it. But on Sunday, I could see anything I want see, that was a rookie mistake on their part. I could see everything. I track it was the end of just the end of quarter, just last month.
I track every single item we sell by invoice. I know the profitability of every single customer. I know the profitability of every single item by invoice. And the sales team could tell you this weekend, they got love notes on $17 and I, I was not happy with 17 of the sales that we did. SKU invoice. It's not like I don't like this customer. I didn't like this individual sale you made. And actually, some of you already sent notes to the customer at $17 prices. I do an incredible amount of nonprofit work in my life. I do it at night, not during the day. Second one. If I was, you know, at first, I was thinking about this last night, I was really excited about really doing something amazing. And I was really proud of all the investments that we're making.
This is even more important. So, slide. I apologize. Slide 13 is the people that we're investing in. You go back 18 months, we're all new, right? Actually, thanks to Steve to make sure that we don't mess anything up. And Dan, who you guys met. But it is amazing what we've got from receiving accounts receivable. We had $ millions, 90+ days when I got here. $ millions. Amazing one, Mary Jo. We have nothing past 30 days now. If I sell you something, I want my money. Cash management. You're gonna see amazing numbers. Anthony will talk to you about what we are able to do because we actually make money. Anthony's pretty amazing. We make money that's in the bank. The more money we have in the bank, the more money we make. That's awesome.
So if I get my money faster and I pay you slower, that's a pretty good business. What Rebecca is doing on logistics, incredible. Literally, 50% improvement almost on our freight costs. We have the capabilities now. We have the people now to look at. She's created an entire trucking network. So we know exactly how to optimize our shipping. It's incredible. When you have someone dedicated to something with a team to support her, magic happens. That's what you're seeing. HR met Abbey, what she is doing to I don't know. It sounds like a terrible word. Professionalize, our team, our family. Invest. Succession planning. Promotion. Recognizing people financially and through all of the different things of benefits, right? Comp and benefits. That's what she's able to do for us. The culture events that we have. The swag. I'm a sucker for swag.
I'll do just about anything for a real event. We do that stuff now. Trade promotion. Nick Powers is just doing an incredible job on what we're doing. You're seeing velocities increase now. We're seeing and Lauren will talk more about all the different things. We saw a bunch of Super Bowl ads with our stuff in it. Actually, it was Jewel had a really cool one with her meatballs in a cup. Publix. I think it's this week or next week. We had Italian Days. We're in the game now. This is where we wanna be investing. And I'm totally committed and we'll talk more about it committed to investing. I know that we are going to spend money. But I know for certain because we are just completely focused, maniacal on profit margins and on spending that the ROI is gonna be there.
I am totally happy. I'm proud of our gross margins. I'm telling you, there's so much more. I just spent all this time talking to you about the opportunity. You're not gonna see any of it. My goal is for you not to see any of it. I want it to go to Lauren and Nick. Everything I save, I want to go to Lauren and Nick. I mean, amen. There you go. Lauren says amen. Then marketing. You'll hear from Lauren in, in a minute. So, with that, let me hand it off to Lauren Sella, our Chief Marketing Officer, our first ever Chief Marketing Officer, our first ever marketing employee. That one. There you go. Thank you.
Move as much. Hi, everyone. Thank you. I am very excited to be here. My name is Lauren Sella.
I have been with Mama's Creations since June of last year. I have been in food marketing for almost 20 years. I started my food marketing career at General Mills, and then transitioned over to what's now Mondelēz. I've worked on brands such as Hamburger Helper, Ritz Crackers, Sour Patch Kids, a number of most recently at Tate's Bake Shop. And I had the pleasure of working with Adam at Mondelēz. And I'm super excited to be here and for all of the growth that we have ahead of us. So why invest in marketing? Well, short term, of course, you're gonna see a lift in sales, drive trial, bring awareness to things like new products, events. And then longer term, you're building your brand equity. And you can see here on the right, this Kantar study with strong brands and their performance compared to the S&P 500.
Strong brands, the growth is much, much stronger than the S&P 500. I can regale you with stories from my past life, in marketing of marketing mix models, $50 million advertising budgets. But that's not where we are today at Mama's Creations. Our focus for now and the near future is really building the foundations and focusing on the areas that are gonna have the most impact. Our objectives are, number one, sticking in their mind, which is building awareness. Two, getting in their cart, which is, driving trial. And three, winning their heart, which is getting close to retail. So we're gonna be focusing on really identifying those where we are, have product at retail and getting close to retail. Either partnering with our retailers or identifying shoppers, who are shopping at our different retailers and targeting them through our various efforts.
We're on slide 16. Here are some examples of advertising that we've done recently and plan to continue to do. So first, we have online advertising. Actually, one of the first things that I did when I joined was ensure that our content on our retailers was to par. So I really worked with a supplier to syndicate all of our branded content to our retailers. We also are doing search campaigns with our retailers and then targeted digital and social advertising, boosting some of our social media. Dan earlier talked about the great community that we have, but also getting awareness beyond just our organic fanbase. Point of sale merchandising is something that we just started testing recently, leveraging our retail merchandising teams and brokers. You can see here some examples.
But it's been really helpful for us because it drives, it drives disruption at shelf and really, you know, attracts consumers. Last year, we did a test with iHeartMedia in two of our key markets, in the New York Metropolitan market where we have a lot of branded distribution. Also, we had a Costco Northeast jumbo meatball rotation happening at the same time. Then we also did an activation in the Southeast with Publix. These were really great for us in terms of driving general awareness. But again, focusing on the markets where we have branded distribution. I'll play a couple examples. So we did, in the Northeast, we in the New York Metropolitan market, we did radio ads with Danielle Monaro. And then at Publix, we actually did podcasts and digital advertising targeting Publix shoppers, leveraging Dan Mancini. So here's some examples. I'll play a couple.
Okay. PR is also an opportunity to drive just overall consumer awareness and awareness with the trade as well. For those who were here earlier, you heard Dan talk about how he got on Martha Stewart when we first started out. These are great opportunities that we're able to garner. It's very low lift for us. We're leveraging the help of our PR agency, the same one that was with us many years ago. What you can see on this slide is an example of a podcast that Dan was just recently on. We have a lot of great opportunities in the pipeline from a PR effort. Here on the right, we are really excited because this year, we're stepping up our game in trade show participation. We're attending or are participating in 14 trade shows this year.
I'm going to my first one next week down in Florida. But it's a really great way for us to get in front of retailers, our current retailers, and then potential retailers as well. So selling in new items to those retailers as well as forging new relationships. Slide 17. I think everyone knows what trade promotion is and the impact that it has to our gross margin and net revenue. But the point of trade promotion is to grow your overall sales. And you're doing that by bringing eye by either bringing in new customers or expanding your consumption through vehicles like multibuys, through vehicles like multibuys. One example, that, that we have in the pipeline is, with Publix. We they use our meatballs in their PubSub program.
So there's an opportunity to give a consumer who buys a PubSub for lunch an offer for a $1 offer, for example, for a dinner for them to take one of our retail items home for dinner that night. So that's an example of expanding consumption and driving a new occasion with our consumers. Our focus is really on quality merchandising. We're not trying to subsidize current consumers through TPRs. So that's really the area of focus. And we're focusing on strategic customers, strategic items, profitable customers, profitable items. An example is the cups that we're launching. You know, we wanna ensure that we have the right trade promotions in place for that. And you can see on the right-hand, just examples of how we're spending across the different product types that we have and then the different customers.
We're making sure to reserve trade promotion dollars for emerging customers, those strategic customers. We have a trade promotion team that's analyzing every one of our promotions. So we know how successful we are with everything. Our mindset, Adam spoke about this earlier. Our mindset is around testing and learning. Not everything is gonna work. But really, the opportunity is to test these things out, find the ones that do work, and then scale them either with that, you know, with the existing retailer or take them across multiple retailers. Slide 18 just shows some of the examples of trade promotions that we've executed on and are continuing. The IRCs, instant redeemable coupons, at the top is something we've just started testing out with some of our retail merchandisers. And we've been seeing pretty good redemption rates on them. So it's something we're gonna continue and expand.
Again, this is an opportunity to disrupt people at shelf because they're seeing this coupon on the product. Online discounts, what you see here is an example of two things. Actually, we had a we have a discount right now, a coupon at Costco Northeast. But then that's also filtering through to, in this example, to Instacart where we have ongoing search campaigns. So people who are searching for prepared foods are finding our product and then also seeing the discount. And that passes through on a platform like Instacart. In-store displays, of course, are a great way to stop a shopper. So we try and get those as often as possible. Then we talked earlier about the circulars, either in print. And there we actually had a great meeting last week at Broker Summit. And we were talking to some of the brokers.
You know, there are retailers where the print circular is actually really popular still because of the consumer base. They come in. They wanna see what the specials are, what the new items are. We're, as Adam mentioned earlier, we're excited because we're gonna be in the Publix Italian Days, coming up. And then this also appears, of course, in digital. And here's a case study from BJ's where we have our branded meatball sleeve in BJ. So Nick and I partnered. We had a TPR, a $2, $2 off TPR. But we combined that with online search campaign, which runs from my team. And that saw a lot of success. We saw some great lift from that. So that's an example where we tested something. We bundled two things together, and we saw success.
So it's something we'll continue to look to expand upon in the future.
Bravo. Thank you, Lauren. Happy to join you this afternoon. Thank you very much for those listening via webcast feed and those who are joining us from East Rutherford today. I'm Anthony Gruber. I'm the Chief Financial Officer. I've been with the organization since about a week after Adam's tenure. So I think we're on the same trajectory. And we've been able to accomplish a good amount of things over the prior year. Just wanna go through some of the targets that we're looking at. And we're on slide 20 right now. So we're looking to grow sales, obviously, from an organic perspective. We're always looking at other opportunities to pull in some of the organizations, the sales selection that we have, keeping in that area.
But we're looking for double-digit growth in the sales side of the business, based on macro trends. Adam talked about already some of the benefits we have of going into this year with home inflation being much lower than the inflation. So we'll leg up there. And we think that we have a lot of momentum coming out of this year, which will generate some sales as well. And the brokers conference and kind of all the small things that we've been doing to increase the top line, which always makes me happy. Of course, it has to be profitable. We're always looking at this: the cost of sales. So, on promo, low single digits to around the 10% arena. We're looking for that to drive sales. Of course, that'll eat into the margin.
But again, we're not gonna see the increase in margins because we're going to be reinvesting that into the business to drive those sales and keep those organic sales just moving up. Yeah. Gross profit, again, focusing on a 38% range. You know, we may be a little bit lighter towards the beginning of the year as we implement some of the new machinery and equipment that we have to make ourselves a little bit more efficient. So as Adam said before, we've gone through, we've tested, and kind of worked out the math on all the investments we're making. And we anticipate it coming back in the gross margin. All those dollars, again, to spend on promo and to spend on marketing to just keep generating those additional sales.
We're gonna be investing single-digit millions in marketing to grow that margin in order to do that investment. We'll be looking at that as a trade-off. We gotta put the dollars in there. But again, to develop and sustain some bottom line and gross margin steadiness there. So some of the things that we're looking at for the coming fiscal year, some additional costs that we'll have, $2 million in non-cash stock comp and amortization expenses. So this is to be adjusted EBITDA. It's not cash out the door. So fortunate for that. We have an eye on cash management. That's not one of the things that will impact us in the arena. $1 million in amortization. And we talked about why we're spending on CapEx. It's to make ourselves have the ability to generate best in promo and marketing. It's gonna improve our gross margin.
You're not gonna see that improvement. We're gonna keep reinvesting in the organization and in driving those sales up. $1 million extra in the depreciation that I spoke about and then $2 million extra in salaries that we've had from lapping last year. So we've brought in the right individuals to run the organization. Again, there's no big splashes or one big thing that has made us successful over the last year. It's all block and tackle. There's no magic to it. It's just a lot of hard work and really looking at what gets measured gets improved, which is what we're all trying to do at the end of the day or measure. And we have to have that improvement. The NOL from the past, we've eaten through all of those in the past. Wonderful story.
We've been paying much in cash to Uncle Sam, or the states for that matter. But going forward, we do anticipate paying cash for taxes. You know, those NOLs were great. But I wanna just keep improving that bottom line, keep improving our, our profitability, which means we have to pay taxes, looking at a tax rate probably in the mid-20s% or so, between all the states and the federal government. Debt. Adam was talking about not enjoying debt. I don't enjoy debt at all. I probably hate it much more than Adam does. So we've had a real focus on, on paying down the debt. You'll see you've seen it throughout the year. We're pretty proud of that. And what we've managed to do is on a lot of the deals that we have and a lot of the debt we have, they're either at no interest.
So some of the acquisitions we did were at a no-interest rate. And some of them were way below the market rates we have now. So the goal is to push down those higher interest rate debt instruments that we're using, which are from the bank, a commercial bank, not any investment banking fees there, and just working that down. Obviously, we're able to do that with the profits we have from the organization. So it's spending those dollars on CapEx and spending those dollars on pushing the debt down as well. We're looking to maintain net income in the single digits at the beginning of the year. Those efficiencies will take a little bit of time to take hold. As Adam talked about, the trimmer that we have purchased, we're already starting to use that in our facilities. We're testing it out.
We know it's gonna bring us some extra dollars in margin. So, we're anticipating that the margin levels will go up. Again, you may not see it from the outside. We'll start to use those dollars again on promo and marketing just to drive those organic sales. And then, of course, Adjusted EBITDA, looking in the mid-teens to kind of growing into the high teens throughout the year. Again, we're looking to grow the organization. We're looking to reinvest, reinvest, reinvest to grow that top line. And that's about what I have from the targets that we're looking at for this year. We anticipate doing quite well on these. And I'll hand it back over to Adam for some closing remarks. Thanks, Adam.
Thanks, Anthony. And again, I'm really proud. I cannot say this enough. This is a team effort.
You guys get to call me anytime you want. It's not on Mondays, 10:00. It's when we have our leadership team meeting. We all talk about everything we're doing. We agree on all decisions together. We don't leave the room until those decisions are made. There's no PowerPoint in this, the only PowerPoint we do for is for you guys. No PowerPoint. There's no, "Let's come back in a couple weeks." We sit there. We take the decisions. We take action. So there is, this last piece, right? There are two legs to this strategy. Part of it is strongly growing organic growth. You see that we're already starting to do that and definitely putting in place the tools to do that. Half of our growth is going to come organically. The other half of the growth is gonna come inorganically.
So we are going to buy $500 million of acquisitions. I would look to the existing acquisitions that we've made as a sort of blueprint for what we're looking for. These are businesses that, you know, we bought at quite favorable multiples and rates. It's stuff that we're immediately creating value. It might be businesses that are not humming on all cylinders that we're able to do and we're able to fix come into the work. It's something that I've been doing for a number of years now. I'm bringing in all the tools that we have such that we could immediately drive a creative growth. So there's really three elements. I'm pretty transparent about what we're looking for. One, we're a deli company. We are going to buy a deli company, ideally something that's incremental. We already have chicken. Don't need any more of that.
So something that's incremental to our portfolio, you know, soups or pizzas. You know, Dan makes some pretty amazing pizzas. Or I just like to make you guys smile, or sushi, right? These are all pieces that are growing well in the deli. Dan did not make sushi with his grandmother 50 years ago. I know you guys thought he did. He did not. I don't wanna lie to you. The second thing is that it has, it's, it comes with capabilities. It's an M&A, so T&L doubled our manufacturing footprint. I'm looking for, but we're looking for businesses that are going to have their existing manufacturing or DC. Don't come to me with this great company that owns a license for a brand. They don't have any employees. They don't have any, like, that's not what we're looking for.
Then the third thing, ideally, my two young boys like to ski. So if we could find something in, you know, Colorado, Utah, you know, west area, that would be great for my boys. They'd be really happy about that. Of course, that's secondary to obviously, being more west is gonna help us from a agility standpoint to get out to the West Coast faster. We already do it today. We already sell to all 50 states. But it will get us faster. And it will actually be able to cut our logistics costs. So that's why we wanna have something out west as well. So that's really what we're looking for from a business. You know, just to summarize on where we are, it's hopefully, you know, we've spent about an hour together.
I thank you guys beforehand for trying some of the cool foods and the plant tour. But we said three things. One, I really hope I'm leaving you guys with the understanding of where the macro tailwinds are. We are it is the deli is winning, full stop. The second thing, and being able to meet Dan Mancini today, being able to walk our production lines, I hope you see that this is a differentiated offering. This is something that is really special. You cannot make up Dan Mancini. When he's on QVC, you guys got to watch some of the QVC videos. You can't fake that. The ability to have the agility to do what we need to do from a production standpoint, that's not something you can just turn on in a day. Something special.
Then the third thing, and I guess let's call it the newest thing today, is hopefully, we've sort of agreed on what we've accomplished in the past 12 months. You guys have a better sense, more color as to what we're trying to do over the next 12 months. We are investing. We're investing in infrastructure. That means temporarily, right, the trimmer came in this weekend. As good as Anthony Morello and Ray Geer are, it is not working perfectly today. It's gonna take a little time for that to work to optimization. We brought Lauren and Nick in. We're gonna spend money on trade and marketing. Trade's actually pretty immediate. But it's gonna take a little bit of time. We are not going to get the best trade promotion the first day.
So I would expect before last well, you know, this current year, Q1, we're going to be investing a little bit. Look, I, I promise you, I have no tolerance for, you know, dramatically lower gross margin or we are making money. But yeah, if it's a point or two lower in Q4 or Q1 and Q2 because it's gonna be a lot more in Q3 and Q4, as a leadership team, as a board, that's what we wanna do. 'Cause we wanna invest to supercharge where we're going. And again, you see on slide 23, the different elements. No need to drain the slide. But continue to focus on getting more items into our existing accounts, increase the velocity of our existing products, and get into new customers. Huge opportunity. All three of those are huge opportunities for us.
And we'll continue, and you'll continue to see, and we'll hold ourselves accountable to managing the margins effectively to continue to drive bottom line growth for the company. And with that, I will open it up to questions. Thank you guys very much.
Thank you. Sir. Modify the growth plan. Is the senior management team kind of in place now, or do you still need to add there? Obviously, if you're bringing on maybe even people in the plant. But is the senior management in place?
Yeah. So Eric asked the question around our leadership team and management. Most of our hires, I think, are done. We hired a bunch of folks this year, all pretty targeted, maybe one or two more.
But no, you're not gonna see five more faces this year at the kind of management level, senior management level. Chris?
Two questions. You know, the catapult said they and.
You like that? Was that that's good, right? I would say it was actually the second choice was Chris. C for Chris. Yes.
And earnings grows out revenue with that company? The limitation of buying.
So just second question first since you just asked it. I don't, it's the limitation has been we as a leadership team knew that when we came in, there was still significant work that needed to be done in our own house. And I don't believe in going to someone else's house until my house is pretty clean. And that's what we did. So the first one is a focus.
I actually truly believe that it, it exceeded my own expectation on how quickly we could strengthen the foundation of our finances. I mean, I don't know whatever word bigger than dramatic is on the operations. Yes, we as a leadership team said, "We didn't wanna buy someone else until we cleaned ourselves up." Adam. I promise you, I am traveling these days. Let's, how about we say that. Then the first question was around the balance of top line and bottom line growth. I think that's the exact right word. Yes, I believe that we could continue to grow the business. You know, it you know it better than I do. Our plants, which you guys both saw, there are, they're not suboptimal, meaning they're efficient.
But that incremental piece of chicken or sandwich that we sell actually reduces our, improves our margin, covers absorption. So I like it. We're in a place now where, yes, I'm telling my sales team, I promise you, I'm not screaming mercy yet. So get some more sales. And that's going to help our, our even m you know, our margins. So I think we can do it. Again, I will just continue to say this. We are a team. And I am here for the long haul. We've been great, 12% to 30% plus. I am totally cool with it being in the high 20s, losing a couple points of gross margin. If I could show you, and I promise I will show you, that Nick is spending more money.
I am totally cool with lowering our net income a little bit, not a lot of bit, a little bit. But I promise to show you all of the money that Lauren is spending in marketing to invest in our brands. I'm here for the long haul. We are here for the long haul.
Eric?
So I can show you guys the show. And you can, kinda wear their hats and improve things, at the same time here as, as the last year. With regards to the top line specifically, I think over the past year, kind of, average items carried was, perhaps one of the main drivers of that revenue growth. A lot of, you know, this, this, trade promotion and marketing investments seem maybe more kind of velocity driven.
So just as we think about kind of 2025 here, can you help us sort of understand how you're looking at, you know, average items carried versus velocity or new doors as kind of which one may be, you know, the main driver here, if there's any sort of change to note?
Yep. So if we could maybe prioritize or tell us a little bit about what are gonna be the drivers of the growth. So I'm a pretty boring guy. So I'm gonna tell you the exact same thing I told you last year because we're not there yet. Average items carried to me is where I wanna continue to focus the business. Why? 'Cause I'm cheap. And I'm already in the store. And the truck's already going there. And it is the most accretive, profitable way for us to grow the business.
Oh, by the way, I think we are massively under-SKU'd. So when we started together as a team, we were at about five average items carried. At the last earnings call, we said we got above seven items carried. Guys, you guys just tried 12 items today. We shouldn't be at seven. We should be at 27. We should be at three, three, three beef products, meatballs or meatloaf or sausage and peppers. You should be at Three Chickens. Balsamic, do you guys just tried our new roasted chicken, grilled chicken, chicken strip? You don't like chicken? You don't like beef? You guys had Persian rice today. You don't like that? You guys started today with the olives. Three of each of those. What is that, 8, 9? 9 times 3 is 20. Look at that.
Those are all items we carry every single day. So average items carried to me is velocities. And if you get better anyone focused on trade to make sure, you know, we got some more sales. That's today, we are spending trade on the first day of the first month of every quarter. And every single day after that, all we do is push on where are we? Nick did an amazing job putting together a calendar. I want every I want us to own every single holiday. No, not just Italian Days. If there is an Arbor Day celebration, I want our products on the shelf. That's every day. Super Bowl, you saw a couple ads there. So trade is gonna drive velocities.
The work Lauren's doing to grow our brand at the point. Not going to see us at the point at that when you are deciding, "That's when I wanna see the shelf clockers that Lauren's putting together." What's great is, and again, scared to death if this is the first day just starting up a company, selling something that no consumer and I've been a nutrition bar, trying to educate people that if they eat the ball, they don't die from it, right? That's hard. It's a lucha. Trying to sell that, right? These are meats. This is chicken. So we have a great relationship with Costco. We're constantly talking literally every month we're talking about. So we get a sense that we actually have a pretty good sense of what the rotations are gonna be for the whole year. We know what last year's are.
We know they all worked great. Again, we've been doing this for a couple years. They want to do the same rotation again next year. They've already said which ones they're liking, so working collaboratively. And the other thing that's just so great, and this is where the agility lies, I don't have to worry about telling a co-packer nine months in advance that I'm gonna be sending them some work. Eric, who runs—you met Eric today—Ray in Farmingdale, they're speaking every day to the sales team. They know exactly where we sit there. So I think the flexibility that we have with our suppliers, knock wood, we have enough lead time that we're preparing ourselves properly for it. Second, George.
Your growth target for the year, I think it was 10%+, right?
Yeah. I like this is what happens when you let Anthony talk.
But yes, we said double digit. Look, I am very passionate about we I've been doing this now five quarters together as a team. We have gained share every single quarter. I expect to continue to gain share and take share.
So throughout the year, is that gonna change? Or do you expect to?
I think that again, I will share as we develop our plans. I have no need to just throw some cool number out to feel good for the day and forget about it. I am going to grow properly. I'm gonna grow in a ordered fashion as well. Again, I don't want our plants to have a great Q1, terrible Q2, great Q3, terrible Q4, and you're gonna say a full year is great. No. That's massively inefficient. I want consistent growth that will continue to check up.
And that and we're seeing that. We're seeing how that happens. You know, Mitch just mentioned Costco. I mean, the chart just keeps going up and up. We're getting more rotations. Each rotation is getting bigger. I think that's great. We're doing great at Publix. I mean, we're doing great at almost every place. So, you know, I'm hesitant just to make up a number. What I will tell you is we're getting better. We're getting stronger. The breadth of offerings, again, five years ago, we had meatballs, right? Now, again, you don't want meatballs. You got chicken. You don't want vegetables. You see all those items that we tried today. That makes us feel better that we are going to nice and grow consistently. And oh, by the way, and Eric didn't finish, you know, the third piece, which is, yes, absolutely, there's new customers.
We're not in, like, four of the top five customers. We're right? That's a huge opportunity for us. It is the main focus for us. But if it doesn't happen, we have a great business. If it does happen, we have the operations. We are prepared for it.
Then the second question, the marketing spend. So pretty, I mean, it's a big change. Tell us about sort of specific tests that have gotten you sort of comfortable that, "Yeah, let's budget. Let's ramp this up 'cause we love."
You wanna talk to us?
Here and it killed it, you know, examples like that.
Yeah. Actually, I'll let Lauren share with you some of the things that we've done. Oh, sorry. The question is, could you give us some flavor as to some of the marketing that we've done and why we feel good about it?
I shared a little bit of this in the presentation. But I really think that the elements, the tactics that we've been doing close to point of purchase have been really helpful. I had talked about leveraging our retail merchandising team. And we're going to hopefully expand that. So giving them, the tools to win at the shelf, point of sale merchandising, instant redeemable coupons, things like that. The other elements from an online digital perspective, again, developing the right content for our retailers that just gets syndicated through them. That was literally one of the first things I did when I joined was I signed up for a content syndication company because I was going onto the retailer websites and seeing, like, our product pictures weren't optimal, the descriptions, the brand name wasn't there.
And then search campaigns, which is something that we search, you know, you can measure that. We're doing it on certain platforms right now but expanding into others. And even testing with some of our retailers, those search campaigns. Last year, we did some tests. Some worked really well. Some didn't work as well. So expanding the ones that do work. So that's really our focus right now is getting just as close to point of sale as possible. The last thing is, and we haven't started it yet. But, you know, as we continue to invest outside of the retailer, it's identifying shoppers through just more traditional digital media, social media, and working with partners who can really help with that and measure digital marketing efforts. To me is ensuring that we're measuring the performance of that.
So not only the impressions but, you know, the clicks and where we can capturing sales.
Andrew.
What do you expect from the spend?
Yes. Question is, what do we see from your perspective then? I'll add it. I assume you're asking for, like, you know, our ROI of sorts. So, we're testing a lot of stuff out. Obviously, we're looking for north of 2 to 1, our trade spend. It's been working, actually. I think Lauren spoke about the BJ's promotion that we did, which was incredible, right? We've, we've pretty much doubled our revenue from this one SKU. So we actually have at BJ's a, a our meatball sleeve, our branded meatball sleeve. Roughly, we are doing, I don't know, about $75,000 a month. Now we're doing almost $150,000 a month. And that's, it was a great example of actually Nick and Lauren working together.
So we had a trade element to it. And we had a marketing, branded element to it as well. So is everything gonna be that good? Absolutely not. If it is, that means that you're just not trying hard enough and you're not stretching yourself, right? It's really easy to do one amazing promotion. We have to get scale on it. So yeah. So that's, that's what we're looking for. But what I will say is that we're measuring every single promotion such that we know which ones we're going to do next quarter or next year and which ones we're not. Average trade cost. They don't carry the. Or maybe there's a way to sell more by showing them, "Hey, we did this campaign with one customer." Yeah. You have one of the SKUs. You don't.
So we absolutely share with our customers what other customers are doing and which is working, what's not. Equally, you know, when we have a Costco rotation, we'll send it out, you know, online to let people know, "Oops. You could also buy it DT C. Or you could buy it at your other stores 'cause it reminds people." So yes, we try to leverage as best we can across again, it's that's why it works so much better for the branded items. If you're selling, you know, if you're doing a discount on Mama Mancini's just yesterday, just last week, it was we had a Mama Mancini's trade promotion on ShopRite. People are reading through it.
Whether they buy it at ShopRite or not, they're seeing a Mama Mancini's sleeve, whether they're shopping at Stop & Shop or at Kings or at, you know, they could pick that same sleeve up in actually, just coincidentally, all three places that I just mentioned to you. Ryan.
So curious, Adam, if we go back to the side of the commercials a little bit, that is 45% of the chicken, even if I look at this slide right here, those four things of chicken on there, the product you buy, a lot of chicken. So are you guys taking, you know, a big bet on chicken? Or what's the big factor behind maybe more efficiency?
Right.
Is that or is there a bigger opportunity there?
So, I don't think it's a change in strategy. So the question is, I see a lot of chicken.
Are we, you know, are we changing the name of the company to Mama's Chicken? And the answer is no. So the answer is you go where the momentum is, right? And what we're seeing is for a number of reasons, beef prices are high. Beef prices have climbed. Actually, they've gone up almost 50% since the end of last year, early part of middle of last year. So chicken is cheaper. It's the beginning of the year. Chicken is healthier. And you want to, we'll run with that momentum. But it's not like we're selling the equipment to make meatloaf tomorrow. But again, I mentioned earlier, 50% of what we do, we wanna meet the needs of our customer. But the other 50% is we will be pushing other things. You tried the Korean barbecue meatballs today, right?
You tried, you know, we're sharing. Chris made an incredible Swedish meatball, which was really, really cool. So we're gonna meet the needs of where the consumers, where the customers and consumers are. Eric. You talked a little bit about working capital. Are you still seeing not a lot of working capital with the growth? So the question is about working capital. So I think a couple things. One, I love spending investing, right? So we're doing that. The team is just doing an incredible job. So, you know, we have a happy hour later. You know, Peter's gonna be here, our corporate controller. Just what we are doing with cash management is just incredible. It's just incredible.
So the way that we pull our money in just so much faster than we've done in the past and we hold on to our payables so much longer, I think that we're in good shape, and sorry. And we've dramatically—I mean, I don't wanna make up the number. But we have dramatically reduced our inventory, dramatic, without any challenge to responsiveness. That has given us a lot of money. The banks have been really good to us. So I haven't—Anthony is our gatekeeper. Actually, nothing gets approved without his signature. I'm trying to understand why. Actually, I don't think I have signing authority. But Anthony does. He says that's a good thing. So literally, not a single contract gets signed without Anthony's signature. Not a single piece of equipment gets signed without Anthony's signature. Mitch.
The capital equipment that you showed on the slide earlier, all that money you spent, or some of that is still too?
Most of it. There's, yeah, probably sorry. The question is, how much of the CapEx that we showed on the slide has been spent? I'd probably say half and half. I'd probably say even more has been; we have contracts for. We might not have signed the contract yet. There's really only one or two items that, actually, there's only one item that we're still trying to figure out the right one. But everything else, we know we're ready to sign. And it depends on the length of time it takes, the lead time. The grills are handmade grills. They take about 800 years. We ordered them middle of last year. And they're coming in in the next month or so.
So those, we knew we had to order earlier. A tumbler, you could, you know, literally just go to your local, you know, Kmart and pick one up. Those not as stressed about those. Good? Cool. Well, with that, I just wanted to say thank you once again to everybody that's listening. I really appreciate the partnership we had. If there's any questions, please reach out to Luke Zimmerman. But otherwise, thank you guys so much. And excited to be sharing the results over the next year. Cheers, guys.