All right. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us bright and early on our first day. My name is Brandon Vazquez. I am the research analyst at William Blair that covers Neogen. We're excited to have with us the CEO of Neogen, John Adent, who's gonna give us a company update, and then we might have a couple minutes for Q&A here before we go to the breakout. Last thing, from a compliance standpoint, I'm also required to tell you, for a full list of conflicts and disclosures, please visit our website at williamblair.com. And with that, I'll let John take it over.
Thank you, Brandon. Well, good morning, everyone. Glad to be first on the docket today and be here with you. So this is my first public safety announcement. Has everyone seen the Fiji recall? 2 million bottles, Washington State, and anything bought through Amazon. So I have no idea where this came from, so I'm drinking tap water today. But this also shows you a little bit about the relevance, right, of Neogen and why we're important, because you see these types of things constantly if you're paying attention. So, I think it was a microbiology or a microorganism that they found in the water and manganese, high levels of manganese. So a little bit about this morning, to help you get started and see why Neogen is a relevant, right, company to invest in. I'm John Adent, President and CEO.
Pleasure to be here with you today. This is our disclaimer. I'll let you take a look at it. I'm not gonna read it. That would be the whole presentation, but we will be asking for forward-looking statements. So a little bit about Neogen, our purpose. What we try to do is we make sure that we are protecting the world's food supply, and we want to have a brighter future for global food security. That is a lot of different things. We envision where the world's gonna have access to a safe food supply that's efficient and sustainable. We have a growing population. It's a big challenge, but it's something that we're uniquely able to do. We've been in the business for 40 years.
We've been protecting the world's food supply since then, and it really is our mission, and it's what drives us every single day to get up and go to work, is to make sure that we are protecting everybody in the room, our family members, loved ones, to make sure that they have safe, sustainable food to eat. It's interesting, the CDC said roughly about 400,000 people get sick in the U.S. of foodborne illness every single year, and that's what's reported. There's a lot less that isn't, right? When you go and eat and don't feel well, generally, you don't report. Those are very serious diseases, so it's something that we're proud of and what we really focus on. We were founded in 1982 out of a small grant from Michigan State University.
Today, we have over 2,500 employees around the world. We are a science-based company. We have over 300 engineers and scientists within our organization. We're based out of Lansing, Michigan. So for those of you that have not been to Lansing, it is the garden spot of Michigan. You definitely want to come visit, but the time to visit is between now and September, and that's when you want to be there, right? But we will be welcome to have visitors. It's our main campus. It's where we're putting in our new Petrifilm manufacturing facility that we got from 3M. So it really is the hub of our business. We're a worldwide company. We sell in over 160 countries, but we have sales and support staff on the ground in over 40 countries, so really growing quickly.
That type of reach and frequency makes us the global leader in food security. There really is not a competitor that looks similar to us. We have two main types of our business. Our food safety business is 70% of our business today. It really is the driver of our business, and those products are used to protect food in really all segmentations, in food, beverage, and the feed industry. So we really cover all segmentations of food production. Our solutions are rapid quantifications. We do rapid diagnostic tests that look for organisms of interest, right? And generally, what that is, is you're looking for bad things. You're looking for pathogens, you're looking for toxins, you're looking for allergens. We group, we group that together into organisms of interest for our customers.
We also have sanitation verification tools, and then we have also very innovative pathogen testing, which allows us to do rapid testing for pathogen versus traditional models. We tie all this together. Most of these are read on equipment, and we tie all that equipment together through our data analytics platform. And really, what that does is it allows the machines to communicate, and it's an environmental plant mapping software. So it helps our customers make sure that the environmental and the sanitation planning they're doing in their plants is rigorous and recordable. So when I joined the industry, I was very surprised. I went in, and I was talking to a customer, and she was the head of food safety for a very large food company.
And I said: "What do you do when the FDA comes in for an audit?" And she reaches down, she grabbed a three-ring binder, she set it on her desk and said, "These are our protocols." And I thought, "Wow, we might be able to help." Right? So what we've done is we've been able to digitize all of that to where now, when the FDA comes in, she has a schematic of her plant. She rolls the mouse over every single point they're doing sampling. Pop-up window comes up, it tells who did the test, what was the result, if there was a positive, what was the cleaning, who cleaned it, what was the retest result? So really allowing to digitize that. And now what we're developing is machine learning and AI technologies to really try to drive this to predictive analytics, right?
Because clean and dirty is not zero. A clean is less than X parts per billion, right? So you can see a trend moving towards dirty. So the ability for us to track and to be able to watch that, to tell customers, "Hey, look, we see that you're starting to trend up in these specific areas. We need to do some interdiction now. We should step in and change either the sanitation protocol, increase the frequency before it gets into the food system." Right? Because I think that's the biggest challenge, is there are pathogens in most of these plants. It's just keeping them off of the food, right? It's very, very hard to say you have a clean facility because the pathogens are very, very robust. The other part of our business, 30% is our animal safety.
You know, we like to talk about food doesn't start at the food processor, food starts at the farm. Really, what we do on the animal safety side is we have a line of cleaners and disinfectants to make sure that we're keeping that environment clean for those animals, so it stops the spread of disease. We have veterinary care instruments that help. If the animal does get sick, we have the instruments to make sure to help the veterinarians make sure to get them better and enhance care. Then we have our genomics business, and our genomics on the animal safety side for production animal is really around helping customers make the right decisions around their herds. What are they trying to improve? What levels of efficiency are they trying to fix?
That's what our genomics business does, is help them become more efficient and make more money. And then on the companion animal side, it's really looking for, and we'll get into a little bit more, but it's looking for breed identification, traits, and genetic disease. So it's almost like individual care for pet. We talked about this. This is our global presence. As you can see, we're well represented around the world. This is where we actually have our sales and support teams around the world. It gives us a very strong strategic advantage with, with our multinational customers. It allows us to be very, very close and understand the needs of our customers to, to continue to help them meet the specific needs that they're looking for. This is what makes us very different. This is what makes us the leader kind of in the food safety segment.
We are the leader in our portfolio with our portfolio. Our business is 95% consumable, so it's a strong consumable business, which is one thing we really like. We talk about our business in these different segmentations. Our indicator testing and culture media is really driven by Petrifilm. Petrifilm is the flagship product we acquired from 3M. It's easy to use. It is a rapid indication of presence of organisms and samples. It really is the industry standard. And then we have our sample handling and culture media. Again, to get a good reading, you have to be able to take good samples.
So while sample handling doesn't sound very interesting, it actually is very important, because if you don't get a good sample, you can't get a good read when you put it through Petrifilm or any of our other pieces of equipment. So those are our indicator testing markets. We have our bacterial and general sanitation, starting with our pathogen line. It is a rapid microbiological detection for pathogens. It's generally used in any type of food processing facility or other grain handling, other areas that are in the food segmentation. And then we have our hygiene monitoring, which is a surface test that checks for organic matter. So if it's ATP, it tells you the relative cleanliness. I thought this was very fun.
When I joined Neogen, I took our ATP test home, and then with my wife, had just cleaned the kitchen. I swabbed our kitchen and showed her how dirty it was. That was a horrible idea because I got to clean the kitchen for the next three months, right? So this is a really interesting tool that we saw move outside of food safety during COVID, where we are now selling into airlines, nursing homes, other areas that are now looking for organic material for cleanliness. That was very different than, you know, even pre-COVID, right? Because people want to know, is that surface clean? The last is allergen and toxins. It's rapid detection of allergen and food processing. You know, we are the leader in that. We're also the first to develop a rapid allergen test.
We're the first to develop a rapid toxin test. That's kind of where Neogen was built, and we look for mycotoxins in harvested crops. And the reason why that's important is high mycotoxin levels can, best case, make animals and people sick, worst case, will kill animals. I mean, high levels of toxin will kill them. So you really want to make sure you want to keep that out of the food supply. The last two are really our animal safety segments. We talked about our veterinary instrument and animal care. These are delivery systems, whether it's our equipment. We have small lines around injectable vitamins, and we have one biological, which is a horse product and biological line. And then really, our bigger piece is the biosecurity line, and this is products that reduce the spread of disease from, you know, people, insects, and rodents.
If you think about it, you know, bird flu has been a lot on people's topics. Is that first you have to do is you have to have the facility clean of all these pathogens. So you use our cleaners and disinfectants to clean before you bring animals in. Once the animals are in, there's very few ways for pathogens to enter a closed unit, except the way they get in are on people. So people shower in, shower out. They also have to clean all their clothes, clean their boots, and then it's insects and rodents. That's how disease gets put in, right? So it may not think that those are strong for food safety, but they actually are, because those are the vectors that really drive pathogens into these systems.
The last piece is our genomics business, and we really have two pieces of the genomics business. The one is production animal, which we talked about, and that is to optimize herd selection and performance for whatever criteria our customers have around their farms. And then the last is companion, which is the identification of breeds. And then we have disease and traits, genetic disease and traits, that we work with veterinarians to help them with customers for better care for people's pet children. And then breeder traits to make sure that when you buy, this is a Husky, you are buying a Husky. This is a Malamute, you are buying a Malamute. You know, those are things we do to help breeders make sure that the lines that they have are specific and accurate.
We're really well-positioned to address the food security challenges, we think, more than others, and we're the leader in what we consider a very strong and dynamic market. This market grows at mid-single digits, so we like the market that we're in. And it, it's exciting because it has very long-term attractive fundamentals. Like we talked about, you know, the thing with Fiji, right? Well, also, the FDA just said they put into law that Salmonella is now a known adulterant in breaded chicken products, which means if you are making breaded chicken products, like nuggets or things like that, you now have to test for Salmonella. This is new, right? This continues to drive because people want to know more and more about what's in their food, not less and less. I'm getting older. I tease my children.
I said, "Look, I can remember when I would go to the grocery store, and you would buy a box of cereal, and it was a box of cereal. You didn't know what was in it. It didn't tell you dietary fiber, it didn't tell you sugar, it didn't tell you ingredients." My children shop very differently than I do. They look at protein content, they look at sugar, they look at added sugar, they look at things that they're putting in their body. That is just a tailwind for Neogen. Because what we do is we help our customers explain to their consumers what is in dietary fiber, polysaccharide, sugars, and what is out of their products, free of allergens, free of coconut, free of soy, and then making sure that their food is safe, free of pathogens, free of all the things that can make people sick.
So it is a, it is a strong market, and it is a growing market. We see as we rise and income levels rise, the first thing people do is put more protein on their plates. They want to eat better, and then they want to make sure they're not getting sick. You know, I lived in China a long time ago now, 25, 30 years. When I went out to go to the wet market, and I'd buy a piece of pork, you know, it's hanging in the stall, and I don't know if it's been hanging there an hour or three days. You just know you have to cook it really, really well, and it was a 50/50 chance you were gonna get sick. Well, for those of you who have been to China recently, it is not like that anymore.
Like, it is, it is an industrialized country where people have raised their expectations and their standards. We see that around the world, and it's ever-evolving. There are 14 known allergens in Europe. There's 9 in the U.S. Why is there a difference? People in Europe are more allergic? No, it's just different standards. We will get there, and we see this continuum going. You know, there was no thing-- there wasn't, there wasn't a gluten allergy when I was young, right? Now, there is. There are a lot of other allergies that we're-- As we learn more about our bodies and we learn more about how food affects our bodies, that is what's gonna drive Neogen's growth forward. We also see increase ability around traceability. This is a very complicated food chain. We're gonna talk about that a little bit later, so that's very, very important.
Then outbreaks. You see what happens, right, when a customer or a food producer has an outbreak. How many years did it take, you know, a certain fast food company, Mexican fast food company to recover after their outbreak? Years. And some companies never recover, right? Our product categories are very interesting. We talked about we're 70% on the food safety side. If you look, we have a very nice product mix. So, you know, we're now 73% or 27% on food safety, 10 on genomics, 35% culture media, 20% bacterial sanitation, 9% toxins and allergens. So we have a very nice broad portfolio with a very nice mix, and then I also like our geographic mix. We're roughly 55% U.S., and then 15 LatAm, 15 Asia, and 15 Europe. So strong, diversified portfolio, strong, diversified mix around the world.
This is what we're talking about, the complexity of the food chain. You start with, We work with a customer, McCormick, and you'd think, "Oh, that's, you know..." One of the things we're working with them is on some of their spices. And it's interesting because there's a lot of different areas around there. One is around what is a certain type of red pepper, right? Because if they're buying in India from thousands and thousands of small farmers, how do they make sure that they have consistency? The other is, is making sure that there are no toxins or pathogens, because for those of you that have been in developing countries, a lot of that is dried out on the street.
Well, when it's dried on the street, there's birds, there's mice, there's cats, there's dogs, there's a lot of different things that intermingle with that as it's being dried, right? So making sure that we can have representative samples, understand how to take sampling, understand how to help them improve the quality of the product, and drive it as something that, you know, we help customers do. Because then it goes all the way from small farms, all the way to large manufacturing, all the way to grocery shelves and the food retailer, and it touches so many hands, it's very, very challenging. We are the one company that really can touch everyone across the food supply chain. We have a lot of different competitors and segmentations that are very narrow, right?
That may be specific around food retail, may be specific around food processors, may be specific around feed, may be specific around pet, but we're really the only one that allows us to help those customers really across the whole supply chain. And, and with that, it allows us to help them also with their ESG journey about reducing waste, being more efficient, and improving the food supply around the world. So these are things that we really drive and we're really excited about. And the bottom kinda shows you those different product offerings that fit those categories. What's important for us is, we're in a growth conference, we're a growth company, and this is—these are our drivers of growth, right? So in the next three years, how are we gonna drive growth? We are gonna leverage our core capabilities, right?
This is fundamental because we have foundational diagnostic capabilities and expertise in our microbiology and immunoassays. These are our core products. We are gonna develop, continue to develop new products that will address the needs and help solve problems for our customers within these two segmentations. We're gonna do it within food safety, but there are also other attractive adjacencies, right? I'll give you a good example. One of our products, Soleris, it checks for yeast and mold, right? Which is very important in the food segment. It's also very important in the cosmetic segment, because you do not want to be making eyeliner that has yeast or mold because of infection or foundation or others. We see our products have opportunities in similar adjacencies or similar applications, just different matrices, right?
So these are things that we're looking at to say, "This may not be the 1-3-year growth period, but it's the 5-10-year growth. How do we continue to drive revenue forward?" The other thing is expansion in the regions and continue market penetration. Petrifilm is the flagship, right? It is a tremendous line. It is well known. It is the number one line in the marketplace, and yet it only has 20% market share. And the reason it has 20% market share is because traditional methods that have been around over 100 years is still the dominant way. So we need to do a better job of going out and explaining the value proposition, because the value proposition is there, and it is extremely strong for Petrifilm.
So we see continued growth opportunities around reach and frequency in all of our segmentations, in all of our markets. We can continue to grow in the U.S. because we're, we are adding new sales team members and new tech service members. We can see growth. We continue to see growth in LatAm, and then we are really under-penetrated, in my mind, in Europe and APAC. If you, if you think about kind of the size of the marketplaces, specifically in the European Union, at 15% versus 55% in North America, that is, that is really under-penetrated. So we are developing ways in which we're gonna go and drive the marketplace kind of around the world for our segmentations and for our products to specific customers. And then the last is we're gonna continue to innovate, right?
We've brought on kind of the R&D teams from 3M and Neogen. We've looked at those teams, we've refocused the teams, and we're getting very specific on the ways in which the areas in which we want to put our money behind to drive growth of the company. So we have multigenerational roadmaps for our products today. So we're looking at what does next generation look like, whether that is time to result, right? Whether that is ease of use, whether that is high throughput, whether that is new equipment. And these are things that you're gonna see, you know, shortly with Neogen coming with new product offering, that's gonna help drive innovation and drive solutions for our customer base.
Then last is making sure that we take our combined leverage and expertise and really help that on a regional basis for some of our large multinational customers. We've developed a specific team around strategic accounts that is really bearing fruit, that's allowing us to solve problems for customers that they didn't know we had the resources to do. A good example is, I think you saw, Bill, did we put out the press release on the dietary fiber test for the ethanol? So we developed a test that was extremely important for ethanol producers, and you'd think, well, ethanol is not really food safety, but it's mycotoxin.
So these were mycotoxin customers, and one of the challenges they had was they can extract more value if they can show the difference between, ethanol coming from starch or from other sources. And they didn't have a test for that. They were talking to our team, and the team said, "You know, we think we can do that." Well, the team got to work. We are now launched it. We are the first one to ever develop a test like that for that industry, and it's gonna have tremendous value for those producers. And it's something that people normally wouldn't think of to talk to Neogen about. But we're seeing now, with this broader capabilities as a combined organization, that we're having conversations to help them find solutions, because now they're starting to understand really how strong an organization we are.
Our integration is fully underway, right? There were 6 main platforms with thousands of work streams. 5 of those are being effectively done this quarter, right? So we have brought in sample handling, we have brought in pathogen detection. It is now in-house. Hygiene monitoring is done, and we've came off our services agreements, whether it was the back office and distribution. So 5 of the 6 were done. Okay? They were extremely complicated, with thousands of work streams. We now have a singular one left. It's big, but the complexity has reduced significantly from where we were 2, 3 quarters ago. We had to bring in Petrifilm, so we're carving that out. Now, our plan, the building is built. We're fitting it out. Equipment is starting to arrive. Our plan is at this time next year, we'll start test production in those facilities.
The advantage we have is we have three more years of a contract manufacturing with 3M, so it gives us the ability to scale up our facilities and scale down their facilities. This is not a lift and shift, which really helps us from a standpoint of risk around manufacturing. The line we're putting in, the first line, will have more capacity than all of 3M's current capacity, and we have the ability to expand double that size very, very rapidly. Okay? So as we bring ours up, we will bring theirs down. As I said, you know, we're gonna start test production in about a year. That gives us two years to be able to ramp up to full production, which, you know, I'm very, very comfortable with. Our goal is to move off as soon as we can.
We have seen the faster we bring things in-house, even though it's challenging, the better off we are. So our work streams are on track. We have one big project left. We have been heads down working on this. When we allow ourselves to kinda look up, the goal we're playing for, right, is post-integration. This will be a mid- to high single-digit growing business. We have 30%+ adjusted EBITDA margins. We're gonna have 100% free cash flow conversion, and that will help drive net leverage down to, you know, kind of our goal, which is around that 2x ratio. Our update for the quarter, we are 1 day done with the quarter, so this is very preliminary, so take that. So, we demonstrated great progress, I think, and continued progress with shipping throughout the quarter.
Every month was getting better. Our view of revenue is we're gonna be ahead of our models, today ahead of our guidance. I think we're gonna be in the mid-$2 30s. Again, we're 1 day in. Dave's sweating bullets over here for me making that comment, my CFO. He told me not to, but, you know, I'll do it. So we think we're gonna be in that mid-$2 30s range, which, you know, we're, we're very pleased. We're on track to solve kind of the, the shipping issue we're having with ERP. We are not making any change. We ended up getting the right resources there and really driving the things we needed to fix and getting our, our second and third parties there to help us fix that.
So we feel comfortable kind of where we are to have that fully resolved by the first quarter. And I think what's most exciting for us is we're gonna be back on our front foot selling, right? Sales teams are not gonna be worried about: Is the product coming? When's the product coming? It is now back out to drive revenue growth, and we're starting to see that in the order book. And, you know, those are the things that we're gonna continue to drive going forward. So we talked about this, and you know, just as a short recap, clearly, we're in a very attractive market, 95% consumables, continuing to have opportunities to leverage our size and scale with our technology expertise.
And then the majority of those big multi, you know, 1,000 different work streams that we're doing for integration, the majority of that is behind us. So we're very excited about the progress we made. It's been a challenging, you know, 18 months since we've been working on it, now more than that. But, really proud of the progress the team has made, proud of where we are, and excited about the future. So with that, Brandon, you can open it up to questions if you have any.
Great. We'll have a breakout in a second, but with the one minute we have left, I think what I ask you, John, is, you know, when we look, go back to the beginning of this acquisition, there's obviously been a lot of macro and integration noise, but now you're talking about demand generation. You're, you're going on the offensive. How comfortable do you feel that this is kind of the trough in, in a lot of the integration noise, and you guys, when you're talking about demand generation, this is we can go from here, kinda to the right?
Yeah. No, comfortable. I mean, I think, look, we've, we've got the biggest piece to do, which is still Petrifilm, but the challenge was the complexity of doing everything all at once, right? In addition to doing all those things, oh, and by the way, we put in a new ERP system, right? Not many companies take on that type of challenge and make it through. So I think we are through the majority of that. It's continuing to fine-tune. An ERP journey is not you turned it on, and you're done. It is constantly improve efficiency, and we're seeing efficiency improvements as people run the system. So we're excited about that. We're seeing efficiency around production, around shipping, and really is gonna get us back to our sales teams and customers, knowing that we can...
When they place the order, they're gonna have it in two days, and we're gonna drive forward. So we're excited about the future.
Great. All right, thank you, everyone. We're gonna go to the Mayer room for our breakout now.
Thank you.