Welcome, everybody. It's 1:00, I think we can get started. Thank you for some of you guys that braved the weather. I don't know, we've been doing this now three years, right? This is my 3rd year. Has anyone been here all three years? Mitch is the man, three years. I'll tell you guys, in the three years, how many times has there been a torrential, crazy blizzard storm? three for three . That's, like, in the high 80% right? Like, that's pretty good. I was telling everyone before, if you want a really good stock tip, whatever that betting system, polymath, or whatever system is.
Once I tell you guys or when Luke tells me when we'll do the investor day next year, I will let you know. You hock your house, you put it all on there being a blizzard the day of our investor day. How's that? Is that good? Cool. I really sincerely do appreciate you guys making some time to come here. This is one of my favorite times because while many of you, unfortunately, have to hear me all the time, you don't get to hear the full Mama's team, it is super cool to hear. I'm gonna try to speak as little as possible and have the team share updates. The other thing I'm gonna ask you to do, guys, have your iPhones, your pieces of paper.
There's gonna be a whole lot we're gonna share today. Again, hopefully, you enjoyed some food, and everything is important. I want you to write down one, two, and three on your notepads, and as the team goes through, I will highlight. If you just leave with only three things that I believe are significant, you know, I think that's a win. You'll write your one, two, and three on the paper or your iPad or in your abacus, and kind of I'll stop the team just to make sure. If you guys don't realize how big it is, I will reinforce 1 of those three big things. Cool? Okay. Chris, you hear me okay? I'm doing okay?
You're doing great, Adam.
Perfect. There you go. That's my boss, Chris. First slide, obviously, the most creative, our forward-looking statements. More of this information, obviously, you could find at our website. Like I said, today, I really want to be all about the team. I'll share a little bit about hopefully, a bit of grading that I'm sure you do of me on how, you know, the years... Look, we've been together for three years, how it's going, as quickly as possible, move into having Chris start off. Chris is on the phone, unfortunately, because of the storm. We'll share some, our updates on all of our commercial activities, what's going on there. Obviously, Lauren's here today to share some. She's already been sharing a lot of the marketing stuff with you guys and the brand building.
It really is amazing what we've accomplished already in three years. Skip literally makes it all happen. You guys, I know, went on a tour with him today, but, you know, as quickly as Chris could sell it, Skip's got to make it, right? They, they have a great partnership, going on. Obviously, Anthony will tell us if we make any money at the end. Does that sound like a good plan? You know, quick recap, something I'm so proud of. I told you guys, you know, my son does data analytics, so I had to create for him an equation, obviously, that you guys see on top. You know, it all starts with our people.
I will tell you, if the board, we have a board meeting on Thursday, if the board tells me today, you know, this week is my last day, I will not be proud of the revenue, I will not be proud of the profit, I will be proud of the team that we have built and we're continuing to build because that is everything. Culture is everything. I told you guys that there have been M&A deals that we've gotten pretty close on. I pulled the plug because I didn't think the culture was the right fit. Culture is everything. The amazing work that Chris and Lauren have done, you see it. I mean, we are growing literally 4x the category, right? The category is growing roughly five, we're growing 20.
Literally, the market share gains we're getting, the new customers we're getting, the new items we're getting in, the velocities that are accelerating, I am so proud of what the team has been able to do to build our brand in stores. Third, I mentioned to you, all the work Skip's doing, literally foundational work. Foundational work, building the people, building the equipment, the CapEx, the strategy has just been off the charts. You're seeing it in the new technology. You guys just went on the tour, whether it be the mapping process, which increased the shelf life, the automation, stripping machine, all of those things. Obviously, that comes all together.
You know, I was just telling George just before that, you know, my biggest thing, if I hope you say, you know, about Adam, is he tells you what he's gonna do, and he does what he says. Now, hopefully, there's a three-year track record of this company telling you exactly what we're going to do, and we do exactly what we said. Obviously, at the end of last year, with the acquisition of the Sysco division, with Crown I hope that is just one more reinforcing mechanism that says, "Wow! Yeah, the guy does it. I'm not, I'm not sure I'm happy with what he's gonna tell me he's gonna do, but whatever he does, he says he's gonna do, he's gonna do it." The M&A stuff is, was great.
The other thing I will tell you, a bit of an unintended consequence, is that, you know, success begets success. I'm telling you, I get more inbounds every day now because of the deals that we have done already, right? Between Creative Salads, and Olive Branch, Chef Inspirational, Crown I. I'm telling you, I don't have to make a lot of outbound phone calls. It's coming in here, and that's great, and we're building that pipeline that I feel really good about. I will tell you, I'm not just thinking about the next deal we're doing. I literally have a pipeline of not the deal next time, but the deal two times from now. That's how we're thinking about M&A. This is a multi-year process. All of that equals into what I hopefully you guys see as a more profitable business.
Gross margin is increasing, we're managing SG&A extraordinarily well. Net income is increasing EBITDA. The top line's growing, and the profit is growing. I don't need to share with you guys because you guys know it better than I do. It is way better to ride a wave than create your own, and the most wonderful thing is, this is a category you absolutely wanna be.
I've said this before, you absolutely decide if, you know, Adam, and this leadership team is where you wanna place your bets. It is absolutely your decision that says, "Maybe these guys are okay, but I just don't like their strategy." Those two are absolutely your decision. The third one around, is this the category you wanna be in? I'm sorry, that is not your decision. It is happening month after month.
Nielsen, IRI, SPINS, you pick any data you want to see, that deli is absolutely where you want to be. It's crazy, you're seeing it now. The data just came out last week for, you know, the next month. Literally, units are growing faster than dollars. Let me go slower for you guys. Units are growing faster than dollars. That does not happen in the food space, and it's just a wonderful thing to see.
We're just getting more and more penetration. Our retailers are adding more and more shelf space. This is where you want to be. Right or wrong, I think we're the only publicly traded deli company in America. I think the last one for me, you know, I hope you're bored. I hope this is boring for you because all he does is say the same thing over, and over, and over again.
Our strategy does not change. Our strategy is only getting reinforced. 4Cs: Cost, Controls, Culture, and Catapults. The cost stuff, you know, obviously, we're all running, but Skip is driving us. You're seeing higher and higher gross margins that allows us to keep reinvesting in more and more equipment. Again, you guys saw, when you took your tours, the additional space. We pretty much just doubled our manufacturing footprint in New Jersey. We got to build that out. That's the strategy that Skip has been putting together with his team. Doing that, obviously, the controls, so important. I know you're supposed to love all your children equally. Controls is the one I just love a little more equally. If you don't have controls in place, couldn't care less what your costs are, and even what your culture is if you're just out of control.
That is so important for me. One of the first things we told you when we made the Crown I acquisition, the biggest thing we had to do, it's great they were already on an ERP system. That's a really good thing. Did not have that luxury with Creative Salads, we had to move them on to NetSuite, in the first half of the year, we will move that. It's going great. John's doing an amazing job in leading our information technology. We're doing great things. Again, what gets measured gets improved, if I don't have the data, I can't measure it. The culture stuff's awesome, the work Abby's doing. Super proud of particularly the Crown I acquisition bringing them on. We're one team.
I really you could ask Skip for more color, but I am super proud of how the Crown team is not just coming in, but they're eager. They are really excited and are really happy about being part of this team. All the work that Chris and Lauren are gonna talk about, Catapult. I will tell you, there's lots of things I worry about tonight. I haven't slept in three and a half years. Top line is not one of them for me. I know we're gonna do great things in a very measured way. Chris, happy for you to take the lead here.
All right. Well, thank you, and thanks for handing over the reins. I'm really excited to talk to this group about our Fiscal 2027 strategic sales initiatives. It's really built on our success, and the strategy we had in play in 2026 has given us a great foundation for going forward. Really excited about what this year has to hold, as well as when you think about three to five years ahead, which is where we're really trying to have our mentality as a sales team today, is thinking even beyond the year that we're starting and getting into and getting further and further out in our thought process. The slide that you have in front of you should be Fiscal 2027 strategic sales initiatives, and there's five basic pillars on here.
None of them should be a big surprise, but they are an evolution from where we were in 26. The first one is strategic multi-item selling approach. How we sell is very, very important, and one thing that Adam and I spoke about over a year ago now, when we first talked was, you know, selling isn't about order taking, selling is about selling.
Our approach to selling is evolving even more into portfolio packages versus single items. going to our customers in a strategic manner and being a great customer partner. I'm gonna talk about that on some of the ensuing slides about what we're doing related to becoming a strategic partner versus just a supplier, which is very, very important to our future and our growth. Second on here is expand average items per existing customer.
This is our KPI that we live by. For 27, we're looking for a net +2 SKUs, or +2 items in each one of our top 10 accounts, leveraging both our Bayshore portfolio into, excuse me, legacy accounts, and vice versa. There's still a lot of products, even within our legacy business, that have opportunities across our legacy customers for us to grow our actual SKU count.
Combined with the product innovation and working with Lauren and the team there, and all the great work they do at bringing new products into play for us. 3rd is drive our ACV growth into under-penetrated regions, and I would also add under-penetrated channels of business. It's expanding our distribution footprint across channels and geographies.
When I look at fiscal 26, the white space that I see from a channel perspective was really the mass channel. When you think about Walmart, Target, and where the consumer spends a lot of their food dollar today, that we were very, very underrepresented.
In some of the ensuing slides, I'll show you where we've had some success or built some foundation for launching in fiscal 27 to improve in that channel, while also continuing to grow across the broad spectrum of channels, from C-store to the grocery channel to each and every channel that we deal with today. The club channel, incredibly important to us as well. Two big things should stand out on this slide. First of all, and framed really boldly here, is no antibiotics ever chicken, NAE chicken.
This is a strategy, evolution, and change as we continue down the path of being very committed and increasingly committed to Grandma Quality. What would Grandma want to feed her grandkids? And it, certainly, NAE is the gold standard when it comes to chicken. It's incredibly important today as in the increasing health-conscious consumers that we have. People who are concerned about antibiotic resistance, just concerned about being anything that we do, additive versus natural in the food process. This seemed like a, a no-brainer type of decision to be able to go this direction and provide it even for our retailers that have existing business with us, that haven't asked for NAE.
It's an opportunity for us to then explain another step, another reason why our product is differentiated from any potential competition that might be in the market. We already have the best tasting, we already have the most authentic, flame-grilled product out there, we already beat everybody in cuttings, and now we add on another layer of, honestly, protection and authenticity into being, Grandma Quality.
The last one on this slide is major account wins and velocity growth. We have to continue to win accounts and grow our velocity. We have built a tremendous base. When you think about the added shelf space that I'm gonna cover in some slides coming up, relative to Walmart, Target, already talked about the mass channel, but also Food Lion, a major grocery retailer in the Southeast, amongst others. There's still accounts out there. They're getting fewer as we continue to latch into more and more, there's still some big accounts out there that we deserve to be in, and we are going to earn the right to be there in Fiscal 2027. Next slide number 10.
Just one second. Guys, remember I said three things. That is one that you should be writing down on a piece of paper. Like Chris just mentioned, this is a moat. This creates a moat against other players, that are not doing that today. It makes the job easier for Chris as he's selling in differentiator cells. This is a really big deal that, again, think about, we could talk more about, but that is a big differentiator for us. Sorry, Chris. Next slide.
No worries. I'm used to it, Adam. next slide, we're executing our plan, and I put two big, bold statements on here. Everybody's gonna recognize these retailers. two, just incredible retailers, very different approaches to the business, but we've had some great success with.
Costco, number one, I'll go into some detail on the next slide, but amazing things are happening in Costco, and we've obtained our first everyday item status that's been secured in the Northeast for Costco, and it's really where all our business started with them to begin with. I'll walk you through that evolution and as well as why it's so important as we get to the next slide. I also want to call out Walmart. Walmart's another just great example of our strategy in play.
Eight new items launching in the largest retailer in America. I just wanna put it in perspective real quick. It's eight new items against an existing one. This is massive for us, and I'll go through how that came to be. One of the eight has already launched this quarter, and then seven additional items that'll be launching are all branded. I'll go into some detail on that as well. I probably should celebrate the branded part more, but I know I got a slide on it, so I'll talk to that in a moment. We can go ahead and go to the next slide, Adam, slide 11. Customer success and channel diversification, and it's here that I can kind of explain the preceding slide a little bit more detail.
I talked about diversification into different channels and covering a broader geography across the country. It's also very, very important to our strategy to diversify our products and as well as our channels. First of all, our sales mix. The sales mix needs to mirror the U.S. food budget, not too heavy in any one channel, and we wanna be where the consumers are. Growing mass to a more appropriate size, while continuing our grocery retail remaining a very key portion of our mix. Our acquisition of Crown I had no club revenue, did have some grocery revenue, and did have some specialty discounter type of revenue in there as well, that helps us again, broaden. I know I'm playing club down a little bit from a mix standpoint.
That is not to say we're not growing the club business. We'll continue to grow it. We just want everything to be proportional. You've heard some of our Costco success. Sam's continues to be a major player for us, as well as BJ's. We're incredibly well positioned in the club channel. Our Fiscal 2027 strategic goal of twp additional items in top 10 accounts, that is coming off of some major wins that we already have in place, that it's already catapulting us and setting up our 2027. It starts with Walmart. eight new SKUs launching in up to 2,000 stores. In complete transparency, some SKUs will be in close to 2,000, some are more than 2,000. This just has to do with the actual planograms in these individual stores.
Eight new SKUs, seven of those are branded. Target, two SKUs that we'll be launching this year. The first one in the first 750 stores will be in this quarter. We'll be following in just a few months with the second one, and the stores ramp up to, again, approximately 2,000 stores there. Food Lion, five SKUs we launched here in Q4 as we entered, made the corner into Fiscal 2027, and we'll be expanding out to approximately 1,200 stores there in the Southeast. Very excited with that. Costco, I have to dive into it out a little bit.
We've got the little mission accomplished things on there, on here, but achieving e-everyday status has been an evolution over time, and I think the Costco picture really explains our approach and our sales culture at Mama's and how we go forward, not just Costco, but all of our major accounts. If you look back in Fiscal 2023, we were doing about a half a million dollars in sales, one product and in one region only of Costco. If you fast forward a bit to Fiscal 2025, we did $10 million in Costco sales with active rotations across the country.
Followed in Fiscal 2026, the year we just completed, we started the year in Q1 with our first digital MBM, and lo and behold, $10 million we had already met or essentially met what we had done in Fiscal 2025 after one quarter in Fiscal 2026. Continued rotations through the year, but culminated at the end of the year in Q4 with our first print MBM, which is really that is the trophy when you think about in Costco as far as moving volume. That exceeded north of $14 million of business for us in that quarter as well. An exciting year in Costco. What does all that lead up to? That leads up to the announcement here in the beginning of the new year of achieving everyday item status in the northeast region.
Again, where it all started, our expectation will be the domino effect on everyday item status, that's where we are today. That was our immediate win and very exciting to us, and allows us to have this steady state Costco business. I'm gonna take just a second. I really wanna call out my partner in Skip and the operations team. This happened because we delivered, we delivered in very challenging situations. To suddenly do in a quarter, $10 million or $14 million of new business, it's not an easy thing to achieve and do it without a hitch. What I can tell you is from our customer, there were no hitches, that builds trust.
That constant trust building over the years and through an increasing amounts of trust that they put in us, allows us to continue to advance the business, and that's the culture we wanna continue to promote. I'm excited about, if you look over on the right, our new customers across channels in 26, we really cover them all. When you think about C-store, the grocery channel, the mass channel, the discounter channel, was covered in new customers, as well as just a great number of customers that represent large volume for us across the board. That'll take me to the next slide 12. I started to talk about this at the beginning of the customer success slide, but this is our category diversification and branded product growth.
It's as important to diversify our products as it is our channels that we're in. Some great successes to talk about here. We are planning a balanced category mix that is optimal for trim utilization and does give us reduced commodity market exposure. What does that mean, chicken trim? How does that affect us? If you look over on the right, chicken bottoms and trim utilization, usage of our chicken bottoms. Let me stop there real quick. The chicken bottom, I'm sure Adam has explained this 'cause he talks about it to everybody, right?
This is, as we make our beautiful grilled chicken breast, there is a bottom piece that is every bit as great a quality as the chicken breast itself, but it's gonna be in varying sizes and form, and it's not that pretty same size chicken breast that we sell when we flame grill. There needs to be other products made from it. Our use of those bottoms will more than double in Fiscal 2027. The utilization of our shredding capabilities that came with Bayshore is gonna be part of that win, along with our Paninis category. If you haven't seen our Paninis, certainly if you're in the Southeast, make sure you pop into Publix. We've got a new assortment of Paninis in there. These are incredible. They're great to reheat at home.
They're just a phenomenal item. They're growing at a rate of over 80%. The primary ingredient in most of these is chicken trim. Our branded chicken meatball sleeves have received placement in our top-tier customers. I've already referred to Walmart, this is where this gets really big, right? Chicken trim going into the production of a Cheese Stuffed Chicken Meatball is one of the seven branded items that are going across the country in Walmart. Also one of the branded items that's gonna go into Target this year as well. It's one of the five branded additions in Food Lion.
If we think about Publix, one of our great partners and retail partners out there, we've got the panini in there, and as part of the six branded additions that have occurred in Publix as we entered this year. Along with the part of the branded additions in Ingles and Weis, a couple of other great customers of ours, I could go on and on. These are the top branding wins for us, and I think a big note to take home as well is, we're targeting a 100% increase in branded sales in Fiscal 2027. As we are known and the consumer recognizes us across the country, it makes us even more enticing to our customers and to open doors into some of those customers we haven't gotten into yet.
Exciting year ahead of us, built on a lot of, a lot of successes. Let's go to talk about trade and trade promotion investments, real quick. That's the next slide number 13. Our trade investment strategy is, first of all, we don't wanna be a discount item. I wanna emphasize that. You shouldn't be looking for our products to be at sale prices, all of the time or waiting it out because they're on sale so often. We are a premium product, and we're proud of that. We're Grandma Quality. The place for trade promotion has multiple areas. You see it in the leaning in with Costco to get the national recognition and reach this point of everyday status.
Where we're going to spend a lot of our trade this year is focused on new items. You've heard me talk about it through this, throughout the strategy, new SKUs in our top 10 customers, new multiple branded SKUs across the country. Look, the easier part of the sale tends to be the sale itself. Getting the placement, doing all those things, those are where most companies forget. It's the next part and more critical part is getting that customer addicted to our products, getting it in their mouth, getting trial, and the confidence in knowing once that happens, our customers come back over and over, and they're no longer looking for promotion. They're no longer looking for a deep discount because our product is worth every penny and more what it sells for out in our retailers.
An example over to the right, we certainly always do the Publix brand promos. That's really built our name in the Southeast, but the graphic below shows how our business was driven and our case sales were driven following conducting BOGOs with one of our, one of our great retailers. This was on the introduction of our, of our Meals for Ones, and this is the poll that then occurred after the fact, and you see that upward trajectory. Product gets in the consumer's mouth, consumer loves the product. They bought it for a great discount, but they come back, and you know what? I'm going to buy even more, and I'm not paying attention to that discounted price. It's a great way for us to use trade.
We're gonna lean in, very heavily there, in Fiscal 2027. But it will remain a, you know, a single-digit percentage of our sales. Lauren will go into a lot more about our wide arsenal of marketing type of opportunities when she gets to that point. We do support a lot of sampling events as well. We can go to the next one 'cause I wanna talk about people. People are what make all this happen or what grows our business. One thing we talk about a lot on our sales team and in the development of our selling culture is that everything starts with the Grandma Quality products. We wanna be proud of what we're selling.
I'm not the sales guy that you can give me a broken pen, and I'm gonna sell that to you. That's just not how I'm built, and it's not how our team is built. Give us a product that we can be passionate about, that we know, that we feed our own family, and we can speak to that. That's when we can sell product in a, in a big way, and that's where we become the Grandma Quality service, as well as the product itself. I think about it anecdotally, you know, I'm getting older. Adam reminds me that all the time, makes fun of my white hair, but the, I'm a grandparent now. I'm not a grandma, I'm a grandpa, but I would never farm out the relationship with my grandchildren to somebody else.
I have a relationship with my grandchildren so that I understand their wants, their needs, what it is they're looking for in success in their life. I might reach out to, in our case, from a business perspective, we utilize brokers. We utilize brokers as an addition, as a service piece, and we have some great broker relationships, but it doesn't replace the one-on-one relationship. Just like me, as a grandparent, I may hire a tutor, I may hire a coach to help one of my grandkids achieve something in their sport, but I'm not going to hire them to have the relationship. That's how we marry that up from a sales team. It requires top talent acquisitions, people who understand that. We've made four acquisitions in the last 13 or so months.
This allows us increased direct customer contact, and what's near and dear as a former retailer, is the vertical relationships in our strategic accounts. We get connected at the top, at the strategic level. We wanna be there to support and understand our customers' needs and build partnership, and then have those relationships as they funnel down all the way to the individual buyer, which sometimes can be a single category within the deli.
There are buyers in some of our customers, all day managers, deli salads. That's it. We have to have that relationship. You wanna be above that as well to understand how that fits into the total picture. We can go back to what I mentioned earlier, selling a portfolio versus selling individual items. We are expanding our culinary capabilities in the field.
We'll be bringing on a field chef, a great experienced retail-facing chef, who will work to help do direct innovation, directly understand the food needs, and the chef needs, and the development needs that are within each of our retailers. It's gonna be a great asset as we open up the new year as well. Over to the right, you see a picture of our sales team, along with a few of the folks in operations, but that's at a plant. We like the team to understand every aspect of our production, what's going on in the plant, what the plant needs are, and to make sure we're communicating and having a great relationship with our operations team as well. That's a picture of the team.
Don't judge us, but we do follow all QA restrictions and wear the hair nets and all that good stuff when we tour. That's it in a nutshell. As fast as I could go on our Fiscal 2027 sales plan. I think with that, I get to either kick it back to you, Adam, or go ahead and introduce Lauren Sella, our Chief Marketing Officer.
Absolutely. Thank you, Chris.
Everyone, Lauren Sella, I lead marketing for the organization. I'm very excited to be here for our third Investor Day, my third Investor Day as well, and talk to you about our plans for next year. As we think about brand building, we're really focusing on both the consumers and the retailers to drive long-term growth. Can everyone hear me okay on the line?
Yes.
Okay, perfect. From a consumer perspective, our priorities are awareness, connection, and loyalty. We recently fielded a survey to 575 participants on their beliefs about the prepared food category, and one of the things... We learned a lot of great things. One of the things that we learned is, the number one trial, the trial generator is brand I trust, which really supports our increase in marketing investment going forward, and as we've been doing it in the past.
Our storytelling leads into authenticity and what you've heard us refer to as Grandma Quality. We're continuing to build upon our customer relationship management database to really drive our re-engagement with consumers, and we're also activating more earned media to build upon our paid media channels.
From a retailer perspective, we're positioning ourselves as a strategic deli partner, bringing insights and innovation to the retailer to help them with their full meal solution. We're also expanding our presence through trade show participation, advertising, and thought leadership. We're supporting our innovations with a full portfolio of activation, as Chris alluded to, things such as trade marketing, trade promotions, in-store demos, and retail media, which I'll talk about a little bit more.
Just recapping our activation and some of the highlights from last year. From a consumer activation perspective, we added in additional marketing activations last year. We started doing some micro-influencer activations, really to support key in-store activities, such as our Costco MVM or our Publix launch. As well as brand partnerships.
Adam mentioned earlier during our lunch how we did a couple partnerships with another brand in the space, Brooklyn Bred. We also brought in Mike's Hot Honey. Those are things that we're going to be continuing to do. We doubled our email list. We added 8,000 new SMS subscribers, which is a really strong re-engagement platform for us. It's a great own channel for us, a way for us to communicate to consumers as we have new news. To engage them also on D2C activities. We improved our site health to 96%, which I was told is more than best in class. I'm really excited about that. Really strengthening our digital ecosystem.
From a B2B perspective, we optimized our strategy and really focused on prioritizing our trade show presence to the most impactful ones. We generated over 100 new leads, and then also received new inbound retailer interest through B2B advertising, which we started for the first time last year, and we'll be continuing.
Moving over from the portfolio innovation perspective, we launched Mama's Creations branded items into Publix and BJ's, and we expanded Mama Mancini's with our Paninis and Meals for One, increasing both the day parts and the usage occasions for our brand. Finally, from a retail media perspective, we doubled our retail media investment last year. We added four new retailers, and we drove significant ROAS at about $8, I think a little bit over $8.
We see significant performance on the retail media platforms, particularly as we have these Costco rotations. A lot of consumers are purchasing their Costco items on Instacart, so we make sure that we're present on there, both from a search perspective, we also do display advertising, video advertising, and we have good relationships with Instacart.
We're continuing to expand and see different ways that we can build upon that relationship. Chris mentioned, from a R&D innovation approach, we're making sure that our innovation is really supporting margin health, not only top-line expansion. Chris already talked a lot about the chicken trimming, but it is a key priority for us from an innovation perspective. It allows us to have greater control over our yield and our costs.
We affectionately call our chicken bottoms our artisan cut products. They really are... I mean, the folks in the room tried some of the products here, the Costco Cheese Stuffed Chicken Meatballs. They really are premium items that we're excited to bring to consumers. As Chris already mentioned, we're launching multiple new Walmart items that use these artisan cut pieces. This really allows us to innovate across multiple product categories. The ground chicken for meatballs, you know, we have the cheese stuffed chicken, but there are a lot of other ideas in the pipeline. Chris mentioned how we're focusing not only on this year, but 3-5 years out, we're constantly building our flavor bank.
Folks in the room met Chef Minn, he's always building out new product ideas in the areas that we're focusing on. Our Paninis also use the trim, as well as our Meals for One. We're leveraging this innovation across a number of different platforms. We know that these are categories that are growing for retailers and consumers, things like handhelds. Obviously, chicken is a very strong and growing protein, it's exciting to be able to bring a lot of innovation in this space that benefits consumers, benefits the retailers, and also helps us as well. Finally, as we look at Fiscal 2027, our goal is to increase our marketing investments by 50%.
Really, as we look at a new item launch, we look at it through three phases across the full shopper journey. First is sticking in their mind, building awareness. From the retailer perspective, we're attending trade shows, we're submitting ourselves for awards. I can't tell you what, there may be an award at sometime in the future that gets announced. It's on embargo now. We're also, as I mentioned, we started doing B2B advertising, which has proven very successful for us. There are a couple instances where retailers have seen our ads and have reached out proactively to our sales team. It's creating FOMO, that's great. You know, ensuring that we have the right selling tools.
Again, folks in the room, you see our brochure, which we update on an annual basis. From a consumer perspective, I look at it, you know, A, as they're, as they're living their life, so things like influencer partnerships, digital social ads, earned media, which is something I mentioned earlier, that we're re-engaging in. We are going to be doing more PR this year than we have in the past year. Product placement, as well, so that's something that's always fun. We work with an agency that you can find us in different game shows or movies or TV shows, so just a way to drive awareness of our brand. When the consumer is in the shopper mindset, the retail media, content and search, and Instacart, as I mentioned.
Once we're in store, ensuring that we're getting in their cart through all of the trade promotion that Chris and his team is doing. From a marketing perspective, we're partnering up with the sales team, ensuring that, you know, we know when we are on ad and supplementing that we have the right demos. Demos are a big part of our Costco relationship. In-store displays, that's something we're working on enhancing, and testing in the, in the near future, even our own displays. Point of sale, Adam's parents are always giving him also the circulars from Publix, every week, every time we appear. We always know we did our job when we see the circular on his desk.
Finally, after they purchase, driving that advocacy and customer retention, one of the things I, we started in the last year, 1.5 years, is putting QR codes on some of our packs. These are customized QR codes, and when you scan the pack, it will take you to a specific landing page. That allows us to do things like on our Costco packs, we offer consumers the opportunity to get a coupon for repeat purchase, to drive second purchase of the item. As well as our email marketing. I mentioned that we doubled our list in the last year. It's something that we started the SMS, which allows us also to geo-target. The SMS really came out of some digital advertising that we did for in the Publix location.
When we have a promotion at Publix, we'll send an SMS, or when we have a new rotation with Costco, we can send people text messages and emails. Really driving that loyalty. That's really our full portfolio. Partner, obviously, with Chris and his team, and Skip from an operations team, to ensure that we're always working effectively and we're all connected on all elements of this, because all of us have to be part of this success to make it work. Thank you. Now turning it over to Skip.
Yep. Hey, thanks, everybody. Skip Tappan, COO for Mama's Creations. I was doing a head count from the back of the room, and it doesn't seem like we lost anybody on the tour, so that's a good sign. You all remember hearing Adam share over the last couple of years, one plant, two locations. As of September 2nd of last year, we're one plant, three locations, and maybe in another few months, and a few months after that number will continue to grow.
Some of this might be a little bit of a review for Farmingdale, because in the summer of 2024 is when there was a large capital expansion in the Farmingdale facility, just a couple of months before I joined, and basically took the existing facility and reconfigured it and added about 10,000 sq ft of usable space. That was the addition of grills and our spiral blast freezer, nitrogen blast freezer, and additional trimming capability and tumbling. This was just a real huge unlock for increasing capacity in a fixed footprint of the operation. One of the other things that started last year and has really solidified this year is the use of contracts for our commodities and our proteins. More contracted pricing, both for beef and our chicken.
In this particular case, with the addition of Bayshore, we were able to look at our chicken purchases as one company instead of two different separate organizations, and really put a much higher percentage into contracted pricing for our chicken, to not only be able to have better visibility into what our commodities were gonna be, but also for better cost control.
The trimming and tumbling, which you all have heard, some of you have heard before, is one of the really the biggest unlocks for us. The more that we can trim chicken ourselves and tumble it and then marinate ourselves, that's one of the biggest gross margin unlocks that we have. We're gonna more than double to triple what we have done in prior years with the addition of Bayshore, when we look at everything collectively.
it really is the slides that you saw from Chris earlier, where he talked about the artisan cut chicken, not chicken bottoms, but artisan cut chicken, as Lauren said.
We're getting there.
I know. I actually came up with artisan cut. It took a year for it to stick. That's good. Anyway, that is really the big unlock, because when we trim the chicken and we cut the perfect portion breast out of it, the artisan cut piece, if we don't use it, then obviously it's just a waste. The more we transform that into strips or meatballs or shredded chicken or diced chicken, then we have this better balance of portion cut chicken, as well as the remainder chicken that we use in our other items. The fact that we have a sales plan linked to the marketing plan, linked to our purchasing plan, linked to our operating plan, really makes this a much better balance and why we can able to fully realize the gains that come from that.
All three plants, I'm gonna mention this one on this one, but all three plants, have a slightly different shift schedule, but none of them are running 24/7 yet. On one of the tours, I mentioned the difference of staffed capacity and bolted-down capacity. You all have heard Adam share that before. If the equipment is on the ground, it's bolted down. If it's not running, then it's not staffed. If we think about where we're going to try to get better asset utilization, it is really making sure that when we have assets, they're running, we're using, they're running efficiently. We have some room in our schedules during the week as well as weekends, to be able to continue to increase our throughput and our capacity through just our bolted-down capacity.
That doesn't mean that we're not gonna focus on efficiency improvement. It doesn't mean that we're not gonna also have some capital purchases in the future, we really want to sweat our assets to get the best return on invested capital. In the other facilities, you'll see this too, partnering with Bayshore. When we added Bayshore, there was multiple benefits that came from that, aside from the customers, the equipment capabilities, the people. The fact that we truly can operate as one plant in three locations means that we started within the first month-... of moving some items into Bayshore or out of East Rutherford here, just to help us prepare for that Costco MVM build.
The fact that we had the right integration process just really made it much easier for us to be able to do that, and we're now gonna add more and more customers to the Bayshore business from our legacy business as well. The one thing that is also, that Farmingdale has piloted, you know, some of the folks there have been amazing operators, but they've not gotten into as much of the data analytics. In the last year or so, this team has actually taught themselves, in a lot of cases, how to do much deeper data analytics, and have gotten so good at that it's actually piloting some of this work and role modeling it with our other sites.
We really are operating much more seamlessly than we have in the past, and it's great that the Farmingdale facility has been able to make such a transformation, sort of leading the way for the others. East Rutherford, which you all just went through, you know, there's a 19,000 sq ft warehouse attached to the side of it. Both tour groups got to hear the fact that we're partnering with an industrial engineering firm, that is not only looking at the physical footprint and the physical space, but the way product flows throughout the facility. Again, we're trying to make sure that we're as efficient as we can be before spending any capital, to ensure we're getting everything out of our assets.
We use that space, we'll use that space for extra refrigeration and freezing, for extra production manufacturing, material flow, to really unlock what doubling the size of this facility will actually be able to provide us. You saw some of the examples of prior investments in technology, with the MAP technology, modified atmosphere packaging, we have more on the way. One of the things that has also become obvious with the acquisition of the Bayshore business, which is primarily refrigerated...
I'll talk to the build to stock model in a second, which we did on the floor, but as much as we've used frozen as our ability to be able to build to stock, now we need to be focusing even more on greater shelf life on fresh items, so we can still maintain that build to stock model, but on refrigerated items, and not just have it be frozen. Same examples of shift schedule. Yes, they're running five days a week, sometimes 6, 2 to 2.5 shifts, but we have schedule optimization in this facility that will also allow us to get more out of the existing assets. The one thing that East Rutherford is doing also for us, as our pilot, you all heard about the 3PL facility that we're using 30 minutes from here.
We are limit to the size of refrigerated and frozen storage we can have on site, but we don't want that to be a constraint to our growth. We have turned to, starting last June, we turned to this 3PL facility, Lineage, that has been a great partner with us for our first really true 3PL experience. We see that that type of engagement with outside third-party partners, as something that will help us continue to grow when we have constraints on our existing footprint. Bayshore. I think you'll see a video right after this. Since we all couldn't be in Bayshore, you'll see a couple of minute video about that. This facility is double the size and square footage of our Farmingdale and our legacy East Rutherford facility.
It'll be about the same after we build out this space, but it is a great facility. There was a large capital investment into the facility prior to our acquisition, and we'll talk about integration here in a minute. One of the things that they have is that our Farmingdale facility can only trim so much chicken from a physical space. The size of the Bayshore facility is more than double that. When we actually show the amount of chicken that we're going to trim in this next year, two-thirds of that is gonna be done to the Bayshore facility, and two-thirds will be consumed at Farmingdale and over here at East Rutherford.
Again, being able to really, truly operate as one plant with three locations, it's just really, it's going into all aspects of it, from our raw and packed material purchasing, to our processing, and to our finished goods. I think the other thing is that on the last statement, efficiently onboarding as a part of one plant, three location strategy. As I mentioned, in the first month, we were moving items between our plants within the first month of September. We did a couple of more items in October, November, and now when we work with Chris's team and looking at what the future forecast is for this year next, we want Chris to be able to sell with unconstrained demand so that the production operations is not limiting what they do.
That requires his crystal ball to be a little more clear, for us to be able to develop and have improved throughput and capability that hasn't existed in the past, that we're really leveraging this integration to help with. Okay. Game time. I've not seen this video, I'm hoping to use some good AI to spruce me up a little bit. Okay, here goes nothing.
Welcome to Bayshore, New York. I'm Skip Tappan, CEO for Mama's Creations. I'm excited to show you our latest acquisition, Crownwood Foods. Follow me, I'll take you through the plant and see what happens here day to day.
While you're only seeing one location today here at Bayshore adds tremendous operational capacity to our existing network. We have a saying that says, "One plant, three locations," you're getting to see a glimpse inside one of them today. Bayshore is a state-of-the-art, SQF certified food manufacturing facility focused on fully cooked, ready-to-eat, wide range of cuisines.
Food safety is foundational here at Bayshore, and this discipline is built into our everyday work processes. From an operational perspective, this facility has multiple cooking and packaging solutions. That makes it a tremendous asset to our broader network. What really makes a difference here is the team. There's deep experience, strong leadership, and a true sense of ownership. At the end of the day, this is about delivering high quality, ready-to-eat food solutions that our partners can rely on. We're super proud of what's been built here. Thank you for touring the Bayshore facility.
We just wanted to try to give you a glimpse, since you couldn't be there, as to what the Bayshore facility is like. It really is a great facility. It has a little more elbow room than what we have here at East Rutherford, but again, that's one of the reasons why we grabbed the attached space to the building, so we can really spread out and operate more efficiently. To really talk about the acquisition and integration on this, and I'll highlight on this top right slide here, or we'll go to the slide in a minute. I think most of you are familiar with what the deal overview was for when it got announced and what the acquisition cost was. The facility is 42,000 sq ft. Revenue is $56 million, and Chris, of course, will make it go higher than that.
We added 200 employees, roughly, to the team, and it's only 10 miles from Farmingdale. Couple of things that I wanna highlight on there. Number one, Adam has shared this before, but when we acquired the business, we acquired great talent and great people. Recently, just a couple of weeks ago, we announced to the company 12 or more, 12 - 15 different promotions and leadership changes that occurred across all three locations. This is the first time in my career ever, that we've had this amount of a percentage of leadership move into new roles at the same time, where we have a critical mass really starting out the journey together. They're almost like their own sort of cohort.
We had individual one-on-ones with everyone, but we've moved to an enterprise level, sort of, way we do HR, procurement, planning, finance, obviously, maintenance, and it's really looking at it as a company instead of individual locations. Not only did the talent that we acquired with Bayshore unlock or provide... you know, gave us the ability to help unlock some of that enterprise-level capability, we had folks that are in existing businesses that were chomping at the bit and raising their hand and say, "I wanna do more as well." It's a great opportunity for us. It was a really big celebration moment for us as a company. Having Bayshore and Farmingdale so close together also have allowed us to have single point of leadership that could be over multiple locations, people flowing to the work, technical resources, hourly folks.
If we have overtime needs or last-minute demands, we can flow to the work. That proximity has really helped. One of the things we did early on out of the gate was integrating 100% of the Bayshore suppliers into the Mama's network. We sort of got rid of the middleman to be able to operate more efficiently. Next step has been, and we're in process now, of using the scale of the two sites, to be able to find the best combination of suppliers that can service all three locations instead of having, you know, individual ones. The NetSuite, you heard about that earlier, but we're converting over to NetSuite to be on one single ERP system by the middle part of this year. I already mentioned the organizational changes.
The other thing is that the gross margin journey that we're on in Bayshore, we have a, we have a legacy glide path that we've delivered in East Rutherford and Farmingdale, and we have increased expectations for this year. Over the balance of this year, we will bring Bayshore into the same sort of gross margin performance as the rest of the business. The revenue strategy, Chris talked a little bit about this earlier, but we are, you know, like the rest of our legacy business, we're looking at exiting lower margin business, in this case, our street business, and replacing that with higher margin branded growth and using that facility's capabilities to help support that. They're also doing...
Chris's team is also doing cross-selling between the Mama's brand and customers, and the Crown I brand and customers. We got into some customers with the Crown I business that were not part of the Mama's base and vice versa. Now we're being able to do that cross-selling. The last thing here was around the Crown I integration playbook. This is really using our M&A playbook and using the Crown I integration to help us inform what the next acquisition will look like, things that we missed, and how we make improvements on that. On the top right of that slide, really, and I highlighted this when we were on the tour. Again, we have methodology and assessments that would say that we could get up to 50% of increased capacity of our existing network without spending capital.
That is through schedule optimization, that is through doing good old-fashioned industrial engineering, optimization work. P rocess optimization, reconfiguring how our lines are configured, and if we put some modest capital up to 100%. When we think about our growth and you do the math, 20% year-on-year, plus acquisitions, this has us going out several years, still being able to absorb that organic growth and acquisition.
Just to, you know, again, remember, I tell you three things. First one, you're gonna hear this at least 10 more times. First one, obviously, NAE, huge differentiator for us. two, hopefully, you guys were a little happy with Chris's modest wins at Costco and Walmart. This would be my 3rd one. This is huge. The amount of work and Skip's built his team, Shane, Carlos, and others, that are helping out every day on process improvement.
I've given you guys some examples that you say, 'Adam, this can't be true. You're showing me AI pictures'. No, there really is this much opportunity. The fact that Chris that Skip is seeing that with his team and going against that would be number three to me, pretty big on. We could expand just fine with three facilities. Great. Cool. Thank you.
Hey, everybody. I'm Anthony Gruber. I'm the CFO of Mama's. I've been here for about three years. I think about two years, two weeks after Adam joined, I joined the organization as well, and it's been a pretty nice glide path from there. We've been able to accomplish a lot in a short time. We have three locations now, which is awesome. One manufacturing facility. I'd just like to take you through the targets that we have for the upcoming Fiscal 2027. On the top line, we're looking at double-digit growth. As Adam said, the area of the deli prepared food area is growing about 5%. Right now, we're pretty far above that. It's quite nice. We're gonna continue. We do anticipate growing that sales line.
The gross profit, we've been growing that and having it grow, kind of, quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year. We'd like to get into the mid to high twenties, our lookouts. Some of the ways we're gonna do that, and some of the ways that Skip talked about was by trimming. Trimming more, using those artisan cuts, Skip's word, I do believe, from a year ago, and putting those into some of our other products. That trimming unlocks a lot of efficiency for us, a lot of cost that we don't have to waste on buying trimmed product that's already been tumbled for us.
We get it in-house, and we're able to trim and use that product on some of the things that we had for lunch today, which were like the Cheese Stuffed Chicken Meatballs, which are one of my favorites, I must say, and one of my children's favorites as well. You know, commodity costs, we talked about some of the contracts that we have in place, we're trying to stabilize our costs across the costs across the year.
We can see some headwinds from time to time in different commodities, we also worked with different commodities. When we started the organization, the biggest commodity and probably only commodity that we really looked at was beef. We're now on to chicken, we're on to vegetables and other things as well. That kind of controls the costs.
And then the one manufacturing facility, three different locations as well. We truly look at all three locations, Bayshore, Farmingdale, East Rutherford, as interchangeable, and we can move production from one to the other, depending where we're more efficient. If we have capacity constraints in one, we can move it over to another, and we can use machinery that may be offline or may be more efficient in making the product.
So we're confident that we're going to be able to meet those gross profit or gross margin percentage. Operating expenses, G&A. Marketing spend, we're looking at increasing it about 50%, and that's gonna be balanced with what type of margin that we're pulling in. If we see the margin is not coming in where we'd like it to be, we're not gonna spend as much on marketing.
Same thing, which you don't necessarily see on this slide, but we have gross sales, and to get to net sales, we spend dollars on promos. We may look at that promo and marketing in kind of the same light. If we don't have the dollars to boost that margin and bring it to where we want, basically, our levers are to pull back on the promo or the marketing.
If those margins start to come in higher than where we're anticipating, we can also use those levers and start to do a little bit more promo, a little bit more marketing, which will then just facilitate more sales and more brand awareness as we go through the year. Investing in the build-out and continuing investment in the build-out of the middle management.
I think Adam has talked about kind of the team that we have built at the top and the leadership team. Very proud of everybody that's come into the organization, and we feel pretty confident in the group leading the organization. This is to round out that next layer of management and make sure that throughout, we're kind of picking up the little areas that we can make a difference in, either in margins, in bringing in the right people to get us further along the line, different thought processes.... On the OpEx side, we're targeting about 20% of sales, and that's without the marketing spend. That's all goes in line with building the management capacities at the middle management level.
Building that world-class team, not at just the top level, but it's starting to trickle down. Skip was able to speak, and he talked about the promotions we were able to do internally. Those are not just promotions for the sake of promoting people. It's people's wants to get up to that next level and really putting in the level of work that showed us that they're able to get to that next level and make the company very efficient. Other income interest, you know, we're gonna keep paying down the debt that we have. We have very small amount of debt. The purchase of Bayshore, we were able to do. We had the line in the bank right behind us the whole time. They offered more money to us than we even wanted to take.
What we were able to do is do a PIPE at that point in time, use those dollars and pay all our debt off. We wound up being in a better cash position and in a better debt position after buying Bayshore than beforehand. Now we have a whole new facility and a whole another round of sales, and a customer base that came with it that we had not tapped into in the past, which is, three wins, I think I mentioned there. It was a pretty good acquisition. Very happy about that. On the net income side, going from the low single digits to kind of the mid single digit range, as a percentage of revenue.
Basically, looking at the levers that we have to control our marketing, our expenses, our promo, and then becoming more efficient in the manufacturing arena. We've made a lot of headway there. We've become more efficient, there are always a lot of other opportunities ahead of us. We see that year in and year out. They get smaller over time, they're still every time we acquire another organization, we find another bunch of items that we can capitalize on, turn that into dollars, make it more efficient, grow our gross margin, grow the bottom line. On the adjusted EBITDA side, going from kind of get into the mid-teens vicinity and keep that going on the way forward as well. You know, we'll be investing in the organization. We do anticipate, we always look at M&A opportunities.
They come through. I could hear Adam speaking about them in the office next to me all the time. I always ask him to get a lower price. I bang on the wall a little. "So sorry, you got to take another $1 million off of that price." We'll get that company for a good level. We were able to really grow the organization, I think, in a really beneficial way, by the Bayshore acquisition this year of Crown I. Very proud of what we've done this year. Thank you, everybody, for making it out here, especially during the snowstorm. Yes, Adam's three for three. I think next year, I may bet the other way. I don't know, 3 x you're out. I don't know.
Off to Adam for some closing remarks.
Thanks, Anthony. Super quick because I wanna do Q&A, you know, look, again, I wanna bore you. Our M&A strategy hasn't changed since the first day I started communicating it to you. You know, we have this one-stop shop. Again, we tell you what we're gonna do, and we just do what we say. Acquisitions, as we get bigger, obviously, the acquisitions will get bigger. We've done a number, you know, even in my past life, a number of acquisitions, and I find, ironically, the smaller the acquisition, the harder it is to integrate. We'll grow with it. Our deli strategy, our M&A strategy in the deli space with existing manufacturing.
The third one, actually, you know, Chris and I spoke after he sent me a love note after the storm: "Hey, Adam, you get off your butt and find me something not on the East Coast." I'm working on that. Yeah. Look, key things to measure success. Again, and again, I'm not even gonna apologize. I hope this happens. I hope you guys are just getting so bored because I'm just saying the same thing over and over and over again. The same metrics that we've been tracking this whole time, what gets measured, gets improved, right?
All the work that Chris is doing around increasing AIC, getting to new customers, all the work that Lauren's doing on increasing the ROAS, the return on advertising spend, at these players, the work Skip is doing to drive more and more efficiency throughout the plant network, all the work Anthony's doing to manage SG&A so well, these are all the things that we're putting together. With that, I will open up for questions. You get extra credit for not asking me and putting, you know, Lauren or Chris or, you know, Skip on the spot, but Mitch?
You're rolling out a new item on D to potential store customers. When the customers are evaluating, are you giving them any data to help them evaluate, or are they just doing a taste test and deciding to buy it in a number of locations where they want to... How does that kind of work?
Yeah. I'm going to tag team. First, the question is, and I'm going to have Chris answer it. The question is: When we go to a new customer, How do we sell that in, right? Do we share information about-... the product maybe at another customer, or why, you know, Lauren, why we did consumer insights work to say that this flavor is better. Chris, how do you sell, Chris, is the this is the question that Mitch is asking?
If I tell you that I have to kill you. I mean, it's like, this top secret stuff. No, it's multifaceted, and it, sometimes it's a little bit situational, depending on what you're hearing or what I'm hearing or listening to the customer express. In part, it would be it comes from the data we have from existing customers, so we know...
We're never gonna share proprietary type data, but we can rank products, we can rank flavors. But it's also tapping into things like, you know, the Food Marketing Institute or IDDBA, and the other data that we pull, about what is the consumers looking for and where the trends are going. We'll, we'll utilize that as well, if that's the tone of the conversation.
Some of it's a little bit of judging what the customer needs to hear and how our product is going to solve maybe their angst a little bit. What I'm seeing a lot out there is, you know, people being charged with moving forward their fresh business, moving forward prepared foods, and that hasn't necessarily been where their history has existed in their role. They're just looking for somebody to come and say, "Hey, how do I get this done? What should I be looking for?" That's where we're reaching back into a lot of industry data as well.
Cool. Sir?
Sort of related to the question on selling, the idea of portfolio selling versus single item is intuitive, but it sort of seems obvious, like, why weren't we doing that previously? Like, what changes in the sales motion make that happen?
Yep. The question for Chris... Well done, guys. You're doing really well. You're two for two. The question was, you know, of course, everyone's gonna say they wanna sell in a portfolio, not a single item. Why is that winning, I guess, is your question?
Why wasn't that happening?
Why wasn't that happening before?
Yeah.
Well, I think in part... Yeah, it's a great question, actually. In part, that is because we didn't quite have the breadth of items. When you think about what we did in Fiscal 2026 and what we're continuing to do now, is develop out these items to where it is more a hand-in-hand portfolio. If I'm selling into a customer and they're saying, "Hey, I really love..." You know, the star of the show is always our chicken breast, or our beef meatball. I mean, that's always just the star of the show. It's like, "Hey, you need a category play here." If you bring in shredded chicken. You know, let us sample the shredded chicken to you, let us sample chicken strips to you.
Oh, by the way, we've got this stuffed chicken meatball, and you can start to build out a total solution for your customer. That's always helpful in the selling process, and it's yielded some good results for us. Probably the biggest reason we didn't sell more portfolio-wise in the past was we had a more limited portfolio in a lot of ways than what we have to work with today.
I would actually add, I think what Chris said is just really powerful, and it's even bigger than the sales question you asked. Our success begets success. Chris is absolutely right. We didn't have anything else to offer except a meatball. I can either give you a meatball or I got nothing for you. The same is the case, you know, I always have positive intent for before this leadership team came.
I would have loved to have bought a shredder. I couldn't afford it. I wasn't making any money, right? Before we all got here. Now I actually have equipment I could buy. "Hey, why didn't you hire, you know, Alberto, a head of procurement? Why?" I didn't have any money. Right? Before we all got here, we had no money.
I'm sure the team might have thought to think procurement's kind of important in this industry. What's really great, and I truly believe this, is, the better we do, the faster we're getting even better. It truly is, the acceleration, right? Did you ever seen, again, my son would be proud of me, acceleration versus velocity. Our acceleration is going up. The speed at which we're growing is actually going up because we have the products, we have the customers, we have the equipment, we have the people, and that's what's so exciting and why I truly believe you ain't seen nothing yet.
Hey, Adam, there's another, you know, aspect I wanna piggyback on. 100%, 100% right there. It's also. When I was referring to Grandma Quality Service, in the past, we had a very tiny sales team, everything was done through brokers. Again, I'm not negating brokers in any way. Those are very important relationships. Oftentimes in that selling environment, there's a cutting on chicken breasts at Albertsons, and I'm just kinda making that up. The broker says, "Hey, send me your sample." Versus when you have the developing relationships that we have as well, you get the understanding of what are you looking for in totality? What is your strategic need?
Now I can come to you with five or six items and present, and it's not about a cutting where I'm just sitting against a competitor. We have a lot more meetings now that are, there's no competitor in the room. There's nobody cutting against us. We're having a strategic conversation. Then we're being invited to, yeah, share all 5 of these items. Let's try them. Let's go forward. I think that's a big differentiator as well.
Yes, sir.
You have a big budget increase this year, 50%.
Right.
With the mantra of, you know, that which is measurement can be improved, like what are some specific measurements in the marketing spending increase that people can look to see that it's working? Whether you gave the examples of Brooklyn Bred, or Mama Mancini's, or doubling the retail and media spending, engaging with retailers. Like, what are some metrics with that marketing increase that we can gauge out to?
Yeah. The question is how we're going to measure the increase in marketing, the effectiveness of the increase in the marketing spend. We're not at a level, and I think I said this in the first investor conference, where we're not quite at the level to do full multivariate marketing model mixes. Where we do measure things such as our retail media, we see the return on ad spend there.
There are other ways that we can measure the effectiveness, things like looking at our engagement rate on our digital media, for example, things like building our own channels. Last year, we doubled our email database, and we added 8,000 new SMS subscribers. That's a powerful tool for us because we own that. We own that information. We can have one-on-one conversations with those consumers.
Those are ways, you know, things, other indicators like the health of our e-commerce business, which is a function of other we do advertising on that as well, on social media, as well as email marketing. Open rates also are, we are always looking at our website. I mentioned the site health was improved significantly and in the top tier. There are a number of different metrics that we look at quantitatively, like the kind of.
Do the checklist that you've gone through.
Chris, the question is, what is the opportunity at Costco?
Do I get to put a ceiling on it? No, the opportunity is really probably in the nearer term, everyday status in every region of the country. You know, that's kinda how we approached, you know, getting rotations in. That's how we approached, you know, getting, you know, full acceptance across all the regions so that we could do something like an MBM, and now it's that progress to get everyday status.
How many items? That could eventually be... You know, Costco runs a limited assortment, so you're probably never looking at, you know, double-digit number of SKUs in there, despite what Adam tells me, right? You know, and says, "Hey, Chris, you got to do," but, I always do my best. It's get everyday status, and then what's the next item you need to get everyday status in?
Yeah.
Your growth expectation for the year, double-digit revenue growth, can you be more specific at all? Is that organic growth?
What is Jerome telling me the inflation rate is gonna be?
You're still lacking the period with that growth.
Right. Again, I wanna continue to tell you that we will beat the market. We'll grow market share. I would tell you that double-digit growth is organic growth. I don't count. This is really good. Really good on the record, right? I don't want to guarantee you. I do not put pressure on us to acquire a business every single year at all costs. I'm gonna pay 50 x revenue because I told you guys I'm gonna buy a company. I've told you guys that we build a plan. The plan has zero inorganic growth in it. I tell the board I have no corporate goals of acquiring a business every year.
Personally, I know from my experience across multiple companies that I could digest an acquisition every year, and that tells me that once Skip gives me the okay, I start looking. That inorganic growth has nothing to do with the algorithm of I'm gonna get you double-digit growth. I will never get you double-digit growth because I acquire another business. Is that helpful?
Yeah.
When do you get to a point where you start to go after the independent channel more? What's the path to actually get through the independent?
Yeah, Chris, the question is there opportunity in the independent grocery channel?
Yes, there's opportunity. The simple question is there's opportunity in every channel, but the volume and the distribution component in the independent grocery channel gets a little bit more challenging. It tends to get a bit more expensive to distribute into independent grocers. For instance, they don't have their own warehouse facility, or you're going through a third party. We have business in that channel today, and it does well for us. You know, I would just say there's no channel that I don't have on my list. I wouldn't put it as a top priority on my list today.
You talked about volume growth outpacing sales. That's great 'cause volume growth is hard to come by, you know, in the broader category. Just curious if you could maybe provide some of the pricing outlook that you have, you know, for the category, 'cause that does obviously imply some central pricing pressure when the volumes are outperforming the sales growth.
Yep. The question is, This will be for Chris, and I could always add it, is what's our thinking on pricing for the year ahead? Yeah, Chris?
Yeah, you know, right now we wanna continue to show a great value for our customers. I would see pricing relatively in line with inflation through the year. Really, what we see in the gains that Skip and the operation team brings from an efficiency standpoint in improving our COGS, our better position and stability that we have, you know, relative to the amount of our chicken that we have under contract, all helps us not have to get, you know, kind of crazy and get our growth simply out of inflation. I always like getting growth, a balanced approach in everything we do, so there's got to be that balance between volume and inflation along the way. We got some good inflationary growth last year.
I would anticipate it to be, you know, nothing that's gonna outpace, you know, what we expect from a food inflation standpoint.
I'll just add a couple of the dirtier things to it. One, you know, reading recently, you know, the markets, not that they know anything, but everyone's thinking that food inflation is going to be actually lower this year than where it's been in the past two years. It's certainly going to be above zero, but it's certainly going to slow versus where it's been. That's just one piece of information. Second, 1 is, I like, and again, also, Chris gets to disagree with anything I'm about to say, so he's the boss. two, I like where our margins are roughly now. The good news is we're in the right place. When we all started three years ago, nothing was in the right place.
That leads me to point three, which is, if we will keep up with inflation, like Chris said, we're in a good place. We don't have to push any harder. Skip has done an amazing job with managing our chicken. Commodities are the biggest driver of why we would need to price. Chicken, we're in a very good place from a contracting standpoint. I think chicken is, you know, relatively stable. It's gonna go up in the summer like it does for the past 250 years of this country, then go down, but I think we're in a good place. Beef, as you all know, because it's on the front page of every paper in America, is a little bit silly right now, right?
I do not believe that's going to come down anytime soon, but Chris and his team are working to make sure that we're at the right price. If you told me, roughly, if you told me that there's no inflation whatsoever on any of our products this year, I would tell you there's really no need for us to price this year. We're just gonna keep up. We feel we are proud of our products. I think we do good work. I know we're all very frugal, and, you know, obviously, if inflation goes up, you see it right along with us.
No, Walmart.
Oh, yeah.
The products at Walmart, is that across the country or is that?
Chris, the question, I'm gonna combine it with the question Ryan has, because I'm telepathic. The question was, the new items, how many stores is that in Walmart? The second question from Ryan, not from Adam, is, "Chris, why are you no good at your job, and why are you not in all 5,000 stores immediately?" Obviously, I added a little artistic color to that, but the question is: Could we, you know, is 2,000 the cap, or could we be in 5,000 stores? Was the question from Ryan.
Yeah, I don't know what the cap would be. We certainly could be in more than 2,000. Again, I would use that approximate number. I think in total, we're in 2,150-ish stores, today. It goes up, constantly, but there's a mix of items in there. On average, it'll be 2,000 stores. It tends to be the stores that have the best opportunity from a Walmart perspective, from a fresh perspective, and from deli. If you think about their stores, a Super Walmarts versus regular Walmarts, that type of thing, that dictates it. Yeah, there's potential for more stores. There's more stores that have deli operations and food.
Barbara?
Yeah, Lauren, on marketing, you said that, the number one driver of trial is a brand I trust. To trust the brand, you have to know the brand. I just would like to hear a little bit more about what really works to get customer trial in different markets, or rather, in different channels. Related to that, you do some private brands that people do trust.
Mm-hmm.
Just how are you thinking about that part as well?
Sure. The question is, how do we build awareness and trust with our products, and then how do we approach private brands? A couple of things. I mean, we use different marketing levers depending on who the customer is, what the items are. For example, with Costco, one of their big vehicles in general, you know, for the retailer, is in-store demos, sampling, and we participate heavily in that as well.
That's an area where we're building that awareness with the consumer, and it's clearly working for us, as Chris mentioned, in terms of the growth that we've seen in Costco, especially as we go into new regions. Getting that, getting those samples out to consumers really drives, builds that familiarity and the trust.
You know, with other, with other things like the retail media, again, what we're doing is we're making sure that we show up when people are searching for any relevant keywords. They're seeing the familiar, you know, seeing our brand and becoming familiar with it, adding it to their cart, hopefully, through the different platforms. From a private brand perspective, we are doing things with private brands.
We are doing advertising to support that because ultimately, you know, it is our product. We still do search marketing, on certain private brands, where it makes sense. Think of like, you know, where we have product at Walmart. It also depends a lot on the retailer and where they are in their, in their, marketing, you know, digital ecosystem.
There are some retailers that are more sophisticated than others. A Walmart, for example, very sophisticated in terms of what they're doing to reach consumers and shoppers, and so we're able to work in that space very easily versus there's some other customers that aren't. We advertise across multiple search retailer media platforms, either their own or with the big retailers or other third-party platforms that have a number of different grocers. We actually advertise. I don't know the total number, but we're across any customer that is on a platform, we're doing some sort of campaign with them.
Coming out of the T&L Creative Salads integration, you had an M&A playbook, and then now apply that to Crown I, and you have a new playbook. Can you just kind of talk about the evolution you have in that M&A playbook, whether it be integration, operations or finance, or just kind of what you've learned from acquisition to acquisition?
Yeah. The question is, kind of what's the evolution of the M&A playbook? The first is, you know, I borrowed with pride the work I did for five years before at Mondelēz. I promise you, I brought, you know, my M&A playbook with me. You know, there was great learnings. You know, actually, we're doing it right now with the NetSuite integration. When we did NetSuite, ERP is part of that M&A playbook. It's a very thick playbook. I'll tell you, we didn't do it right, and that's my fault. The first time with Creative Salads, we did not, you know, for one instance, you know, train the trainer enough.
We pushed the ERP onto Creative Salads, and that didn't work, and it caused a lot of. It made it more difficult than it was. Actually, I'll combine the two. The other thing is, we didn't have, you know, an expert, you know, an ERP expert to running the implementation. You know, we have now John leads all of our IT efforts. He's done ERP implementations about, you know, 850,000 times. We have, and Anthony and I, and Skip and others, meet with John every week now. There's Gantt charts upon Gantt charts around all the training that we're doing. Actually, on the steering committee are the folks from Crown, right? We're not doing it to them, we're doing it with them.
That's one example, you know, there's not enough time in the day to talk about all the things that I failed at, but every time we do it gets better and better. You know, I could give you ten of those. Just one more question, another question from Ryan, for Chris. Chris is the winner today. How much white space remains with these top ten customers?
How much white space with the top 10 customers? It would be almost impossible for me to put a number on that. I would say, when you think about Walmart and eight items in there, that's a lot of items for them to allow to be in by one supplier in that deli space. You know, I would say it's more about growing the velocity of the items that we put in there, making sure we get a good rotation of new items, things like that in there. When you get to some of our customers, we may only have three or two items in, that white space gets very, very large. I'll give you an example.
We've got a customer who will be a top 10 customer, that, you know, the very next meeting I have is with them. They have five items branded today, and they want to expand that and by a significant number, and we've just gotten started. When you start looking at that, you go, you know, I don't know. It could be 2x white space with our top 10. It could be 5x in some cases, and others might be, you know, approaching a little bit of maturity when you think about just SKU count. I know that's not a good answer, and also, it's like, all you guys in your roles, right? You wanna hear a definitive number. It's still a lot of white space.
That's what I could, certainly put out there.
Chris, tell me if this makes sense to you. You know, just a couple of metrics, right? That are facts. We know the category, prepared foods, is a $40 billion category, right?
Mm-hmm.
Even at $1 billion, what is that? 2.5%. A two share. I mean, we used to have a 50 share in the cookie space. Like, a two share is nothing, right? That's, you know, $40 billion. Billion is only a two share. You know, where Chris used to work, multi-billion, it's not unheard of. There are multi-billion players, right? Boar's Head, Reser's, these are multi-billion dollar players. Again, I agree with Chris. I know everyone wants a particular number. I don't know how we could do that, but what I could tell you from a triangulation standpoint is there are billion-dollar players in our space that still puts you at a pathetically low market share. Again, Chris and team are just getting started. Yep.
I just had a question for Anthony. I think you had said mid-teens EBITDA margin?
Yes.
Is there, like, a revenue-?
... number you need to hit in order to get that, what do you think about the opportunity for incremental margins or contribution margins on...
Just repeat the question.
Dollar revenue growth?
obviously.
Please repeat the question.
The question was, what's the opportunity to get that EBITDA margin up, and keep it in that teens percentage range, and what's the lever there? The main lever I would say is margin optimization.
Gross.
Gross margin optimization and bringing that up. Using the levers that we talked about there, looking at promo and marketing. The biggest one always is top-line sales. You know, and they have to be profitable sales. We make sure of that. Chris makes sure of that when he's pricing the product out. Those are our two biggest levers, and as we bring in organizations, it's just leverage. You know, the more that you can spread the costs around to more entities and to more sales, the higher your EBITDA, your net income is gonna go up, and your EBITDA is gonna go up in turn as well.
I'd specifically add, Anthony is the boss here, we have been reinvesting all of our profit over the past three years into building this team, right? There was no Lauren when I started, right? There was no Skip, there was no Chris, there was no Chris's team, right? You saw Chris's team, which is amazing. We had one salesperson total when I started. Every year, you have seen Anthony has done an amazing job. Our SG&A as a percentage has really not gone up. It stays around 20%. That's amazing focus and fortitude when everyone comes to him every day saying, "I need more, I need more, I need more." We have probably another year or so where we're adding, right? We said, this year, I'm done, right? Our leadership team is awesome, right?
I don't need to hire anybody else. We said we're gonna build a middle management team this year. I really think after this year, we're sort of done building the team we need. That means every incremental year, SG&A only goes down, right, as a percentage, only goes down, and therefore, EBITDA is one for one, right? It only goes up. We've been intentional to build the team of the future. Once we have done that, I think another year we'll be pretty close to done, then every incremental dollar goes up. Again, I look at you guys as partners. I hope you agree that the investments we're making, and you see these people around the room, is a good use of our dollars. If I wanted just to fake it, right, I didn't need to hire anybody.
I can make EBITDA go up, but we don't have a strong foundation, and then what's the sense of that? I hope you guys agree with the investments.
Just to put a finer point on that, I think the mid-teens number is a number that many of us were not expecting for next year. Because you previously talked about mid-teens as, like, an.
Yeah
like, once we scale. By putting mid-teens out there, you're basically saying-
I think we said to make sure we look at it, I think we said.
Yeah.
We end-
It's gonna glide. It's not gonna start at that point, definitely.
Right.
It's going to glide to get there.
Ending the year in the mid-teens.
Okay. Not mid-teens for the full FY 2027.
Uh-
Well, 'cause I'm just asking because the financial targets for Fiscal 2027 were at the top of the slide.
Yeah, I said I would love to say we could go back and take a look. Again, I think we're gonna go through the year with, again, mid-teens, you know, maybe it's the low end.
It will start.
I think we're in that range.
I mean-
The low double digits, and it'll ramp.
I'm happy for you guys to say. Again, all I do for the past three years is underpromise and overdeliver, so I'm happy to say that we'll be leaving the year in the mid-teens.
All right. That's helpful. Thank you.
Overdeliver for you.
Yeah.
For the few large retailers, we don't have a huge presence with yet. What's their main pushback, or what's their resistance level then?
Chris, the question is, for the customers that we're not in, Well, sorry. Well, for the client, customers we're not in, why are we not in them?
It's not so much pushback as it is just the bureaucracy of a large business. I can't explain this enough 'cause, you know, I came from that side of the world through most of my career, it is challenging to get the first step. It's always the first item. You know, one of them out there, we've been to, I've personally leveraged relationships, and we've shown a ton of samples, and it's always: "Man, your product's the best. We're excited. We'll get back to you," type of thing. For me, it's gonna be persistence, and oftentimes, it's right timing.
Some of the big customers that we still look at out there that we could get, they've had a lot of distraction in the last year or two, so you can kind of put the math together a little bit, who I might be talking about. And in that distraction tends to be people that move positions and suddenly have different responsibilities, and we've seen ourselves get caught up in that a little bit. A little bit excuse-oriented there, but to me, it's still just persistence. It's not that we don't have the right items, it's not that our items aren't great. We have gotten pushback in the past on pricing to some degree, and that is just more us saying, "I don't mind that.
I'll lose the sale every time if it's simply gonna be about price, 'cause I'm gonna get another opportunity on that one when they get disappointed by a lesser product.
Yep, totally agree. Yes, sir.
Yeah. Focusing on the NAE chicken product line, are you pushing that as a replacement for the rest of chicken products with some retailers, or is that kind of incremental to products that you already have with retailers?
... Chris, you want to? The question is, I know the question is the answer, but are we doing NAE for all customers, or is it just for new items, or we're transitioning all of our items then?
No, we're transitioning all our items to NAE. It's just who we're going to be. It's just like we flame, the way we choose to flame grill and our chicken and do it to the, to, you know, the highest level of quality. That's how we're viewing NAE. It's just who we are. It doesn't require a new If you're thinking about it this way, "Oh, it's a new item, or we have to resell into the customer," no, absolutely not. It's, "Hey, you're buying our chicken. By the way, it's all NAE now.
Right, there's nothing bad, like, in the sense that. Again, we don't have to change the SKU number or, you know, it's one of those things. If it's not, if it doesn't say NAE, but we accidentally make it NAE, that's absolutely fine. It's only a benefit. There are some customers that will buy it because it's NAE. There are some customers that will want it more. Equally, there are some customers that don't care as much, but we know it's better, and we're still going to sell it.
As a follow-up, how much more expensive is NAE chicken versus the.
The question is, how much more expensive is NAE chicken? I could answer that in two ways. One, it's roughly $0.10-$0.15, necessarily more. I mean, you could check the same information on, you know, on the Urner Barry stuff. Is what it is on the market if you buy it on the spot. Because of our scale now, because we're able to contract in advance, that helped us a lot. No.
It's highlighted that you're getting on everyday items, that is in Northeast going 7?
Yes.
What does that mean? I don't know what that means. That sounds like you, but what does that mean?
Since it's a softball question, 'cause I only give Chris the hard ones, I'll answer that. The question is, what is Costco NAE? Sorry, what is Costco, everyday item? That means carry the one. It's every day, it's in Costco. Costco traditionally is a rotation program, right? The treasure hunt mentality. Most items at Costco actually rotate in and out. There is a very small subset. You know how Chris said already, the club channel has a smaller set of items, assortment. There's even fewer that are an everyday item, and Chris, and team, and Scott got us everyday status at Costco in the Northeast.
Items that you have there.
No, just the beef meatballs, jumbo beef meatballs.
What are the numbers, though?
What numbers?
For having an everyday item. Just like the revenue opportunities with an everyday item. I mean, you guys.
You could totally be a research analyst.
I just mean, you've gone from one to 10 to 30.
Yes.
Now that you have every day, like...
I think it's great. I'm very optimistic about it. Damn.
Yeah.
I should go into politics.
Yeah.
Going back to the M&A to-topic, you obviously focus on adding incremental customers, capabilities, categories, all that good stuff. I'm curious if you could dive deeper into the capabilities aspect.
Yeah.
Like, where is your priority there? I guess, maybe ask differently, where do you feel like you're underdeveloped today that would, that's kind of necessary to help your business scale over time?
Yep. The question is, from an M&A perspective, you keep talking about capabilities, Adam, what the heck are you talking about? It really could be anything. When I think about M&A, I'm sincere when I tell you, I don't care about the revenue and the profit, that just comes along with it. If they could get me into a customer, right? Wegmans and the customer that, you know, shall not be named, we tried forever. We couldn't even get a call returned to us.
Magically, they called Chris, you know, the next week. Getting into a new customer is pretty awesome. Getting into new items that maybe we don't make today, right? New technology, whether it's, you know, HPPing or MAP technology. Those are examples where. Are there things that we could learn from other customers?
Stuff like Skip was talking about, industrial engineering, like capabilities. I would love, I would be thrilled to have someone, you know, even more hardcore on the data than I am, right? On the way they track things, the way they measure throughput. How do we learn from one plant to the other? Skip does an amazing job on his leadership team, that we're one team.
Any given day, a product be anywhere. That means you better be sharing with each other because we're all family here. On, what are you learning? You know, there's a super cool guy, Lenny, that, you know, he's hardcore, right? He's tracking throughput every single day. He sees me in his Excel sheet, he gets, you know, excited or nervous, depending on the numbers.
Now he's taking on a broader role because, look, if we're doing this in Farmingdale, let's do this in Bayshore also. Let's do this in East Rutherford also. We're sharing that information. Capabilities to me can be anything that again, we could use across the network. You know, the fact that they, where do we learn? I mean, not that it's rocket scientist science, but NAE, guess where we learned that from?
Crown with NAE, with, well, everything that we do at Wegmans is NAE. Oh, wait a minute, maybe we should do this broader. Maybe customers would be really interested in it. Maybe this could be a differentiator for this. That's why we're looking at M&A. It just so happens that it comes with $56 million at 0.3x revenue, you know, very profitable.
All right, one more on Costco. Once they go into the everyday item status, do they do not do the-
... anymore, or they do something else?
No, I believe, Chris, for Costco, just because we're an everyday item, that's not to say that we couldn't do any sort of promotions or tastings, et cetera, et cetera. Is that correct, Chris?
Oh, yeah, that's absolutely correct.
Yeah.
We can do other promotions, other rotations. We can still conduct an MBM even on that item, if we're if they wanna do that nationally into some regions that aren't every day.
There are commitments to the everyday item. Like, once you become an everyday item, is there a life to that?
You're just a hater today, aren't you?
Is that for me?
Everyday item, you know, look, we have to keep up great quality and great service. I have no doubts, and I would actively do it myself. Yeah, if we actually have a cruddy product or we don't actually deliver, I'm sure they could take away everyday status. Yeah. I would take it away myself because I wanna keep getting better.
Like Chris mentioned, I think it really was an amazing partnership between Chris and Skip. Yeah, we sold it in, heck, you know, at best, that's only 50% of the challenge. Can you actually deliver on it? I am super proud, just like Chris said, right? First, you start with Grandma Quality products, what really keeps you is Grandma Quality service. That service is sales customer, sales service, customer service, supply service, et cetera.
Given the attractiveness of the category, is there anything else happening in the landscape that we may not have seen, you know, outside of Crown, privately spaced or any changes you've seen, broadly speaking?
Question is, anything from a macroeconomic standpoint on the deli space, prepared food space? I would say, if anything, it's only getting better. I truly believe, it's really getting accelerated by customers. Customers are seeing it. Customers are investing in more and more linear feet of shelf space, refrigerated shelf space. It's not one of those things that you just take out the next week, right? They have to invest in it as well. I feel great about that. You know, I don't feel great that the economy is not as awesome as it could be for everybody, that means people aren't going out as much. Inflation, I'm not happy about this, inflation is 2x, 4%, right? Away from home, inflation is 4%. At home, inflation is 2.1%.
It's 2x. This goes back to the acceleration point. It's getting more expensive to eat out. I'm not happy about that for my 330 million friends in America, but it does help our business.
No other, like, strategic M&A transactions in the last how long so far?
Again, it's an interesting dynamic. We're the only publicly traded company out there. It is still a massively fragmented space. you know, it's. I feel good. Yeah, so. Yes, George.
A couple more for you. The MAP technology.
If I get past 3 o'clock, I get double pay today.
The MAP technology?
Yes, sir.
Is that a big deal over the next few years? like, of your products in account, is it a pretty small part of the mix, and how should we think about that growing?
Uh, so the question is just, uh, the opportunities for MAP. Um, I think there's more and more opportunities, right? It increases shelf life. Um, I don't know the exact number of our business, but it's getting to be a lot. Uh, we map a lot in, uh, Bayshore. All of our MFOs in East Rutherford are mapped. Um, I'd love to continue to do it. Again, it's uh, a natural way, right? There's just nitrogen gas. It, it's a natural way to extend shelf life. That helps our customers, and by helping our customers, that means they're gonna buy more from us. So I'd love to do, uh, I'd love to do even more of that. We have... You know, it's pretty cool. You know, this goes back, Jacob, to your question on capabilities.
We took, like, 400 years when I got here to, you know, should we get our first MAP machine, which you guys saw today, right? Then we just fell into Crown, and they had four. Like, oops, that's pretty cool. You know, there's more opportunity, there's more room. Like Skip was saying, you know, you could play, you know, soccer or football, pick your country. You know, in some of the spaces at Bayshore, we have a lot of, we have a lot of room to grow and add more equipment into, if that's what we choose to do.
One other one, Sam's Club. How should we think about this year? You know, you've had so much success there. The momentum, feeling good about it, new product additions, like, anything you can.
Yep. Chris, the question is, hey, what are you doing at Sam's Club?
Sam's Club is like our other top customers. We're looking for additional SKUs in there. We've had some things rotate in and out. Sam's Club itself, you know, I wanna express a little bit of just caution of all the marbles in one place at some time. We wanna make sure that we keep it a proportional part of our business as well. We've got a great relationship there. Our chicken. They have a policy. Basically, you can't be as the single supplier relative to what we do there. There's another supplier in there that supplies grilled chicken to them. Our performance is, I don't know, Adam, is it like 3x what the other supplier is? They love us.
As far as year over year over year type of sales, the customer keeps telling us we're the best product, and our sales continue to grow. Even sometimes when we try our darnedest to kinda have it grow a little bit slower, they just grow. We're in a good spot. We do want to get some. Strategically, I wanna get some additional SKUs in there.
Good.
What does the PP&E CapEx look like for Fiscal 2027?
Yeah. I think, Anthony is the boss here. Roughly, we spend... Again, most importantly, you don't spend anything we don't have. You could look at our cash flow from operations, that will tell you roughly how much, we're not gonna spend more than that. You know, spending five, seven, definitely not digit million dollars is more than enough, for what we wanna do. I would, I'd factor in mid to high single digits. Are you guys out? I'll see if any other questions. Okay. Well, if that's it, thank you guys so much. I really appreciate, everyone making it out here, listening on the call. Luke and I are always available. If there's additional questions, George or anyone else, or Noah has, I'm available 24/7.
Sincerely, I'm so incredibly proud of this team, and you're seeing only, you know, a tenth of the team. This is what I am proudest of. This is what we have built that is not going away. Really excited to share with you more what we accomplished this year and in the years ahead. Thank you, everybody.