This is our take disrupting the deli space. The deli space is about a $40 billion prepared food space, pretty unsophisticated, about a $100 million-$120 million business, profitable, and excited to share with you today. Really, three things that I want you to take away. First, again, this is a generational shift in deli. Deli has been around about 100 trillion years. The move to these prepared foods, they're actually increasing the shelf space. If you guys are in food and beverage, tell me the last time you know a category that's actually increasing shelf space. Generational shift. Consumers are looking for fresh, clean, easy-to-prepare meals, number one. Second thing I want you to leave with is we have a pretty differentiated story. There really is a Dan Mancini. I get to have breakfast with him all the time. Mitch has seen him, met him.
Unfortunately, Mama's passed away, but grandma quality still lives on. It's really important. It really resonates with customers. It really resonates with consumers that Dan's face is in the back of our Mancini brand products, number two. Three, it took me two years. I've been here two years. We now have a clear, consistent strategy of being this one-stop shop. And now we have, after two years, we have the management team to do it. Those are the three things that I want to show you today. Obviously, the most creative slide I've created in my lifetime, the forward-looking statement. Please take a look at that and look at our website. So what's Mama's in a nutshell, like I mentioned to you? Profitable business, taking another look at how we do deli, how we do prepared meals. This is an industry of thousands, thousands of mom-and-pop shops.
To my knowledge, we are the only publicly traded U.S. stock on a U.S. exchange. We're the only publicly traded deli company on a U.S. exchange. I know of four or five billion-dollar brands. That's about it. This is, again, a massively fragmented $40 billion category that we believe we can start to consolidate and be that one-stop shop. So let's go to the three things I just told you. First, generational shift. You guys are consumers. I don't need to tell you how you guys are shopping, right? Consumers do not have all the time in the world, right? When I was growing up, I went with my mom. We went once a week food shopping. Now my wife and I go every single night as we go home because, ooh, I need dinner, right? Fresh, clean, right? I didn't say healthy.
I don't know what the definition of healthy is, but certainly people are looking in the back of the packages now. Our meatballs, six ingredients: domestic ground beef, imported Pecorino Romano cheese, onions, parsley, whole egg, breadcrumbs. I just named for you everything. I lied. Little salt and pepper. Dan talks about a pinch of salt and pepper. Six ingredients total in our meatballs. Look at our Pierre meatballs. You'll be there for 20 minutes, right? Grilled chicken. Guess what? Grilled chicken. Grilled chicken and water. Little bit of salt. So fresh, clean, easy to prepare. So that's what the consumer is looking for, something different. On the other side, and this is why it's such a great win-win, the retailers have a massive shift now because in the past, the retailers used to make everything themselves, right?
Literally, 50 years ago, you'd go in the back and people would get in there at 2:00 A.M. and literally braise meatballs for six hours. They don't do that anymore. There was a shift. It didn't make sense to use all of that space, then they went to these central commissaries, and that's where they thought they could, you know, let's get 10 stores together and then we could drive some efficiency. Pretty much after COVID, they couldn't even get people for that, too, so they're looking for a low-labor solution, which we have. Consumers are looking for fresh. Retailers are looking for a low-labor solution. I mentioned to you the size of this category. Again, I've been in the food space for a little bit of time, right?
I thought I was a big deal with Nabisco, $12 billion cookie and cracker space, $14 billion in-store bakery space, $16 billion chocolate space. This is a $40 billion prepared food space with no market leader, so that's number one. Hopefully, you get a sense of what the opportunity is from a deli perspective. Consumers are not, right? We're not our grandmothers. Actually, my grandmother's still the one that likes to pull the tag down and wait 20 minutes to get her meat sliced, right, so besides my grandmother, not a common thing that people want to do. They want to get in. They want to get out. Number two, it's really cool, so Dan created this 10, 15 years ago. You watch. Actually, if you guys are bored or something, QVC is a nice customer of ours. Dan is literally on QVC. It feels like three nights a week.
Just came out with our grilled chicken strips. Really important. Remember that. Grilled chicken strips. But it just really resonates. So one of the jobs I had when I was at Mondelēz was I had the opportunity to be part of our to help lead our M&A in North America. If you look at the companies that I bought, bought about half a dozen companies, it's the same company, right? Bill and Leigh Keith from Perfect Snacks, Jason Karp, actually, if you know Jason, he's here today, and Jordan Brown, Gary and Kit from Clif Bar. I keep buying the same company over and over again. If I turn it over, I want to see someone's face because that's what resonates with the consumer. I get to do that with Dan.
It really resonates whether he's in buyer meetings when he goes, and we bring him to the big meetings or in front of the consumer. So number two, you can't buy that, right? That this is what we have. You can't buy that. Third, and when I first came to the board with my idea of this one-stop shop vision, we had the strategy. It's really clear. Again, this is a category that is massively fragmented. There's a guy that makes the best potato salad in Kentucky, and that's what he does. To my knowledge, I don't know of anyone else that does everything in the deli. That's a differentiated strategy. So whether it be proteins, which we have today, chicken and meatballs, whether it be salads, Mediterranean farro, Israeli couscous, Persian rice, we bought an olive company, bought a salad company, sandwiches, paninis are really hot.
I'll talk about those in a minute. But then there's some things that we don't have, right? We don't have soup today. We don't have pizza today. Just to get a rise out of you guys, we don't have sushi today. Small, but fast growing in the deli today. That is why M&A is 50% of our strategy. We're going to keep growing what we have organically, and when appropriate, again, I would hope you believe because Dan does it all the time. Dan makes really cool pizzas. Maybe I don't have to acquire that. I can't lie to you guys. Dan's grandmother did not make sushi 50 years ago. She just did not. I don't care what you say. She did not do it. The last piece literally just happened. Last month, we hired Chris Darling, who is our first-ever Chief Commercial Officer to lead our sales organization.
I'm done. Took me two years. I built what I believe is the greatest deli management team there is, punching way above their weight. This is not a $100 million leadership team. I guarantee it. With Chris now running sales, Skip now running operations, Anthony Gruber in finance, Lauren Sella in marketing, we literally have the dream team. Now it's off to the races. So those are the three things, right? I told you. I'm going to keep saying it over and over again. Generational shift in deli, differentiated positioning with Dan and this story, and now we have the one-stop shop strategy with the team that's going to deliver it. So just a little bit more about what we're doing. We're full end-to-end. We come up with the ideas ourselves, the R&D. We have two facilities ourselves. We do all the QA.
We do all the testing in-house, develop it, and then we use 3PLs to get on the truck. We are national, all 50 states. Actually, Luke, our IR guy, will remind you that we also sell in Puerto Rico because that's where he lives, so that's really important to him. End-to-end, why is it so important? It's important because quality. There is nothing more important to me than quality. The more I can control, the more I trust my team. The other thing is the more I do, the more I can manage down costs and drive efficiency. I don't need to have to give the vig to a third-party co-packer, right? About 100 years ago, I used to be an innovation guy. You will never find another innovation guy that's so against innovation than me, right? We have a great core business.
With all due respect, innovation is just lazy revenue. Anyone can come up with a new idea. However, that said, when there is incrementality, when I believe I could get an incremental consumer because of a positioning where I am, an incremental channel I could get into, that's when we're going to innovate. We did that with our meatballs in a cup. It's great on-the-go snacking, high protein on-the-go snacking, right? I could either eat a Milky Way bar or clean protein. I'll take the clean protein. Getting into club. Club's been incredible for us. What we have accomplished already at Costco. We're in every BJ's in America, every Sam's Club in America. We're in seven of the eight Costco regions. It's Mitch's fault. He made a call. San Diego won't let us in. I see him. We're doing incredibly well in club.
Obviously, we need bigger products, 3 lbs, whatever we do it. And then we do these meals for one. These meals for one are really cool. This could help us actually in C-store. But again, this is going back to the customer. No labor. This is literally coming out of a box. They put it right on the shelf. Zero labor. Some cool innovation we've done here. We actually tripled, almost tripled the shelf life of the product. Customers love it. I mentioned to you, so IDDBA is our Super Bowl. It happens in the summer. That's when we come up with our new products. You see up here, I mentioned you see on the top the paninis doing well, getting into a lot of new customers. On the bottom, we actually just launched. That's a 2.25 lbs grilled chicken. That just launched in Costco.
It's there now in the Northeast if you're hungry. Some breakfast wraps we're doing. We actually just got those into Aldi. Again, it's incremental. I'm not just throwing tons of items. Actually, two years, I have cut the number of SKUs in our business. We have fewer SKUs today because of me than when I started. I'm all about efficiency. But breakfasts are great because it's a whole new, a whole meal time that I was missing before. What's really cool, I've again been in food for a little bit of time now, and it is super hard to try to educate people on kombucha or refrigerated nutrition bars. Wait a minute. If I take it out of the refrigerator, do I die? How much time do I have? It's hard. Everybody eats a deli.
I actually would posit, find me any of my 330 million friends in America that can eat something in the deli. If you don't eat protein, if you don't eat meat, have chicken. You don't want chicken? I got salads. You don't want salads? I have olives. You want olives? I got sandwiches. There's something for everyone. All 330 million people are our target audience. Distribution channels. Again, all 50 states. Name the place where they're. A bit ironic. Three biggest retailers in America: Walmart, Kroger, Target. For some reason, when I got here, we were zero for three. Everywhere else, but not in the three biggest retailers. It's a strategy. Not quite the one I have, but it's a strategy. I said we are going to get one a year for the next three years. I am a very patient man.
Just last month, I guess now three months ago, two months ago, we got into Walmart. So now we're in Walmart. But you see it out there, and if we're not there, let me know your favorite place. We'll get it there. What's super cool is while I see this as a startup and I've been here two years and what's the old saying? I've changed everything but the name, but no, I changed the name. Company started as MamaMancini's. Now we're Mama's Creations. While it's really cool, we're just starting up, we have this 15-year track record. There's no retailer that doesn't know who we are. We actually get as many calls coming in, meaning, "Hey, Adam, we want." I was speaking to some folks. We got a call from a major retailer. "Hey, we want to do Korean barbecue meatballs .
Can you just do them for us?" I don't even have to sell. They call us. This is the beauty of, yes, we're a startup, but we got a 15-year track record. I mentioned to you we have everything we do is in-house. So we have two facilities, one in New York, one in New Jersey. We just expanded. We doubled the capacity of our chicken facility in Farmingdale, Long Island. In New Jersey, we have two-thirds of a building. We actually, effective February 1st, actually get the third-third. It's great. Doing everything, again, continuing to drive a lot of automation. When I started, literally, there were eight women with a chef's knife, and all they would do is literally cut chicken into strips. I wish I was joking with you. Now we bought a machine. It does like 3,300-3,500 lbs an hour.
The one person that runs the machine is that far away from the blade. I'm also all about safety. We should not be having people with chef's knives all day long. It's just not how you do things. So more efficient and safer. It's a pretty good combination. Margins. So when I got here, our margins were 12%. That's not very good. At the end of last year, our margins were close to 30%. That's where we should be. That's where we were. That's where we'll be again. We had some construction opportunities this year, which made things difficult. It's fully behind us. There is not a hard hat in our buildings. We're ready to get back to where we were, where we've proven we could already get to. Another thing I'll tell you about, obviously, this is a commodity business, right?
Chicken and beef are our biggest commodities. Chicken had a bit of a run-up this year. That's great. How do we take action against it? Three things I've already done now that we don't have this same issue next time. One, we're actually trimming. We moved one step earlier in the process. We're trimming our own chicken now. Significant savings. That's effective today. Second, it's not good for my heart watching every morning when I wake up looking at what the chicken prices are. I went on contract for about 50% of our volume. Obviously, I don't want chicken to be $8,000 a pound, but if it is, we're locked in for half our volume. And then the third, I shouldn't be the COO. I was for the first two years. I don't need to be there anymore.
Skip is doing an amazing job in the plant, doing amazing things, driving more efficiency on our labor utilization, significantly reducing overtime. All that's going to help from a commodity perspective. So the two challenges that we have had this year, construction and commodities, fully taken care of. So I told you we're going to be a $1 billion-or maybe I didn't-we will be a $1 billion deli prepared foods business. Half of that is going to be organic growth, and we are well on our way there. The other half is going to be inorganic. We're going to acquire $500 million of revenue. That's what I did for the past five years before this. Great pipeline. We're ready to go now that I have the right team in place. So we've made two acquisitions recently. One, a company called Creative Salads. Anthony Morello is doing a great job.
And we bought that business for about half times revenue. Last summer, we bought a company called Chef Inspirational Foods. We paid about third times revenue. Did we do pretty well there? Yeah. But that's roughly where we should be. I spent my time at Mondelēz paying five times revenue. Don't need to do that here. Half organic, half inorganic. So that's really our vision, right? Built off a common, the strong legacy of Dan Mancini. Again, 10, 15 years of retailers knowing our story. Trust. Critical. Continue to add items that are incremental. Incremental consumer, incremental customer, incremental channel, incremental occasion. Keep building on that. Have the right innovation. Now is the time. Add acquisitions to that model. Continue to drive the flywheel, drive absorption of our business, our story. You know how much easier it is? We're already in most of the customers.
You know how hard it is to say, "Hey, by the way, I know you take our beef. I know I take your chicken. We just came out with these sandwiches. We just came out with this soup. We just came out with this pizza. We just came out with this sushi." We're already there. Our truck is already going there. It's almost too easy. And ultimately become the one-stop shop that, to my knowledge, no one else is doing today and is critical. Again, it's not just how do I meet the needs of the end consumer, which I care very much about, but I equally care about how do I make the customer, the retailer, the buyer easier. The buyer likes it better. If I could, instead of having to deal with a dozen trucks coming every day, one truck.
A dozen EDI systems that they have to deal with, one EDI system. A dozen different deduction systems, one deduction system. We give them actually trade dollars and we say, "Hey, you tell me where you want to put it. I don't care where you put it across our dozen items." Now I've empowered the buyer. That is not what has been going on in the past. Just some financials. Again, when I got here, we had about actually $873,000 worth of cash. Now we have close to $10 million of cash. I was given that it was closer to $16 million of debt. We now have close to $6 million of debt. We're ready to go. So that's it. Tell you three things. One, generational shift in deli. Huge category, ready to be disrupted. Two, differentiated story with Dan, right? It's really cool. It really resonates.
And it's allowed us to jump off that for other areas. And then three, super clear, super consistent strategy of being this one-stop shop with the management team to do it. That's all I got. Anyone have questions? Yes, sir.
Can you tap into your history in food and bev and the CPG world and think through, is there an analogy for where the deli category is today? Deli in the grocery aisle is like what? 80, 20 years ago or something.
Yeah, I don't have to tap anything. I'll just tell you what I did five years ago. So there's a company called Give & Go. Give & Go is an in-store bakery company. So Joel Flatt, the CEO, super great guy. I don't think he really liked me that much, but I liked him. We acquired his company. At the time, the in-store bakery massively fragmented. There was the cookie guy. There was the muffin guy. There was the Danish guy. Give & Go had great quality, great service. And they started with, I don't know if you've heard of Two-Bite brownies . That's them. And they had great quality, great service. And one day, someone came up to them and said, "Hey, do you make muffins?" Sure. And the next year, they said, "Hey, do you make cupcakes?" Sure.
Next year, they said, "Hey, can you make croissants?" And I remember I was learning how to make laminated dough. We had to get new machinery. Sure. When we bought the company, Mondelēz bought the company, I think it was around $300 million-$400 million. Now it's over $700 million. And they are the one-stop shop in-store bakery solution. God, that resonates.
Why haven't big CPG companies targeted this category in a better way yet?
So, first, just for fun, I'll say, "don't care." I don't know why they're not doing it or not. I will tell you, I've been in food. I've been in carbonated beverages. I've been in non-carbonated beverages. I've been in salty snacks. I've been in cookies, crackers, candy, gum. That was not pleasant. Cough drops. You name the category, I've done it. There is nothing like having to deal with raw chicken and raw beef every single day. USDA inspectors in my facilities 24 hours a day. Nothing compares in all my years of food to the complexity of dealing with refrigerated food end to end. It's not allowed to get to 33 degrees. At 33 degrees, it's dead. It is super hard. I will sell Oreos all day long. I never lost an ounce of sleep selling Oreos. I haven't slept in two years.
Lastly, on that analogy of the baking, when you bought that, what multiple did you pay?
I don't remember, yeah.
How did you pull off the baking success? Or it sounds like you're walking away doing that. What's it worth on the sell side?
Again, respectfully, I'm building a billion-dollar business. I'm not interested in flipping this company. I'm going to build something amazing. Yeah, I'm building this.
Okay.
Come on. I paid you 20 bucks for a softball question. You didn't even give me the softball question.
Were there any priorities on the acquisition side or just?
Oh, yeah. I mean, we have a pipeline. I share it with the board. A couple of fish on the line. But the laundry list of targets and companies that I've spoke to over my years that I didn't get relative to the very few that we did get, there's not enough reams of paper. But again, it's really important. I felt like I had a little bit of pressure. I needed to buy companies in the past, right? Our core business wasn't growing. I love how we're growing today. I want to buy other companies today, but I don't need to buy other companies today. I'm doing just fine. So I'm not running after anything.
So when you buy something in the western half of the United States, does that reduce costs in terms of dealing with customers and those parts?
It does. So it's something I absolutely look at. Logistics are a relatively low, mid-single-digit component of COGS. So it's not a huge amount, right? Because even if I cut the cost by half, it's half of. But again, to me, 1% is 1%. So it absolutely will help me there. And I made the mistake of having a job doing business continuity at the time too, 100 years ago. I like the idea of having multiple locations. God forbid something should happen, I could do something in another location.
Can you talk maybe about a region?
Hold on. Okay, last question. Sorry.
Can you talk maybe about a region or a retailer that's the top dog on it with just the existing portfolio products you're selling in? How does that one compare to the average? Are we talking 2X penetration, multiple multiples of that?
There are a lot of great examples. So Publix is a great example. We have something that I call the Double Digit Club, which is having more than 10 items in the store. Publix is a great example. BJ's, when I started, had one item. Now it has 10 items. Costco, when I started, had one item in one region. Now we're up to seven regions and many, many items. So the focus for me is club. Sam's, BJ's, Costco. That is what I want the foundation of our business to be because that's where I believe consumers are going. I apologize. I'm literally getting hooked off. Thank you guys so much. Yeah, call with anything.