Good morning, everyone. I'd like to introduce our next presenter of the day, Adam Michaels, with Mama's Creations. Good morning.
Thank you so much. Thank you, guys, and thank you to LD for having me, back again. So if you're not familiar with the Mama's story, I was hoping we could talk about and really leave you with three things. The first is Mama's Creations plays in the prepared food deli set, prepared fresh foods. This is where the trends are going. You don't need me to tell you about fresh, easy-to-prepare meals. So the macro trends are in our favor. That's the first thing I want to share with you today, that you're going to see today. Second one, we have a differentiated offering. I could talk to you about the equipment we have. We make all of our own manufacturing. I could talk to you about the idea of all the different, ethnic foods that we make.
But one of the big things is there really is a Dan Mancini. So we started at MamaMancini's . Unfortunately, Mama's is, sorry. So, Mama's Mama's no longer with us, but, but Dan is. If you guys have been to our investor days, you're always welcome at our facilities. There's something special about Dan going to a, you know, one of our big buyer meetings. It really resonates. So that's the second thing I'll leave you with. And then the third, and this is something that so I've been here now about 18 months. We have a super clear, consistent, what I believe is compelling strategy of being this one-stop shop deli solution provider. No one else is doing it. We believe and I will tell you, I'm cheating a little bit. I have a little bit of experience in this strategy, and that's what you're going to see.
Those three things is what I want to leave you with today: macro trends, differentiated story, and a super clear strategy. So obviously, the most innovative slide in the deck. Hopefully, you guys are really enjoying this one. Our forward-looking statements. Please go to our website for further information. So what's Mama's in a page? So like I said, we want to be a well, we are already becoming a one-stop shop deli solution provider. You know, all the trends that we're going to talk about, the customers that you see, very much concentrated in our insider holdings. Most, if not almost all, of my compensation is fully aligned with you, the investor. Most of my compensation is stock-based compensation. And what you see is it's working. You know, I started LD is actually a special place for me.
It's the first place I came when I became the CEO. I started in September, and my Luke and Greg and my amazing team put me on a plane in October. Said, first of all, find out where the bathroom is of your company, and then come out to LA to LD. And they threw me to the wolves. When I started, I spoke about this one-stop shop strategy. At the time, we had 12% gross margins. At the time, we were all over the place. You're seeing it work, right? Our margin's now 30%+. Run more than a run rate of $100 million. This is not just a strategy. It's actually execution in progress. So let's talk about those three things, and please hold me to these three things that I told you I'm going to leave you with. The first one is the macro trends.
The consumer, and again, you guys are the consumer. The consumer wants it, right? Who has six hours a night to braise their own meatballs? Nobody. Okay. So they want fast. They want clean. Who's looking for highly saturated fats and this and that? My rule in the company, they know. I have. I'm very lucky to have two 13-year-old boys. The rule is my 13-year-old has to be able to pronounce every ingredient that's in our products. That's the rule. So the consumer wants it. And then the grocers, and this is why it's like double powerful. The grocers want it, right? So the grocery stores 100 years ago, they were the ones getting up at 2:00 A.M. to braise their meatballs for six hours. Then they moved to, wait, this doesn't make any sense. Let's go to the central commissary.
And now, after COVID and everything, I can't even get people to be in the commissary, so they're outsourcing it. So the grocers want this idea that they could call Mama's up, and literally, we send them product, and all they literally have to do is put it out on the shelf. No labor. That's the double win. The trends, you see it. Again, this is a huge category. The deli is a $45 billion category, growing at about 3.5% last year. That's pretty good. Deli Prepared, where we play, a $25 billion space, 5.6%. Ready? I'm going to go this slowly for you guys on this one. Growing more than 1% in volume. Not just dollars. The category is actually growing in volume. Tell me another category that's doing that. That's the power of this category. Everyone's looking for the perimeter.
This is exactly what consumers are looking for. Okay? So the first, hopefully, share with you: the macro trends are in our favor. I've learned early in my career it is much better to ride a wave than create a wave. I've been in the space of refrigerated nutrition bars. Wait a minute. Do I die if it comes out of the refrigerator? Can I still eat it? You know, this kombucha thing. Guys, everybody understands the deli prepared foods. Everyone understands chicken Parmesan. Everybody understands General Tso's chicken. Everybody understands well, they might not all understand Chana Masala, but it's really good. Chickpea, Indian, you guys will like it. Okay, two. This differentiated story. I told you it's not a cardboard cutout. Dan was actually at our office yesterday. It just really resonates.
There is just real pride in the work that we're doing, and that is making a difference. We'll speak a little bit later about 100% of what we produce is in our own two facilities. That means we get to manage the quality. That means we get to manage the efficiency of the price, the cost. Really special, and it's something that we see it really, differentiates ourselves in the marketplace. And the third is this story. So again, when we started, we started as MamaMancini's. It started as this authentic Italian heritage think meatballs. We made meatballs. And if the buyer just broke up with his boyfriend or girlfriend or doesn't like Italian people or red sauce, I had nothing to sell them. You know what? You don't like meatballs? I got chicken. You don't like chicken? I got sausage. Wait, you don't like protein at all?
I got salads. I got Mediterranean farro. I got Israeli couscous. I like Persian no, you don't. I got wraps. I got paninis. You don't like any of that? We bought an olive company. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever a salesperson on our team leaves a buyer without selling something. That is the power of what we have right now. These are not you know, it's not clip art. These are all our pictures. These are all of our products. But there's more. So we are going to be a billion-dollar company. It's not a matter of if. We will be a billion-dollar company. Half of that growth is going to be organic. We're $100 million today. We're going to be not even joking a little bit. Write it down. We're going to be we're going to grow to $500 million, and that's going to be organic growth.
You're going to see it. We're going to talk about growing our average items carried. It was under 5 before I started. It's over 7 now. We should be 27. I just named you all those items. Those are not innovations. Those are items we have today. We're going to grow by driving the velocity. We just hired an amazing guy to run all of our trade planning. Obviously, you know, we never had anyone focused on trade. We hired an amazing chief marketing officer. Marketing's kind of important for CPG. We're going to drive velocity. We're going to drive average items carried. We're going to get into new customers. I could tell you today that we are national. We are shipped to all 50 states. We are in Albertsons on the West Coast. We are in Ahold on the East Coast. We're in Publix down south.
We're in every BJ's in America, every Sam's Club in America. We're in 5 of the 8 Costco regions last year. Name for me the 3 biggest retailers in this country.
Costco.
We're in Costco, but anyone else? Walmart. I've heard of Walmart.
Kroger.
I've heard of Kroger.
Target.
Target, there you go. How many sales, how much sales do we have in Walmart, Kroger, and Target? Zero. I don't ask questions as to why we didn't do before I got here. I will tell you, the day I got here, we got the three best brokers in Bentonville, in Minneapolis, in Cincinnati. We got our meetings. We showed our stuff. And we're going to hear this year. We've already had our meetings. I just named for you three of the big the three biggest retailers, and we're not a dollar in any of them. You think there's opportunities for growth? So while we're going to grow organically, half of our growth, we are going to buy $500 million of revenue. Look at some things I just tried to make you laugh, but soup. Soup is a big part of the deli that's growing, sorry.
It's a small part of the deli. It's growing really fast. Pizza, small part of the deli, growing fast. Sushi, small part of the deli, growing fast. Dan makes incredible soups. We have all of Mama's recipes, incredible soups. I hope it is not a stretch for you to believe that Dan already brings in amazing pizzas. I don't want to ruin anything for anybody. Dan did not make sushi with his grandmother 50 years ago. I apologize. I will not lie to you guys. Maybe we have to acquire. And that's when we decide whether we build versus buy. That's our strategy. Yes?
How big is the convenience store business?
Awesome. I'm so glad you brought that up. So we have meatballs in a cup. We're going to talk about it in a second. Huge opportunity for us. Again, $0 in the C-store space. We just hired an awesome guy to run our C-store business. Super psyched about that opportunity, too. Again, as much as we're everywhere, I mean, we just named places that could each be $100 million in and of itself.
Are you going to talk about margins?
Hold the thought. 2 or 3 slides.
Well, the reason I ask is because when you said Walmart and 0, for many Wags, that's actually a good thing because you're in Walmart, you're losing money.
So the great thing so I do an incredible amount of nonprofit work. Actually, I got suckered into. I'm actually a city councilman in my town. I do an incredible amount of nonprofit work. I do it at night. Seems my predecessor did it during the day. So nobody is big enough that I'm willing to lose margin on. I do not. It is absolutely unacceptable. So if Walmart doesn't want us at the margins we want, I'm not interested. I don't need them.
Good answer.
Good. I'm doing one for one. Someone keep track. I'm doing okay. So again, we spoke about the other thing that's differentiated for us is we own the entire value chain. I've been in this business for a little bit now. I have worked with co-packers in the past, and it is miserable. Why? I have to plead for someone to make product for me. I literally work so we have two facilities, one in New Jersey, one in New York. I am in one of those two facilities every single day. And literally, I could pick up a phone, and we could be making blueberry meatballs if I wanted within 15 minutes of me picking up the phone. That's not how you do it with co-packers. So we own everything. That means we own all the R&D. We develop the idea, the products, ourselves.
We test the product ourselves, all the QA testing. We manufacture. We package. We do have some of our own trucks, but most of it is 3PL. But we own the entire value chain. That means we own the quality, the cost, everything. We spoke about meatballs in a cup. So about 400 years ago, I used to be the innovation guy when I was at Booz Allen. You will not find a guy that is more hates innovation, an innovation guy that hates innovation as much as I do. So I think it's just lazy sales. However, when there is something incremental that's the word of the day. You hear me if you're in my office. You hear it at least once a day. If there is an opportunity for incrementality, this cups is a huge opportunity for us. Why?
Not because it's a product, but because we have done consumer research. I used to run all of our intelligence at Mondelēz at one point. Incremental consumer. We find that the cups actually age down our consumer base. Younger people like the products. It's an incremental channel. We have $0 of C-store sales. This is the perfect C-store product. And it's an incremental occasion. So we are a center plate occasion. Most of our products are eaten at well, not as much breakfast, but we're working on that. Lunch and dinner. This is an intermezzo, right? This is an in-between my son's, you know, lacrosse and football. This is what they're eating in the backseat type thing. So it's a snacking occasion. I don't know if anyone's heard snacking's kind of popular in this country these days. Huge incremental opportunity for us.
Club packs, meals for one, you know, constantly winning awards. This is a much older picture. I don't know how that happened. We won just last year. But it's working. What we're finding and again, I told you I led our intelligence at Mondelēz. I don't care what I think. As respectful as I can be, I don't care what you guys think. I care what my 330 million friends in America think. We're constantly doing consumer testing. We create an entire immersion lab in our office. Everybody is welcome anytime they want, where we bring in focus groups because, again, my taste buds are horrible. We bring in our team and our members to do that. What you see here is, again, if we could get it into their mouths, 93% of people will tell you that they will recommend it to a friend.
So it's trial. We just got to get it into their mouth, and that's what we're doing every single day. New product launches again. The cups you know, the idea of Mama's Creations is to go beyond Italian, which we're doing quite successfully. New sleeves. But again, everything is building on each other, and it's incremental. More data just to see and you guys could have this later on, but just to understand we're everywhere, right? This is and again, I have been in industries where our product was great for the 23-25-year-old people in the Southeast on Wednesdays. Find me a person. Honestly, find me somebody that cannot eat something from our product line. Your supply of meatballs are on me. How's that? I mentioned to you all the customers.
What's really cool about this is if we did this slide last year, more than half of these customers wouldn't be on here on more than $1 million worth of sales. And that's a good thing because that means that we're continuing to put more sales through our existing customers. Why is that important for me? Because I'm cheap. And that means the more I could put into the trucks, it's free, right? Because just putting on one more pallet doesn't cost; the truck's already going there. So the more we could sell to existing customers. The other thing, getting a new item into an existing customer that we talk to every day takes about three minutes. Getting a new customer that we've never met before through the EDI system, through invoicing, background checks, this, that, you know, takes 5,000 years.
That's the beauty of continuing to grow more and more. That's why average items carried is where I'm focused on the most because it's the best, highest profit opportunity for us. I spoke about our manufacturing. Actually, just last week, we have two amazing guys that run our two facilities. We had a busy couple of weeks. So in a matter of I think it was like 10 days. So we are massively controlled by the USDA, FDA, all the folks that you expect. So we had, in 10 days, annual checkups from our two facilities. We had two social. There's an annual, like, social audit thing that Walmart did. Had two of those. Had a surprise visit. Costco does an annual visit. Destroy the numbers. It was just, I am so proud of our team.
Literally, I think it was like 98%, 98.5%, just the craziest, awesome numbers that we received. We love it. Our ops guys are even crazier. They love it because it allows them to be on their team to say, "Guys, we always have to be awesome," right? Because at any given point, someone could stop by our facility. Really proud of our manufacturing operations. I would literally eat off the floor. More in the RTE room than in the raw room, but I would eat off the floor. So two facilities I spoke to you about. It's another good example with the acquisition of Creative Salads. You could be saying, "Wow, Adam bought this company. We bought this company for, you know, the brands," which are awesome. But secretly, we just doubled our manufacturing footprint. That's what we're looking for.
I'm going to speak to you in a minute about what we're looking for for M&A targets. So you could each help me find some targets. But that was really cool. We doubled our footprint. And I made a mistake in my life. And for a year, I ran business continuity planning for Mondelēz. That keeps you up at night. So I love the fact that, God forbid, something should happen in one of the facilities, we actually have redundancies on everything. We make mostly our meat products in New Jersey, but we have facilities that we could do it in New York if we need to. We make most of our chicken in New York. We can make chicken now in New Jersey if we have to. I love the ability for redundancy planning. So you asked, sir, about margins.
Yes.
Yes. So we're at 12 before I got here. We're at 30 now. Is that better or worse? Pretty OK?
Yeah.
OK. Good. We're doing OK. So yes, 12% when I got here. It's 30% now. I'm telling you, we were just getting started. And I'm going to make up a number for you because I'm sincerely making it up. There's easily 10 more points, and you're not going to see any of it. I have been very clear at our investor day. Every single percentage point more that I get, and I'm going to get a ton more, all of it goes into trade and marketing. I believe we're underinvested in our trade and marketing. You guys understand gross to net, so you're not going to see it. My goal is to hide the 10 points of margin, and you guys never see it. But you're going to see it in our top line. And that's the goal. Every single customer this is not one customer was bad.
When I came in, we raised prices on every single customer. The only feedback that I got, "Why'd you take this long?
Is that a function of supply, of product, and efficiency, or is it a function of content of the product?
Yep. So it is a function of I did 1,000 small things better. So first of all, 0% of it was on possibly I can't even say this out loud. It would just I'd get struck by lightning degrading the product. Quality actually has only gone up. Actually, in many instances, the quality of the product went up. Grandma quality. Again, grandma quality. If you guys are taking notes, if there's only one thing you write down, grandma quality. We do not cut corners on anything. Everything, I'd say, has my name on it, but I guess it doesn't. But has Dan's name on it. And that is really important. Quality, quality, quality. I am proud to tell you that we are not the cheapest product out there. I hope that is the case because we don't want to be the lowest cost player.
So I got to go a little quicker because I want you guys to have some questions at the end. So fix the margins. More's coming. We spoke about organic and inorganic growth, the acquisitions. You know, I could tell you, again, three things for M&A. One, it has to be in the deli business. We are a deli company. We are a fresh-prepared company. Don't come to me with some great frozen company. Don't come to me with this great shoelace company that's going to take NVIDIA down. Not interested. Two, it's got to be west of the Mississippi. So we already have two facilities. My boys have asked if it could be in Colorado because they like to ski. But west of the Mississippi. And third, it has to have its own manufacturing and our distribution.
I'm not looking for some great brand that I could do something with. I want to have a great business, great footprint, great employees, and then accidentally put an additional chicken line in that existing manufacturing facility in Utah or, I don't know, Wyoming. Our vision, super clear, right? We're going to be a billion-dollar company. Write it down. It's going to be built off of the legacy of our business. Legacy MamaMancini's continued to increase the breadth and depth of distribution. It's free money for us. Get more items into existing stores. Very targeted innovation that drives incrementality. This is the year we're going to start M&A. We're building our war chest. And there is literally thousands of companies. Anyone, extra credit, name for me another publicly traded deli company. To my knowledge, there's not one. I ask the question every single day.
Name for me a billion-dollar deli company. I can name four.
There's Buffalo one. One basic Rich's.
Rich's is one. He is good. That's one I know of. I know 4. You guys are better than me. You could probably get to 6, but that's probably it. This is a business of thousands of mom and pop, the best potato salad in Kentucky, and they're great. That's all they need. They put their kids and grandkids through college. They go on vacation. They don't get a report card like I do at 4:00 P.M. every day, and they're just good. The problem is their kids, grandkids don't want the business, and they have nowhere else to go. So that's it. Financials, you guys are seeing, continuing to grow. Cash, continuing to drive down debt. A lot of the debt we have is at either 0% or at some sickly low number that I don't even want to get rid of.
We have earnings coming up at the end of the month, and I'm going to stop. What do you guys got for me?
Talk more about the competitive dynamic. I know Boar's Head. You know, I know the brand. It's been around forever. They're expanding into hummus and more, you know.
Yeah. So Boar's Head is amazing. The greatest compliment I've gotten since I've been in this job is someone says, "You guys are going to be the Boar's Head of prepared meals." So Boar's Head does deli meats and everything. Unfortunately, at least for them, it's a declining business. It's actually negative.
Why wouldn't they get into your business and leverage distribution if they've got a great business?
You could ask them. I don't know if that's their skill. Obviously, it's very different products. I've actually been told that they actually don't even produce the meat. They co-pack that. So it's a very different business. And again, I run my business. Like, you know, I don't know the family. I think it's fifth generation. They're doing pretty OK for themselves. Why do I have to get? I'm doing great. Everyone's taken care of. There's not that it's 4 o'clock or I have a bunch of investors that say I have to grow every year.
But when you go to Target Walmart, who are you sitting across the now, who are you competing with? Who's coming in?
So what's really cool about our space is my competition is actually Il Mulino or whatever restaurant down the block from here. The biggest competitor that we have is the fact that restaurants which, again, I think inflation was 3.2%, food inflation was 2.2% last 12 months. That just came out in February. In-home inflation is 1%. Out of home was 4.6%. Literally almost five times inflation. Where our competitor is restaurants, our second competitor, empty shelves. What is awesome about this industry, in 20 years that I've been playing in this space, we're gaining shelf space. I've never done that in cookies. I've never done that in salty snacks. I've never done that in soda. I've never done that in every industry I've been in. This is a category that's constantly adding shelf space because their consumers want it. It's actually driving trips. It's actually driving basket size.
They add more shelf space, which does what? Gets more people to do it, which gets them to add more shelf space. It's this virtuous cycle that's only helping us.
You took over what was arguably, I would say, a severely undermanaged, possibly even mismanaged company. Not to diminish what you've done, but I believe there was low-hanging fruit.
I'm married. So my wife says that to me all the time. Don't worry about it.
There was a lot of low-hanging fruit. How much harder does it get moving forward? Is it harder now? Is it?
I don't think I've gotten to the low-hanging fruit. I definitely got to the fruit rotting on the floor. I think I'm now getting to the low-hanging fruit.
Then just as a quick follow-up, like, where you're going to need capital to grow. You're going to need capital to buy a facility. You're going to need capital to buy other companies. Can you just talk about your sources and uses?
Hey, I got it. I think I'm getting pulled off. But cash flow from operations, we actually got approved by the board, and we're seeing it already. Millions of dollars, the largest capital investment we've ever done, all of it paid for from cash flow from operations. We are minting money right now. And that's what's going to pay for a lot of our stuff. Thank you guys so much. Really appreciate it. I'm here three nights a week. Come on by.