Welcome, team. Hopefully everybody is well-fed now. So, first I want to share a big thank you. Big thank you for coming out here today. I really want to do three things if we can. So first and foremost, for those online, we have some folks here in our Farmingdale facility that are well-fed, I hope. So three things. One, we just took a tour of the new Farmingdale facility. For the past year, we've been sharing with you the work that's been done to literally more than double our capacity. Really, the work that we're doing to move earlier in the process. I really hope you guys had a chance to see that, ask questions, and really see and touch as hygienic as you can all the work that we've been doing and have accomplished over the year.
Hopefully, you know, question, no hard hats, no yellow construction tape. We are fully done with the construction, and you saw that today. So number one, hopefully achieve that. Number two, it's taken me two years to do it, but we now have our leadership team. So I'm going to try and speak as little as possible today because you guys are tired of the past two years of hearing from me. We actually have our full leadership team here today, and you're going to hear from the team, and I'm super excited for that. And then third and finally, I hope we give you guys a taste of the year to come. Our year ended on January 31st, means we're already into the new year, and the team will share with you some of those things that we already have planned. Good? Good three things? Perfect.
So the first slide, obviously my favorite slide, it's the most creative one I have, which is our forward-looking statement. All of this information's on our website if you want to learn more. So this is the agenda today. So like I mentioned to you, it's a team effort. Share with you first, Chris Darling, our new head of sales, will be sharing, Chief Commercial Officer, our sales plans and how he's going to be viewing the business, how he's building his team, the capabilities that he's bringing to the table. And sharing with us s econd, Lauren Sella, our Chief Marketing Officer, will share not just the amazing stuff that we did last year, but more importantly what she has in store for us this year. Skip Tappan, our new Chief Operating Officer. Again, it's great that we started by sharing with you the Farmingdale facility.
We've spoken about all the enhancements we've made in East Rutherford, and last year we had the event in East Rutherford, and all the work that we're doing to drive more and more efficiency in the system, the expansion and the efficiency, and then lastly, Anthony Gruber, our CFO, will share our outlook and what we plan to be doing financially for the year ahead. Good? So first, and I do want this to be about what's going forward, but if I can, just one minute on what we've accomplished over the past two years. So if you remember when we all started together, we were a Northeast meatball company, right? Today, meatballs are not even our biggest item. Today, 45% or so of our sales are west of the Ohio River. In all 50 states, District of Columbia, most importantly for Luke, in Puerto Rico, we are there.
So it's amazing what we've evolved to over two very short years. Whether it be, you know, brand strength, amazing expansion work that we've done, people are actually asking for us. One of the things that I heard you guys ask and we spoke about is, even though some of these items are private label, whether it be at BJ's or Publix, they're asking us to put our name, our brand on the private label items. Financial strength. I mean, Anthony Gruber is going to heaven. It's a guarantee. What we've done over the past two years, strengthening the balance sheet from having no cash and tons of debt to tons of cash and no debt. It's amazing. And why? Because now it allows us to do the 50% of our strategy, which is inorganic growth. New capabilities. You're going to hear me say that.
I've been saying that all along. We're building capabilities. The leadership team that you see here today, it's not about what they're doing. It's the capabilities that they're building in their teams such that all 300 of us employees are doing the right things. The capabilities, NetSuite, again, ERP you guys saw when we went through the warehouse today. Every single item has a QR code on it. Every single pallet placement has a QR code on them. What gets measured gets improved, everything in NetSuite, our warehouse management system in real time, and then M&A, it's been great. The integration of Creative Salads, the integration of Chef Inspirational, this repeatable playbook that, you know, we've been doing as a company and I've been doing for many more years before that.
Now that we have Chris and Skip here, I'm spending more of my time out of the office going and looking and speaking to folks. It's a key part of our strategy. You've heard this before, but it just does it only keeps getting better. The macro trends, Bruce's friend, Jerome Powell, giving us numbers. This is where the consumers are going. Fresh, clean, easy to prepare, and it's a win-win, right? Having a bigger deli space allows retailers. It's a higher margin for them. It drives more trips. It's a bigger basket. It's a win for everybody. You saw the numbers. Just look, for the last 52 weeks, category, right? So food and beverage, it's growing 1% in units. In total deli, it's growing about 3%. In prepared foods, the $40 billion space that we play in is over 5% in volume. 5% in volume.
This is where consumers are going. You know, I sent actually, of course, Dan Mancini, key part of our business. I sent him this slide in advance. You see how he crossed out restaurant quality. This was Dan's typo. He corrected me. Grandma quality. That's what we're all about. Grandma quality. Then, you know, the last slide for me, because I said I wasn't going to talk. All right, Bruce made his money. Our four C's, right? It hasn't changed. This is our three-year strategy, right? These are our objectives for the next three years. It's not, you know, I've learned very early in my career, a great strategy doesn't change every single year, every single quarter. This is a consistent strategy that we keep going after. So around costs, this leadership team wants to have a three-handle on our gross margin. That's what we're building towards.
It's what we did last year, right? This is not an aspiration. We did it already. Last year, we got to get back to that. We know why with the construction. We're through it. But that's where we have to go from a cost perspective. From a controls perspective, what gets measured gets improved. The fact that we're driving more and more work into NetSuite, thanks to Steve Burns, the work we're doing there, what gets measured gets improved. We're tracking everything. We see everything. It allows us in real time to see, and actually one of the things that we're working on now, we're going to get a flash. If a product is sold under target or if costs get too high and we haven't changed the price, we're going to get a flash so we can take action on it. Take action on everything.
Culture, thanks to Abby and team, building this grandma quality culture and safety in every aspect. We were talking about this yesterday at our leadership team. Every member of the team is about quality, whether it be Skip in the plant, whether it be Lauren in marketing. There's quality and we're talking about it in finance. Everything has to be grandma quality. And then lastly, catapult. We told you guys last year, every year we're going to get into one of the three big ones. The three biggest players we weren't in when this all started. Got into Walmart this year, doing very well. Chris yells at me that he, you know, he has to only, you know, he's sure I have to only get into one, so he wants to get into more. But this is what we're going to do. We are getting the job done.
Further, he's driving more and more growth, balanced growth, profitable growth. And then, sorry, the last thing, of course, is, again, now that we have the leadership and team in place, now I could be going after the inorganic growth, which is 50% of our strategy. With that, let me pass it on to, Chris Darling, our new Chief Commercial Officer.
Thank you, sir. First of all, just excited to be here today. I started with Mama's back on November 1st. So I'm drinking from a fire hose a little bit, but it's all good, and all good stuff. I want to take a couple minutes of my time just to introduce myself since it's my first time talking to this group of investors. I'll be very brief. 35 years plus experience in the food industry, food retail, divided probably in three segments. First segment being operations. So I've run everything from departments to individual stores to multi-store units to regions, and had the privilege of running some of the most cutting-edge, innovative, creative, prepared food-focused stores that probably exist in the country, and that being H-E-B and Central Market.
During my time in operations, I led the design and development of three commercial commissaries for prepared foods. And my career has always been focused around that aspect of the business as well as the broader food retail. I made the switch about 15 years into my career over to the merchandising and marketing side of the business. Instead of carrying the water, I started making the plans, I guess would be the way I could describe that. So that's been an exciting switch. That was an exciting switch for me, getting more into strategy. So did consumer insights, as well as was the Vice President of Innovation for Albertsons as we entered into the merger time period with Safeway, the last big successful merger of supermarket chains.
But during that time, I did a lot of, was in charge of doing a lot of research of how we're going to innovate and grow in prepared foods, in particular coming out of that merger. Later post-merger, was the Group Vice President for deli prepared foods and food innovation for the combined Albertsons Companies, and that was national over what at the time was, I believe, 16 divisions, across the country. From that point, I went on to be President of a chain of stores closely associated with the Kroger Company, and that was a scale-up business, and that ended up leading to phase three of my life, which was getting more into the CPG world with Boar's Head, the Boar's Head brand, a very exciting and learning experience for me.
I joined the executive team there and was head of sales nationally for Boar's Head for several years, and now here I am at Mama's, and what's very exciting about Mama's is the quality, and hearing grandma quality talked about all the time because it's differentiation that's going to win in this space. We are positioned. I'm excited. We are positioned right time in history for what's going on in the food space, and as the customers migrate towards convenience foods, we're there, and when you think about deli prepared food growth that Adam referenced earlier, if you zone in on just prepared meats in the deli departments, ready to heat, ready to cook, that's the only double-digit growth category, according to FMI out there right now, and we play heavily into that space, so very, very well positioned for the future.
With that, I want to talk about where we are today, what's already been built. I don't have much of a hand in this, but I'm excited to share it. We're still not in half of the top 10 retailers out there. That's great news because that's a lot of growth potential that's out there. It's bad news because we should be in more of these retailers. I give Adam a hard time about that all the time, but we're in some great names as you look at that. If you look at our new customers from last year, names Walmart, three different Costco divisions. That brought us to seven out of the eight, across the country at that point. What I don't have in this slide, because I didn't have time to put it on there. We are now officially in the eighth.
So we are Costco, coast to coast, across the country. Very exciting news. Safeway, you know, another, another big one to win, close and near and dear to my heart. Clearly, you look at, there's different channels that we entered into. So we've got, when you think about club, we've got mass represented in our new customers. We've got grocery represented there. And we even have a little bit of, of the convenience channel. We have some large customers, customers that we do large amounts of business with, as you can see on this slide. Sam's being one of those. BJ's another one. What's really exciting to know about BJ's is we're in their branded. And that's, that's big news when you think about the club business out there.
As I talk about strategy here in a few moments, branded and our branded presence is a key part of that as we grow going forward. Walmart, we just got into Walmart back in the fall. Yep. So, and you think about that. So when I say they're at a run rate now at the end of the year of being over $5 million of business for us. So that's exciting news. I want to use them as an example, really quickly. This is how our success builds. It's what I believe about sales. It's about having great product, great reputation that you live up to, and what it leads to in growth. We had success at Sam's. It led to an invite to speak to Walmart, allowed us to go show our products to them.
We ended up getting two SKUs in, into Walmart, approximately 2,000 stores, that we're able to make entry into. Our SKU, our largest SKU, which would be the most costly SKU, which is really good news, the four-piece chicken is running 2x what our forecast was. And we've increased the number of store penetration with that by 25%, since the launch. So very short time seeing success in a major retailer. Exciting because you, you think about the households that are now, that we're getting exposure to that are experiencing our product. It's very, very positive for us. Obviously, they represent a large piece of business. The grilled chicken that you see on the, on the screen there, one thing that that does produce for us is it produces what we call trim or artisan cuts.
They're a little bit irregular as we go in our production process. And I'm going to get to what that means. And I'm going to talk about a little bit on the next slide as I want to share some new news. We are now in Sheetz, or we have our first POs. They should deliver by the end of this month. That'll be our three of our panini SKUs. Those of you in the room have seen this package go around. That's a 10-ounce panini. Fantastic product. Part of how we got in there, we have an expert now on the sales team for our convenience channel. This is important strategy for us as we broaden our reach across the country. This is branded. But more importantly, I talked to you about trim on that last slide.
Two of those SKUs are made with our chicken trim. So it's just another opportunity that we have out there to convert and use the whole chicken, or that whole breast, in our production process and have an outlet for it. So we're really excited to be in there. We'll go into 542 stores, initially, and they're very aligned with who we are. When you think about the C-store space and think about a name that is probably on the forefront of food service in the C-store space, it's definitely Sheetz. Let's talk about where we're going. Strategic sales initiatives for this coming year. Number one, sustainable double-digit revenue growth. And that's about increasing year-over-year revenues by double-digit percentage in a profitable and purposeful manner. And everything I think you'll see on the rest of our strategy really points to that. It's about right-sizing SKU assortments.
It's about how we sell in combinations of items. If we're selling in grilled chicken breasts, are we able to sell in roasted strips at the same time or paninis at the same time? And really being smart about how we look at our sales instead of looking at them as a transaction, looking at them as a, at a strategic sale that really grows our business in a sustainable and profitable way. Number two, expand average items per existing customer. This is, I don't want to say the easiest because Adam will hold me to that, but it really is the easiest way to grow our sales. These are customers we're already set up in; we already have reputation and relationship with.
And I don't want to overuse the term relationship, but, being on the other side of this fence for many years of my career, that is critical is us having the direct relationships with our customers out there and being able to expand on the things that we already do well with them. And that's another key element of what we're doing this year. Third is major account acquisition and balancing channel mix. Alluded to that on that first slide, we've made some great inroads into some major accounts. There's two out there very specific, one in the mass channel space and one in the grocery channel space. And that would be Target and Kroger that we believe we are very aligned with their values around fresh foods and advancing their prepared food programs and offerings to their customers.
We have some great opportunities due to some good relationships that we have at the right levels in both of those organizations to make our case and obtain that business is our goal this year. We haven't obtained it, but that is definitely our goal. Also the C-store channel. So again, going back to the Sheetz, that's why that's such a win. You think back about the Sam's. Sam's leads to Walmart, right? Sheetz leads to other C-store channel players out there is my viewpoint. They are respected in what they're doing in food service. Being able to have success there and a presence in that player leads to a lot better things. We already have, you know, many, many meetings set up as we move forward for that channel. That moves me to product assortment. This is about improving our brand presence.
It's establishing a product development cadence and process focus on those branded items. So when you see things like the MFOs, those of you who are in the room here today, and our brand being on that, that's what we want to be focused on. This is what brings us recognition. This adds value when we go to sell to retailers and accounts out there is when we're selling our brand and the consumer has come to trust. And I'll get to some more that we're doing on that shortly. And then set and achieve strategic product mix targets. This is about balancing our business. Adam, you talked about it earlier, having to have balance across our business. That's a healthy business. We want to do that with assortment. And that's really today, that's about balancing this whole chicken.
When you think about chicken breast that's been portioned and you think about what is the trim that's produced from that, how do we get the maximum out of that total thing? And that is, that's what we're doing with our products, whether it be the paninis, whether it be the, cheese stuffed chicken meatballs, that are out there, you know, whether it be the strips. Those are all uses of that, so that we're making the maximum use of our, of our ingredients. So how do we support that? A big initiative for this year is trade promotion. We are looking to double our trade spend this year over what we spent last year. And there's very good reason for that. When you think about our initiatives, one is new item launches. We were in development process. We have a lot of new items that we've talked about today.
We want to improve that assortment. Trade spend is critical to those launches. Getting initial customer buy-in to those products requires trade spend. And customer retention is very, is a very important piece that we get out of our trade spend. I want to give you an example over on the right. This was from BJ's. We did a digital coupon with them. As you can see, this shows you the BJ's meatball volume as we proceeded with that coupon. And then you see that big spike. We expect a spike. Anytime you do trade or you do something that's going to be a price cost reduction for the consumer, you should see a spike. What we want to see and what we measure all of our trade spend now on is what happens post-spike. And you can see we've moved the baseline up incrementally means we captured new customers.
We're likely in more households at this point, and we've set a new baseline. We would expect future promotions to bump that further and reset that baseline as well. That's the purpose of our trade spend. When you look at these pictures, this is the other thing that it does for us. And what you should be really excited about, like in this display, if you look on the bottom, I guess that would be your bottom left side, with the mini meatballs tray for $9.99 on display, there is our brand. And that's where we're focusing trade dollars. Trade dollars are available when we're out there in a branded and or a sleeved item is where we're putting our emphasis because it gets our brand presence out there for the customer.
If you look at the coupons, up in the top right, Publix, Homestyle Whole Meatball Subs, everybody talks about Publix and their sandwich programs and their that, that they have, right? The Publix Pub Sub, all these things. Well, here we are called out Mama Mancini's Beef Meatballs right there in the Publix ad as part of their program. And we run multiple runs of this item every year in Publix. But again, you can see that through and through in our trade. But again, focused on new items, focused on branded items, and making sure we're spending our money and measuring a great return on our trade spend. And that's what I've got for sales. And I think Lauren's going to come up now, our CMO.
Hello, everyone. I'm Lauren Sella, CMO at Mama's, and I've been here for a year and a half, which makes me an old timer. I've been in food marketing for almost 20 years. I've worked on brands such as Ritz Crackers, which was in the Super Bowl for the first time, Sour Patch Kids, Hamburger Helper, which was actually my first marketing role, and most recently Tate's Bake Shop Cookies. I'm very excited to be here and for all the future opportunities with Mama's Brands, so we support our brand by reaching the consumer across the journey, first by building awareness of our brand and our products, then as Chris spoke, getting in their cart, having the consumer drive action, and then lastly, building loyalty by winning their heart.
We're activating across all of these touch points, and we're measuring our marketing activations with various KPIs as well as our brand lift where applicable. To illustrate how we support our brand and our products, this is an example where our trade and marketing promotions come together. First, to get a product or our brand into a retailer, we have to drive the retailer consideration. That's by building the right selling tools. There's some examples on this slide that our sales team can then go talk to the retailer about. We also are trying to build our presence with the trade, through participation in trade organizations, attending trade shows, submitting for innovation awards, through these trade publications, as well as putting out trade ads. Once a product gets accepted into a retailer, we're trying to build awareness with consumers of the brand and the product through various tactics.
For example, digital and social ads at retail, influencer partnerships, doing PR, generating earned media, as well as product placement. Closer to retail, we want to ensure that our products are showing up on the retailer websites. And then we also activate search campaigns to ensure that when consumers are on those sites, they are finding our product that's coming to the top of the page. There's an example on the bottom left, right picture, which shows a sponsored search ad on Walmart.com. And then finally, Instacart, and I've spoken before, we've been doing a lot of support with Instacart, the grocery delivery platform. It's proven very successful for us. Closer to store, Chris spoke about all of the trade activations we do. In addition to those trade promotions, we also do marketing activations.
So for example, the bottom picture is showcasing in our C-stores. We're starting to put shelf communication there so people know what the product is because it is a novel product for the channel, Heat and Eats. So there's communication about that. And then also sampling and demos. So we've been doing demos at Costco, and we will be doing demos at Sam's as well, going forward. And then finally, post-purchase, one of the things we just started last year was placing custom QR codes on our packaging. There's an example here, which you can scan. And what this does is it drives consumers to a site, a custom site where you can get recipes for that product as well as subscribe to our email marketing list, which helps to build that loyalty and close the loop. So we're constantly communicating with our consumers going forward.
And then to further illustrate our support, here are some wins from fiscal year 2025. I'll highlight the wins and then talk about what we're doing differently in 2026. So first, we developed our first ever branded campaigns to support key retailer initiatives. We launched with Costco and Publix campaigns. We also engaged with a PR agency, and we generated almost 500 million or over 500 million PR impressions. We activated our Meatball Day sweepstakes, national sweepstakes, which itself grew our email marketing list to 12,000 people. National Meatball Day is March 9th, so stay tuned for this year's plans. But this year, we're continuing with all of these. We're going to expand both the retailers and the products we're supporting from a digital and social campaign perspective.
We're also constantly, and this is a really fun part. We're constantly testing and refining our creative. So we have a great agency partner who we've hired, and they're really analytically based. So we're looking at our KPIs and constantly refining our creative to ensure that we're getting the most reach, the most engagement. And we may start testing out even some AI-generated creative, like helping develop creative with some AI. So that's exciting for this year. We're going to continue with our PR, just continuing to build on all of the success we saw last year and then also start to drive more PR of the Mama's Creations brand once we're in market. We activated our trade marketing strategy. So we established. We've always participated in trade shows, but we really expanded that last year.
We went to the most trade shows we've ever gone to. We generated leads. We captured leads at the show for the first time electronically, so that we could follow up with them, and we actually built some great customer relationships, which generated revenue, so that's been exciting, and then I submitted us for Trade Innovation Awards as another way to generate awareness in the trade, so all of that proved very successful. This year, we're going to continue with our trade show presence. You know, one of the things that I do and our team always does is test and learn, so we're going to go back to the shows that proved successful. We're going to stop attending the shows that weren't as successful.
IDDBA is one of the trade organizations where we have the strongest presence, and we're continuing to expand our presence this year. Adam's on the board. I joined a committee for the biggest show. The show for IDDBA is in the summer, so I'm on the board, or I'm on the committee for What's in Store Live, which is a separate section at the show, and that's going to allow us to have more presence at the show beyond just our booth, so really expanding our presence this year as well. We implemented a new product development process. My two new best friends, Skip and Chris, and I have been working together to prepare and launch items, both customer-specific and national, both private label and branded, including the Mama's Creations brand.
And since Skip and Chris joined, seriously, it's been great because we have partnered together to really refine the process. Looking into this year, we're going to continue to refine it. Really, the goal is to streamline all of the touch points and improve our speed to market. I've seen the success of this in the last just few months that we've been working together on this. I think we've been able to get products ready to launch faster than we have in the past. That's been great. Then we expand retail media. We added five new retailers to our media campaign, as Chris spoke about, you know, focusing on branded products. So as we get more branded products into distribution and new retailers, we support that with retail media.
We expanded our Instacart support, and we've saw really good success with that. We're going to continue to do that, with the Costco National Campaign coming up. We have the support in place for Costco. And as we get more retailers on board, we'll continue with those search campaigns. So these have all been some great successes that we saw, and we're really just building upon them and expanding them. And again, you know, with the support of the team, we'll be able to go even bigger this year. Thank you.
Thank you, Lauren. So again, I'm Skip Tappan. I was a newbie until Chris joined. I joined in the first part of September, so I've been here right about five months. Just briefly, my entire career has been in manufacturing and supply chain. I was my first 21 years at Procter & Gamble. Then I was at Sun Products and Henkel, which was a private equity laundry care deal. And then I was at Campbell Soup, Walmart, and then Gordon Food Service, but always in supply chain and operations. So on this particular slide, I would like to start where the foundation is. So I'm going to talk about these three, the three P's of operations, supply chain excellence, but I want to start with the operating strategy and principles. And this is kind of the condensed version.
There's a lot of things that I could put or we could talk about or what makes a good operating strategy and what sort of principles do you apply in an operation? But the very first one that we think about and I always start with is around safety, such as personnel safety, equipment safety, and quality, food safety and quality. These are our top priorities. We have room to improve and room to grow in this space, but it is at the foundation of what we do. And we think about grandma quality. It is, as Adam said earlier, it applies to all aspects of the operation, not just the food content, but the way that we get things done.
The other, depending on what your familiarity is with the sales and operations planning or integrated business planning process, we don't really have one. We're working on it now that Chris is here, as well, the partnering. This is really partnering with the sales team to really think about the sales forecast. When Chris mentioned that one of these Walmart items was doing 2X what we had planned, that's great for sales. We have to be able to support it too in planning and operations. So for us to be much more integrated with how the sales team thinks about the customer business for Lauren, as she mentioned, the new product development and new item development. These are all things that we need to plan for us if the manufacturing is not a bottleneck.
Adam often will say, "I want Chris to be able to say, 'Skip, hurry up. I got more stuff to sell.'" And I want to say to Chris, "I can make more, so you need to go sell more." So we really think about how we can sort of leapfrog each other in this process. Math and science-based forecasting. That's a term that I've used for many years, and it's from experiences that I had elsewhere where somebody just says, "I'm going to get 2% better, 3% better," and I build a glide path to do it. And then you say, "Well, how are you going to do it?" "Well, I'm going to try really hard." That's not what this is about.
This is about when I make a step change or incremental changes in any KPI that we're going after. There's got to be the math and science behind it that says, "Here's the additional capability that I'm going to create to enable that. The losses that I'm going to eliminate or both." And that's really how we're building our throughput plans and our production plans is based on a much more disciplined approach to how we forecast org design support that enables the operating strategy. So when we think about roles that we have, individuals that are in seat, the structure that we have, whether we are centralized, we talk, you know, Adam's talked about, and you guys have heard before, around having two different locations, but really kind of operating as one plant.
There's some centralized functions that we need to have from procurement to planning to safety and quality that we really think about the different physical environments, different products, but the principles of how you operate are all the same. Then doing a talent assessment of the folks that we have, building talent from our existing team, buying talent from the outside, you know, so that we have the right talent profile for our business. So if I go up to the top where I have plant process and people, you know, sometimes I will start with people, sometimes I'll end with people. This time I put it at the end because that's the most important asset that we have here. You also when you walk through the plant, there's a higher level of manual work that we've been streamlining and improving upon.
But if we don't have the right people, the plant and processes don't work. So you've had updates on what's been done in Farmingdale for the last year. You got to be able to take the tour today and see what's been happening at the tour, or in the plant. We're going to get into a little bit here in the next slide about East Rutherford and what we're doing for investments in East Rutherford. But Farmingdale had all the construction work from last year. And then as we think about stabilizing from the construction work and now getting into focusing on core business, throughput improvements, productivity, debottlenecking of our constraints, that's really what we've been focusing on in the last six months or so and certainly been seeing benefits from that. Discipline, CapEx, planning, and project management. I'm going to talk about some lessons learned in the next slide.
A lot of money was spent on this location. We had some challenges and opportunities. We're not going to make those same mistakes when we go to East Rutherford and do this work. So I'll get into more details. Under process, I already mentioned the sales and operations planning, but the way that I like to describe that in simple terms, this process is really taking your commercial plan, whether it's your merchandising or marketing plan, sales plan, and then basically telling the rest of the company, or showing the rest of the company, "Here's what we have to do to enable that, to bring that to life." Capacity planning, outside storage, inventory planning, materials, procurement. It's really having that integrated to bring that commercial plan to life. I think the last one I'll talk on here was engineered standards and development.
If you think about the manual processes again that you all saw when walking through the plant, when you see that many people with that many touches, there's always room for improvement. Some of the pack lines that have been out there might have had 19 people doing work a couple of months ago. Now there's 14 people, and we have room to continue to grow. And it's really just thinking about how you sequence things, go to industrial engineering type of work, before you invest the money into automation. If we can streamline the people part of it first before tying up capital, we're absolutely going to go down that route first. And then when we have the sales and volume to support to get the right ROI, then we'll go down the automation path.
And then around the people side of it, as I mentioned earlier, there's some roles that we're centralizing, some new talent that we've brought in or bringing in in these different functions in space. And then really, as you met Abby earlier, but from a people operations standpoint, we're really doing a much better job and starting to when it comes to talent development and succession planning, really thinking about who our leaders of the future are. Okay. So on this particular slide, whether you have seen this lower right corner or not, this is the schematic of the East Rutherford facility. And the red rectangle box around it is the existing facility. And the left side is the space that we have recently acquired.
I'm going to tell you a little bit more about what we're doing with it, but this is kind of like the rendition of what we were thinking of doing. And now we're rethinking part of that. And we discussed some of that while we were on the floor earlier. But Farmingdale, I hope you enjoyed the tour. I know we had two different groups, and there was a lot to try to cover and go through in the hour that we were out there. But hopefully, if this was your first time seeing it, now hearing what Adam has talked about in the past now makes sense by being able to put eyes on it. The work was complete for the construction work.
Like you said, there was no more hard hats and caution tape, and it added 10,000 sq ft of true production capability to the facility by reorganizing what we did, acquiring the space across the street for our dry storage, and really unlocking how do we get the maximum manufacturing potential out of that facility. The chicken contracts, I'm going to talk about that on the next slide as well. But basically, all of our chicken before would have been subject to market variation that we were purchasing before with market variation. So we've locked in a percentage of our chicken for this next year under contract with set and fixed pricing, kind of like hedging, but basically we've locked it in. And as the market goes up and down, there's a chunk of our business that is locked in, and we can plan around that.
We can make adjustments if we start trying to see, or if we see market prices that are going to cause us to have profitability issues that might be something we can't take pricing on fast enough. You saw the trimming operation. We have levers we can pull to try to help offset some of those headwinds by trimming even more ourselves than what we do today. So we feel really good about having these chicken contracts. We're going to see how this goes and how much more of our volume in the future that we might, we might lock in. This targeted trim and tumble half our chicken by the end of Q2. So you saw the trimming operation. You saw a machine right beside it that was wrapped in plastic.
They use both of them at times, but basically we're metering in how much chicken that we're going to tumble based on our sales. As Chris, his team goes out, and Lauren helps us with the new product development to identify more customers for that random or trim, the meatballs, the chicken strips, then we can trim more ourselves because when we create that perfect portion chicken breast, that random and trim is a byproduct of it, same quality, but it's a different format than what we would use the product for. So as we get more sales, we can ramp up that trimming. And our projections are that by end of quarter two, we will be doing about half of our chicken trimming ourselves.
I think the second to the last bullet under Farmingdale, utilizing new demand and capacity modeling tool. I'd shared on the tour that we'd gone from around 46,000 or 47,000 pounds of raw chicken across the grill to 54,000, 55,000, 56,000 pounds as of today, just in the last couple of months. Some of it is because of operations and discipline and process excellence. Some of it is because we've done a much better job of how we plan the production on these grills and how we link with our sales team. We have more room to improve in this space, but we've had this kind of improvement despite the focus and having a much better concept and understanding of what it means to actually plan versus being so reactive to what our customer orders are like. And then this discipline performance management, KPI-based Balanced Scorecard.
Adam will say all, you know, all the time, "Get what you measure," or, or, "What you measure gets improved," those types of things. And we do. We, when we show the light being shined on some of our results and we really get into true root cause and root cause analysis, we're able to get into it. It's not a repeat offense. It's not the same thing that keeps breaking again or having an issue. The term Balanced Scorecard, what I mean by that, and this was something that we, you know, employed when I was at Walmart, you can go after productivity and throughput improvement, and you can crack the whip and drive so hard that people start making mistakes. They have safety issues. They create quality issues.
So when you think about a glide path of what your production needs to look like, what your cost savings need to look like, we have to do that looking at safety, quality, service, cost, and morale. Look at these different metrics and have a Balanced Scorecard so that we don't compromise one area while we're targeting another one. So at East Rutherford, as I said before, we have acquired the adjacent space to this. It's over 20,000 sq ft. There was a plan that was in place to put some freezer space and some more manufacturing footprint in this space. That's still the plan, but now we're looking at it through where we've partnered with an industrial engineering firm that is going to help us look at all of our assets.
We're looking at the Farmingdale facility, what it makes, what the volumes are, where it ships to, transportation impact. We're looking at the, in its current state, we'll be looking at East Rutherford in the same way. And now say, when I look at both of these assets together, do we have the right transportation model? Do we have the right truck building, truck or load building model? Should we be using this space for more manufacturing, or should we make it our own small mixing center, our own, consolidation point and ship everything from East Rutherford to customer? A lot of math involved in trying to evaluate what the best balance of transportation cost, inbound transportation, manufacturing cost, inventory management. So we're partnering with, a firm to help us, decide. We've launched that work already, kicked it off last week.
Within the next two months or so, we should have the recommendation as to how best to use this new buildup part of the facility. This is part of doing it right the first time. This is part of not saying we've gone down and spent capital and launched a project and realized a couple of months down the road coulda, woulda, shoulda done it differently. We want to be. We're slowing down a little bit to go faster in the end because as I said, there were some opportunities from the way that projects were done here in Farmingdale.
You know, if you look on the slide here where it says corporate reliability, Adam and I were thinking what's the right word for this phrase for this, but we didn't necessarily have all the best partners that we could have worked with from a project management standpoint, from a reliability of manufacturing and production delivery, from startup support. And we've learned from that. And I would say just from overall project management, the complexity of what we did, the importance of integrating functions from mechanics and electricians to how we get, you know, get things through the building without disrupting the operation. Our intent is to do this buildout work regardless of where it ends out, almost literally maybe shutting down on a Friday and starting up on a Monday with a new operation, not having impact the existing operation. We can't afford that.
It's not good business to do that. So how we plan this buildout, how we execute it, is going to be critically important to not only do well, but make sure we don't disrupt the current operation. I think that's probably it on this slide. So this last one, I'll start with the gears on the right. We've talked a lot about chicken trimming, and you guys got to see that while you were out on the floor. But if you look at the top, the enabler and the unlock for us to be able to trim more is being able to sell more of the random and trim that comes from that. The reason that we want to trim more is because we save over $1 a pound when we buy the chicken and cut it ourselves.
We pay a premium to have somebody else cut that perfect portion, breast. We pay for water weight when somebody tumbles it, and we don't tumble it ourselves. So if we can buy the chicken, cut it ourselves, tumble it ourselves, not only do we get the gross margin benefit of a lower acquisition cost, but we also buy less water weight. When we have the byproduct of the high quality randoms, as Adam described earlier, if we can sell those into different formats, then it's a tremendous win for us. So we were right now, what you saw was the equivalent of us trimming. When I say one day, it may take a day and a half, but it's about 40-50,000 pounds a week of what we would trim.
And then by the end of the quarter two, we'll be up to three days a week. We can go more if we have more of an outlet, but this is really a big unlock for us in gross margin. And as it says down there at the bottom, every day, every additional day we trim is about one point of gross margin for us. So this is something that's huge for us. The outlets are examples that I mentioned earlier, but ground chicken, chicken pieces, chicken strips, something other than what that portion looks like. So it's just really a big, big opportunity for us. The machines that we've purchased, the tumbling machines that we purchased, we've gotten really reliable, Adam. When they started up, last year, there's a learning curve to this, but we've gotten really reliable.
And, it's really a great unlock for us, not only from a quality standpoint, but also from a gross margin standpoint. Last but not least.
Thank you, Skip. Well, thanks for joining the organization, welcoming Skip and Chris and Lauren as well, even though she said one and a half years and she's an old timer. So I've been here as long as Adam, so I think there's a little dusting to be done on me. I just wanted to take you through some of the financial targets that we have for next year, and the way forward as well, and some of the unlocks and things that we've kind of done over the past two years to get us into the place where we can grow both organically and through acquisition of other organizations. So we'll start out at the top line.
We're anticipating double-digit growth for the next year and going further than that as well. That's net of discounts, slotting fees, and the discounts are really the area that we spend in. We talked about promotion in a lot of different areas in Lauren's area and in Chris's area. That gives us the momentum to build that top line even more. One of our levers there to margin control as well is kind of using the lever of promotion, and we'll get to marketing in a second to make sure that the bottom line and the margin come out to a point where we want it to be, where we could keep going, keep that bottom line strong, and understand that we have those dollars to spend in the future. I know Lauren wants to help me with tomatoes right now.
As I said, one, that's one of the levers, but we do anticipate spending those dollars on marketing. The cost of sales as well. We're going to be growing that trade promotion. As Lauren said, we've kind of gone through the numbers. We have the ability to do that. Again, we'll tap the brakes, if it's too much at a point in time and we're not generating the margins that we need. So we have a great lever there. Gross profit, we're looking at least in the high twenties in the short term, and growing through the year and then into the years coming up as well. We'll adjust that.
I know we've talked about margins in the past and the adjustments there are through promotions, so we can use those to go up or down and start to feed the business with the dollars that we have to spend. As well, we look at the gross margin and floating down to the bottom line as building those dollars that we'll need to put some more dollars into the business and CapEx, but more importantly even is to spend dollars on an acquisition and bringing more business in. That's really going to get us forward pretty quickly. The operating expenses. So growing the marketing spend by 100% year over year. This is going to generate some more publicity, some more opportunity for us to sell even more product, grow that top line. It's self-fulfilling.
We also will look at that based on our margins to release those marketing funds as we know we have the dollars to do it. So it's wonderful being the smallest big company on the block. So as you know, we're a public company. We spend a lot of money compared to our revenue, compared to other large companies on just being public costs. Talk about insurance, SEC fees. We have a new level of SOX compliance that we're going through this year with our auditors. We just changed auditing firms as well, and going through the rigor there to make sure that we're fit for the future, as far as our financial reporting and what we're doing on that side of the equation. So it's expensive.
The more time that goes by and the more we can lift that top line, the more leverage we'll get on our expenses. A lot of those are fixed. They don't go up and they're not variable. So those fixed costs will be absorbed more, which means more dollars to the bottom line, which is a wonderful thing. OpEx we'll be looking at about a couple of twenties without marketing, as a % of sales. And again, this is another opportunity for us going forward. The more we can build that top line and the more we can acquire through M&A, the more we can use this shared service philosophy to have that back office structure to do more absorption, do it with less people. We don't necessarily, if we buy an organization, doesn't mean we need that whole team to run the business.
We can kind of do it with the team we have now and maybe bolt on a little bit more, so we can grow even further, and it's a way to really get leverage. So we're always balancing the spend that we have on promo, advertising, and other things in order to grow that top line so we get the leverage we need to flow those dollars down to the bottom line. Other income. So we've been paying down debt, and I'm sure you've noticed that, over the years we've been paying the market rate debt off and sometimes a little bit quicker than we were even asked to do by the bank. So quicker than the term loan is needed. The reason we're paying those off, those are at market rates.
We renegotiated about a year and a half ago or a year ago, and we got those rates down pretty substantially, more than half a point on both our revolving credit line and on our term loans. That's bank debt we have out there. Then we have some related party debt, which is awesome. It's at a really low rate, really advantageous. I will not take that debt down quicker. I will focus on the term loans and what we have with the bank to bring that interest rate down. One of the loans that we have is at 3.5%, and Adam did a wonderful job during his negotiation of purchasing one of the organizations that we bought that we have a 0% interest rate situation.
I'll keep that debt all day long until we have to pay it off, and that one will come due this June. It's about $1.25-$1.5 million, and it's going to be all in stock, so no cash going out the door, which is another opportunity for us to keep those dollars in-house, spend it again on more acquisitions going forward and on funding the marketing and the promo going forward as well. We have very great relationships with the bank. I, I speak with our banker, Debbie on, on a weekly basis, if not more than that. They're looking for us to do a little bit more. They've definitely given us the indications that they're going to support us through M&A. The debt that we owe to them keeps whittling down, so their income stream keeps going down. They understand that we have a strong management team.
We have a vision. We're going in the right direction, and they're willing to give us additional funds to do those acquisitions, so we kind of have that in our pocket, which is very nice. They've agreed to give us those dollars, so as Adam's looking, he doesn't have to worry about how we're going to fund it. We have other ways to fund it besides just the bank debt. We're building up the cash balance, and we can give some shares out as well, so equity to purchase some of those companies. Net income, again, going to be growing during the year from the lower single digits to the higher single digits with a look to the future of getting 10% of net income and balancing out the income statement quite nicely.
And of course, Adjusted EBITDA, the one adjustment that we have in there on a quarterly basis is stock comp. So you'll see that that's why we call it Adjusted EBITDA. There's usually no surprises that we put in there. It's a very stable calculation that we have. So progressively going from the high single digits into the double digits as we go forward. If we bring another organization in, and we purchase another organization, the P&L may look a little different. It'll take time, we'll get some accretion out of it, and that'll take some time to build up. And we're very much looking forward to that, to build the organization and just build a bigger vision, the bigger vision of what we have of becoming a billion-dollar organization in this area that we see is growing massively more than any other area in the supermarket.
And we have some advantages over restaurants as well as far as the price inflation. So with that, I'd like to hand it over to Adam for some closing remarks. Adam.
Thank you, sir. Thank you, team. Just the last thing, and then I want to go to some Q&A. Obviously half of our growth is organic. The other half is inorganic. Consistent with what I've been sharing before, the size and what we're looking for in the deli, ideally incremental, whether that be incremental items, incremental customers. We spoke about that earlier. Second, have their own manufacturing and distribution. The great part, and you guys saw it today with the Creative Salads acquisition was we doubled our footprint. Having manufacturing and distribution capabilities are great. And then ideally, you know, closer to the Bay Area, West Coast, my boys like to ski.
So if we could find a deli company at the base of Aspen or someplace else like that, we could do that. Chris is on board on that one as well. So those are the three things we're looking at. Now with Chris and Skip here, I'm spending a lot more of my time making trips, meeting new companies. It's really terrific. Clearly we're communicating well enough because we're getting a lot of inbound interest, people coming to us and saying, "Hey, interested in our company." It just went on Friday to a place. So it's great to get that inbound interest as well. We have our database, the playbook. Again, these are things that we could do repeatable over and over and over again. So that's it. So really just to close out before questions. So, you know, my mom was a teacher.
You know, how are you going to measure our success, right? So making sure that we're growing profitably, making sure that we're investing appropriately. We spoke earlier, as we're more profitable, as we do better, more efficient in COGS, better in pricing, it gives us more money for trade. If we want to pull back a little bit, we could do that. We have that lever to pull. You know, understanding, as Chris mentioned, the balance of, yes, we want to get new customers and get more items into existing customers, and we want to make sure driving the velocity of the existing customers, of the existing items. So that balance there, and you can kind of go through here, focused. You see it in our facility now. Feel a lot better about our gross margin.
You heard all the things that Skip spoke about on things that we're already doing. This is not theoretical. We're already doing it today to capture more gross margin. And then, obviously, the M&A component to it. It's really important. It's a simple, silly distinction, but it's something we want to do. It's not something we need to do. Our business is growing organically, just perfectly. If we can't find the right company at an attractive multiple, we will just keep plowing more and more money into our existing business to grow even faster. But if there is an opportunity to find incrementality, we're prepared for that. We have the balance sheet for that. So with that, I will open it up to questions. Derek.
The new construction. First, with the prospecting that overall expansion. New equipment, can you just kind of give us a refresh of what new equipment you install and then checking any?
Yep. So the question was, great to see everything finished in Farmingdale. What is it going to look like in East Rutherford? And then equally, any specific equipment to understand if there's any downtime or not. So, in East Rutherford, it's going to be through this year, as Skip actually mentioned. I actually liked how he said it. We're going to slow down to speed up. So we're not jumping the gun on anything. We don't need anything. We have the additional space already, pretty much doubled our space, adding 19,000 sq ft. We're looking at it now.
What we're going to do, we're actually using some of it already, for dry storage and sorts, but we don't expect any, so it's something this year with no rush. Second, we don't expect the downtime. So again, great learning. I love learning. We literally, you guys walked into the facility in Farmingdale, we ripped open the front. You literally could have put a tractor trailer through the front of our building. We're not doing that this way. We don't have to do that this time. Like Skip mentioned, it's a corner. The new facility is obviously, since we didn't own it before, self-contained. We could build everything in there, little, not as easy, but get it done on Friday, and then on Monday, just Skip and I with sledgehammers. We already bought two sledgehammers, and we'll just break down the wall, right?
A little harder than that, but that's much closer to where we're going to be versus we ripped open the roof of our entire Farmingdale facility. We also did it at a prime time, literally in June, July, and August, right? Because it's not hot in June, July, and August, right? So we know exactly where we could have done things better, and we're going to do it right there. You know, one specific one, because we just mentioned Meals for One. We showed you the new line of items that we've developed, Meals for One, doubling, more than doubling the shelf life of our products, which retailers love. The machine actually, again, it's not something aspirational. The machine just arrived last week. It's being installed as we speak. It's being tested as we speak. We're going to be using it before the end of the month.
That's a great one and no interruption whatsoever. Good. Bruce. [audio distortion] I don't know if Skip, well, I would say that probably in the past, I'm not sure. Oh, sorry. The question was around maintenance CapEx, and what our expectation was last year versus this year. Yeah. For this upcoming year, I don't know if I could speak to the total CapEx, maybe Anthony can, but when it comes to the maintenance side of it, I would say that last year, even though I wasn't here, a lot of it was not planned. It was unplanned downtime so PMs of the equipment. Somebody asked me today. Preventive maintenance. Sorry, preventive maintenance of the equipment. Somebody asked me today whether or not, adding the two grills, the two new grills, did it just double what we had for the last year.
I said it actually probably gave us another 5% or 10% on the first two grills because those two grills were run around the clock and not maintained properly. So we had unplanned downtime. So to kind of slowing down to speed up is if I do proper preventive maintenance and I plan for things, then even though I'm taking planned downtime, I'm not having that slow down, those breakdowns, those things that occur. So in this year's budget, we did budget for the grills, as our biggest maintenance item. We did budget for two rebuilds, each six months to do full rebuilds on the grills. It's already in our budget. So the numbers that we have for our gross margin targets already include that. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what a total percentage of maintenance cost would be, what's expense versus capital.
But the overall budget includes all that maintenance, those maintenance items that are planned and then accounting for some level of existing COGS, cost of goods sold, history on unplanned downtime. Our expectation is that as we do more preventive maintenance items, downtime doesn't occur or doesn't occur as often, which is more expensive as well. But we did account for it in this year's budget, which I don't necessarily know was done last year. Oh, low. So we spent about $5 million. We're going to probably spend less than that this year, but let's call it low single-digit millions is what's in our budget. Again, I like, I love what Skip said, you know, slow down to speed up.
We might not spend all of that this year, but we've already incorporated into the budget low single digit millions. The only thing, this is around maintenance CapEx for those on the phone. The only thing I would say is that, if you're lumping total equipment cost with what we differentiate between maintenance and preventive maintenance versus new capability, new acquisition. If it was maintenance, just strictly pure maintenance, it'd be much less than that. Yeah. If it is total equipment, like total investment, this MAP machine that we bought, if we bought anything else that was going to be going into East Rutherford, we would consider that new capability, not necessarily what we would call maintenance.
The point around when I again saying slowing down to speed up or I talked about the number of folks on a packing line going from 19 to 14, before we spend money on capital, my view is, unless it's because we have we just can't physically make it, my view is that we do extract all the people efficiency out of the operation that we can first, because if you can build an ROI on something that's 20 people instead of, well, if I cut my headcount in half, I've got a great ROI. Well, you should cut the headcount. You should get as efficient as possible to have a pure ROI and what that would look like.
And that's why I think what our CapEx will be is going to be in a slower range because we won't in the next year, we won't have defined necessarily far enough along as to how to spend everything that's going to go in that building and why we're doing this network assessment. The distribution aspect of what we do with freezer storage and how we distribute, there's not a lot of onsite storage in this Farmingdale facility, which is why that spiral freezer, blast freezer was purchased. How to use that most efficiently, where we don't need the onsite storage, ship direct to customer or ship over to East Rutherford, cross dock and go to customer. That's all going into this network analysis to then say how best to use that build-out facility, number of freezer spots that we'll need.
So the capital that we might put in there may not be for manufacturing equipment, all of it. It may be for freezer storage, which enables that lower transportation cost to customer. Good. Brian?
Yeah. With the two facilities now, how much larger do you see the size of the business from an overall perspective?
Yeah, absolutely. And again, I hope you see, and I say this lovingly, right? This is not the most well-oiled AI running robotic machine, right? That we're tapped out in. In every room you guys walk through, I hope you see that there's additional opportunities to drive even more efficiency and a higher throughput from that. And I apologize. The question was how much more additional capacity do we have? So you see that already, right? So there's more space. You know, again, today in the chicken grilling, we're not grilling seven days a week, right?
We're not working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There's more space there. You guys saw that there's tons more opportunity on how we do the grilling to drive even further or further yield there. We spoke about how, remember, most of what we're getting in today is done outside, right? Bringing in that's already pre-tumbled and pre-cut. That means the yield is a lot lower than it could be if we were doing it ourselves. So there's so many areas to drive further and further efficiency on the chicken side. I could do the same sort of thing on the beef side of the house, right? The same issues with yield, additional things that we can do with our yield in beef. So I feel very good with where we are.
And again, the third, the additional piece is why the second element of our M&A strategy is with their own manufacturing and distribution is, you know, I've been to facilities, other companies that I'm already seeing they have extra space. I'll put another spiral oven in there. So even though they make plum plots, I'm making that up, you could absolutely put in a beef line or a chicken line there. Yeah.
Just one more quick thought on that. Adam alluded to it, but I use the term, this is from my P&G days, but bolted down capacity versus staffed capacity. And I mentioned it to the group that was out on the floor that I was with. If you have physical assets, whether it's the building, the oven, the grills, et cetera, if they're not running 24/7, 365, then they're not making product.
Now, if you planned downtime for preventive maintenance, if you have unplanned downtime, if you have scheduled downtime, those are all times that you're not running. Some of it you can't run 24/7, 365. You have to take it down for maintenance. But we have opportunities, we have a lot more opportunities in East Rutherford. Right shift. You have one extended shift in East Rutherford. It's going to move to a second shift and then to a third shift. Weekends that have been run over here in Farmingdale have been done on overtime over the last couple of months because they hadn't gotten throughput where they needed to be. So not only getting throughput adds our ability to hit more top line support, but it does it on a discounted cost because we're not, or reduced cost because we're not paying the overtime for it.
Same principle for East Rutherford. Business has grown there. We have bolted down capacity that we're not using. So adding schedule and making sure that the schedule that we add and the shifts that we add are as reliable as the shifts that we have today. Because if you add another shift and it runs half as reliably, that's not good from a cost standpoint. So the other reason that we're not rushing in to go buy stuff and put it in that facility is because we can get more out of our existing assets.
So again, for me, when we think about CapEx, the human element of how much more efficient can we get with existing people and processes, and then how much more throughput and production can we get out of our existing bolted down assets by adding schedule would be the things that we would look at before and in partnership with as we look at our future capital purchases.
Brian?
Just then it's just too easy. So the question is, Adam, can you tell me everything there is to know about M&A and, you know, what day of the week you're going to be announcing this week?
So a couple elements. So one, you know, you brought up a brand. If we get a brand, that's great. I love the brands that we have. Remember, the deli is different, right?
The deli is actually way more than 50% of the deli is private label. If we were 50/50, which Chris Darling, our Chief Commercial Officer, would yell at me, it'd be that low. But if we were still 50/50, we'd still be above the trend in, you know, where the deli is. So what we're looking for is incrementality. We mentioned earlier, incremental customers would be awesome. There are some customers that are just really hard to get into because they're great, because they're really loyal. If we could buy a company that's already in those customers, that's a great way in, and oh, by the way, of course, we're going to cross-sell in our grilled chicken and our meatballs and our sandwiches, et cetera, et cetera. So the incrementality of customers and/or products, again, you know, we could be, we should be bigger in breakfast.
We should be bigger. We're not in soup. We're not in, you know, pizza. We're not in, you know, sushi. So there's lots of places that, an acquisition is a way to get us into things that, I don't know, quote unquote, we don't have the right to win of sorts because, you know, it's hard to get into a customer or it's hard to get into a different type of food. So that's what we're looking for from an M&A perspective. Again, it's really important, and it sounds silly, but in my past life, there was a need. I had, I had pressure on me to acquire other companies because our core business wasn't growing. A lot of pressure. We don't have that pressure here today. We're doing just fine organically. We're going to do even better with the new team in place.
But I think that, but it's a great opportunity incrementally. Yes. So yeah, I tell you guys too much. So we have a, you know, a deli workshop workbook. We have an M&A workbook. It has all this information that we're doing, all the contacts, all the players out there. On my life, on my life, the first tab, ask Anthony, he's seen it. It has the wage rates in every state. I swear to God. Wage index, which is awesome for us because we're in all the top ones and in none of the bottom ones. So yes, that is a piece, right? And you're never going to get everything you want in an M&A deal. But I swear on my life, the first tab has all the wage rates in it. So it's an important element to look at.
It's also understanding the network analysis, you know, where it sits, right? This is my old consulting days of how do you have the optimal network footprint? That's one of the reasons why we're looking to go out west. We have footprints on the East Coast. It gets us everywhere, all 50 states. But obviously, I could cut my cost in half if, I don't know, I'm in Colorado or Utah, right? It's going to make it a way easier to ship to Seattle than it is from New Jersey. Is that helpful?
Yep.
Yeah, George. So the question is, and I'm repeating the question because I don't like the premise of the question, but I'll repeat the question exactly. What's the hangup on M&A? To me, there's no hangup. So I'm sincere when I tell you I don't need to do anything.
I want to do stuff. Obviously, last year, my focus had to be on this construction. This had, you know, there were things that happened that we didn't expect per se. And I probably had to have my hands in it more than I would have liked to have. So part of it was time, right? I just didn't have as much time to travel and work with folks as I would have liked to. I'm seeing a lot of deal flow. I'm seeing a lot of deal flow. You know, just for fun, it's great. Yeah. Some people call and they want a thousand times forward looking 2050 revenue. And, you know, yeah, they wanted $8 billion for a $10 million company. And I, I appreciate it. I, you know, say thank you and, you know, I pass on it.
So I don't need. I'm not running after anything. I feel great now with the team in place. I really can leave for the day and the business is going to be just fine. Actually, the team mostly says that team's running better when I'm not there, which is good. I'm good with that too. And I attend a lot of conferences. A lot of conferences, right? They find conferences for me to attend. And I'm seeing more. I promise you I've done more M&A work in the past six weeks since the year started than I had in the 16 months beforehand. So yeah.
Can I add just one thing?
Sure. It'll be complimentary.
The only thing I would add is Adam, and I've had this conversation and, maybe there's some divine intervention with the delay, but I personally believe I've been a part of M&A in my past that by getting the business more stable, to getting our systems, our ERP system with NetSuite, to get our planning systems, Chris and I working and partnering on our sales and operations planning, you start introducing more businesses, whether it's more of the same or different. We just added exponential complexity to something that might be struggling, well, we don't want to be struggling anymore, so we want to make sure that the foundation is there that as we bring in new businesses, whether it be culture or financial systems or IT, that we're prepared to do that.
I think that that's where we're at that point. We're pretty close to the cusp of that. So if Adam brings up a deal for us to go kick the tires on, we're pretty close to being able to say what impact model, what kind of impact might that have on our business? And I think that's a great position to be in. Yeah. Said something positive. First time. There you go.
And again, I do feel good. I really feel like this year will be well. Ask Anthony. His hands getting tired with all the NDAs we're signing. We're in data rooms right now. So we're moving on a couple of things. Eric.
I've got a follow-up on this topic. Bigger picture. What sort of pace are you over the next several years? Is that too much? Yes. Are you looking ?
Yep. So, the question is the pace of the M&A deals. Obviously, anyone that's in M&A knows that whatever plan they have, it's, you know, bound to change. But let's be clear on what, you know, what we're going after and what we're building towards. So we're going to be $1 billion. Half of that is going to be organic. The other half is inorganic. That means we're going to acquire $500 million of revenue. There's bullet point one. Bullet point two, I've been doing this for a little bit of time now. One a year is most, really what you need to digest. So I would, it would be incredibly opportunistic and it would be an incredible, amazing deal if you'd see two in one year, but I think it's one a year.
And then the third thing, because you guys send me good books to read. I really appreciate my investor community. I forgot which one of those is it, Outsiders or one of them, you know. And again, in my past life, it cost, it was harder work to integrate a $10 million business than it was when we integrated a $1 billion business in my last job. So it makes no sense. There is definitely an alien in my body if we acquire a $10 million company. I have no interest in that, right? We got to keep growing. The hope is that we, you know, you almost use it to double. So for $100 million today or more, but let's just use that. I'd love to buy another $100 million company. Will I wimp out at the end? Probably. Yeah, probably.
But again, that's where you want to go to. So this first acquisition for $100 million today, I've said roughly $33-$77 million is the first deal. Well, $77.16 million is the first deal. Okay. So that's the first one. But then now we're going to be $250-$300 million. Then the next acquisition is going to be $150 million or $200 million. So that's how we're looking to kind of build that out. But again, it is, it's a lot of work to integrate. It doesn't make any sense to integrate a business that's 10% of your company in these next few years. To get us to $1 billion, I expect roughly, I expect four to five acquisitions over the next five years that will get us $500 million of revenue. Good. Awesome. Well, guys, thank you so much for everybody.
I really hope let's go back to what I was hoping for today. One, seeing Farmingdale, seeing it up and running, everything going, great what you see. No construction, no work to be done per se, except for preventive maintenance. We're going to do that all the time. So that's number one, and hopefully you also enjoyed a little bit of food from Chef Chris. Two, this wasn't the Adam show. God knows, my wife would say that's a bad thing. You've seen the whole team, right? This team wasn't here two years ago. This team wasn't here a year ago. It is awesome, and I hope you feel the same confidence that I do, that we really have the capabilities now to really accelerate. I will put our leadership team up against any other $100 million business in the country.
We are so massively overpowering relative to our size. I feel awesome. So that's number two. And number three, hopefully you got as excited as I did between ne w sales opportunities that Chris is already working on and is seeing.
You didn't even mention Lidl. Oh, man.
Okay. You guys got to wait till the next conversation. But the work that Chris is doing on sales, the plans that Lauren already has in place and is executing against in marketing, all the great work that Skip's doing to continue to drive more and more efficiency in our facilities. And then our friend Anthony making sure that we have the dollars that I get to spend on our M&A opportunities and continuing to strengthen our balance sheet. So with that, thank you guys very much, and excited for the year ahead. Thank you guys.