Hi, good morning everyone. This is Robert Rietbroek. I'm the CEO of Primo Brands Corporation. I would say the following: we had a combination of several things that impacted our business in the second quarter, beginning with the retail side where we were impacted by tornado damage at the largest retail plant in Hawkins, Texas. We also experienced a record cold and wet quarter in the Northeast where we have a 40% market share. That really put a bit of a damper on the retail growth. Good news is the first half, we still are in net growth at 11 basis points. We're the only large branded manufacturer in water that's still growing a share through the first half in the category. The bigger issue that was self-inflicted was in our last mile business, or we used to call that home and office development.
We closed 40 facilities in the quarter for a total of 48 to date. Now we're eight months into the merger right now. We were seven months into the merger at the end of the second quarter. We really took a highly decisive and somewhat aggressive approach to the restructuring. We also reduced another 1,100 associates in the second quarter for a total of 1,600 to really prioritize speed of synergy delivery. What happened is that once we started closing factories, which happened in the month of May primarily, in the second half of May, we ran into supply issues. Those supply issues were driven by equipment compatibility issues for the bottles and racks, and general shortages of the racks that carry the five-gallon bottles. Those are usually four wide. They carry about 40 bottles per rack.
We've since infused about 70,000 of those racks and a couple of million of additional bottles to overcome these shortages. We've made significant progress. From a technical standpoint, we basically backed the Primo Water Company into the legacy BlueTriton or Nestlé systems: SAP, the handheld, the geo-routing system. We experienced some initial change management challenges. We also needed to update the IT technology to accommodate the more complex business model, which now includes frequent retail deliveries in exchange. Those are the racks that you see at Walmart or Kroger. Where are we today? We've largely restored service levels. We're approximately at 92% daily service rate. We are working our way back to get over 95, which would have been the pre-merger base. We will continue to see some minor disruptions for the next 8- 10 weeks through the end of September, but we will be normalized hopefully by Q4.
We have all the reasons to believe that will be the case, since we already are working our way back in well over the 90s. We're currently looking at, particularly in South Florida and Mid-Atlantic, where we have some supply shortages. The big markets, LA, Dallas, Chicagoland, have been pretty much addressed. Nick, that's really a quick summary of what happened. We have been decisive, we've addressed the issues, and we'll continue to implement corrections to restore performance.
Yeah. Robert, if I could just kind of follow up on that, you mentioned speed several times during your prepared remarks when you reported earnings. Maybe if you just, I think that's another big question people have on their minds, why go so fast? Maybe you can just provide some context around that.
Yeah, it's a great question. As we announced the merger in June of 2024, we communicated $200 million of synergies by the end of year three. We then decided to advance that to the end of year one. We really truly drive, you know, the value thesis of the merger. There's really two ways of doing these mergers. You can either take a very, you know, slow approach and look at effectiveness, and then you will gradually work your way through protracted issues that occur. Or you can go for speed and efficiency where you have one period where you run water through the pipes. You know, in hindsight, I probably would have slowed it down a little bit. Obviously, we are now where we are, and we've redirected all of our focus towards resolving the issues. I'm glad to report that we have resolved the majority of issues.
We are currently back at 92%, which is, you know, spitting distance from the 95% pre-merger. We have ways to go. The benefit of this approach is that we don't have, you know, multiple quarters of compounding smaller issues, but we've just got through it in one, ripped the Band-Aid off quarter.
Got it. Okay, that makes sense. Maybe Robert and David, if you want to also kind of chime in, you know, what was, what did the run rate look like before you started running into these challenges for the HOD business, right? What did it look like before, and then how much did it kind of drop off? If you can just give us some relative context on the delta.
David, do you want to?
In our Q1 disclosures, as everyone may recall, we delivered a 3% top line, which is a 4.2% growth rate on an equivocalized leap day basis. Within that, you had a last mile or direct delivery business that would be sort of on par with our algorithm of 3%- 5% in that case. Those were largely two different sovereign operating entities running service to customers that would have been brought to the combined company. That really proves the confidence we have when the service disruptions are remediated because there's a demand signal every day from these customers in addition to our retail partners in things like exchange and refill where the customer base has the demand profile for the volume we deliver. We started the year actually pretty significantly skewed toward volume contribution within those results in Q1.
Q2 is a quarter where, as the major pieces of integration started to occur, it's led to the disruptions we've obviously talked about, and Robert just answered again. We remain pretty confident that the consumer demand is there. We've really not had a lot of pricing influence within our quarterly results. Again, we're still speaking exclusively on the direct delivery side of the business. Therefore, as we are able to satisfy our customer demand, as we recuperate our product supply, we feel that we'll be able to exit Q4 in the latter part of the year back to a more stable place that provides a more resilient 2026, sort of back exactly where we would have thought the algorithm would have delivered.
Okay. Great. Super helpful. What was a portion of your user base that you actually had the issues, or you lost during the quarter? Obviously, a lot of folks just trying to understand what the churn looked like, if you can provide any context on that.
Sure. Nick, you know, let me go first. So David, the majority of our customers were unaffected. As I said in the earnings call, our delivery temporarily dropped to below 80% DSR. That was probably about 10% to 20% of our customers, at some point affected either by a non-delivery or a delayed delivery. We see a slight increase in attrition, but not actually as much as we would normally see with major disruption. We've seen customers be very resilient, and the need for our product remains out there. We see continued ads from digital as well. We're recruiting a lot of new customers into the base. The top of the funnel is healthy and growing, and our focus is on recovery of service and stabilization. We're also implementing win-back programs.
Right now, if you are at a 92% daily service rate, it means that around 8% of fill rate is not completed. We're working hard to get that above 95%. 95% would mean that there's a 5% variability in deliveries, which you can normally cover through next-day delivery or a Saturday or a Sunday delivery. Let me pass it on to David for some additional perspective.
Yeah. I think a couple of areas that are really important here. One, there is not a top-of-funnel or new customer waning demand in any way. You've talked about this, you know, for a couple of years now. You know, interest levels in tap water quality and safety are, I would say, you know, continuing to progress, essentially setting all-time highs in the way we look at interest levels. Unfortunately, obviously, we went through this disruption, and that has not, in any regard, whether it be Trustpilot, Google Review, that has not slowed new customer or brand new to the category customer interest. Again, we don't take that for granted. We know where we have to resolve and improve our service levels. We remain very optimistic that the top-of-funnel issue is not creating an issue, and we remain sort of vigilant there.
In terms of actual quits, it's left us in a couple-of-month period of a net deficit where our adds are not outpacing the quits. We believe that that's impacted. We have a rough approximate, you know, user base here of about 3 million on a direct delivery basis. There are other customer bases within exchange and refill not quantified in that 3 million, but within the actual delivery to residential and commercial customers, it's about a 3 million user base. We believe we've lost sort of anywhere between 1% and 1.5%, or about 50,000 during this period. That, again, can be short-term in nature because the ability to continue to add, resolve our service issues, can put us back into a net accretive or net organic add position.
You know, we'll continue to work diligently to win back customers where we've disrupted their service to the point where they've decided to leave. Again, we remain very confident, however, that when they choose to depart, we will have an opportunity to address and reclaim sort of potential service in the near future.
Got it. Where, like, the customers that left, where did they go? Did they just stop having home and office water delivery and just start buying in retail, or did they switch to a competitor? Any context around that?
You know, in our past, we've done a lot of research within our customer base to say, how have you migrated to becoming a direct delivery customer today? Typically, you have a moment in your journey where you choose to leave tap water as your primary service. You would end up potentially in one of our five-gallon options, be it refill, exchange, or direct delivery. We then obviously have alternatives where they might be in sort of case pack consumption, simple or more advanced filtration stages. Again, whether or not there's a halo impact around our brand, we have not seen any elevated increase in filtration user additions to signal perhaps that they're, you know, giving up on one side of an offering and moving to another. That could be because you have a negative affiliation with us as a brand, but we don't believe that's the issue.
Exchange and refill have continued to perform quite well, and we don't believe that typically that's an offset. We think it might just be a temporary kind of pause in their consumption, figuring out what they're going to do next, as it is somewhat of an elongated user journey to, you know, sort of decide what they're going to do. Again, we do believe that we will have an opportunity to win them back. We do remain very active in our tuck-in pipeline where we can address potentially looking at regional or local opportunities to sort of acquire those in our future. We believe this is a lagging indicator of our service challenge. As service stabilizes, it's a decently self-fulfilling prophecy of sort of resuming sort of a net, organic acquisition.
Great. For the direct delivery disruptions, lack of supply was cited as one of the main problems. What are supply levels now relative to demand? Do you still have less demand, or do you have more supply than demand at this point?
Nick, in general, I would say that demand is very, very healthy and strong in the last mile. It's our ability to supply that that has been the question, and that remains the question. In general, we do not have a demand issue. It's right now all about restoring service, ensuring our product supply is there. One of the things we're trying to get to is having a day on hand of inventory at the branch, a day in transport, and a day at the factory. That will avoid us from having to rely on trailer arrivals in the morning for the loadout of our trucks. Once we have that fully restored, we get to that 95% DSR. We should be able to take advantage of the demand. Obviously, the weather is very, very good right now. It's hot outside, and that really drives demand in water consumption.
Robert, I guess that is really the key for this whole September timeline that you're talking about, right? It's just kind of getting all that situated?
Correct. Yeah. By the end of September, we should be fully addressed. We would have not only the markets that I've discussed that are completely back to normal, but the remaining two, you know, I would say, focus areas for sure, the Mid-Atlantic and South Florida, in a position where we have sufficient mod racks, sufficient bottles in the system to have, you know, the new lean optimized network function at that level that we would have had pre-merger in both corporations. As you understand, Nik, because it's peak season and it's hot weather, that is a factor because every case we produce, we are delivering.
Got it. Okay. One of the things that was supposed to be part of the back half top line was price harmonization. I'm assuming that's not the right time for this at this moment. Maybe you could just give us some context around that in terms of timing and kind of how you think about pricing in the direct business.
Yeah. As we've discussed, we believe that remediating our service challenges from against first stabilizing product supply is paramount. If you are in either of the legacy company systems and have not migrated, if there are anniversary increases or other adjustments that are typical for your experience of being a long-tenured customer, those will continue. They have not been a meaningful contribution to the overall top line at this point. Our win-back efforts are first and foremost our priority, which again starts with a better and more stable service. We're really going to shift more of that priority into next year, where we believe that several experiences of more satisfied customer behavior and stable service is the right environment to sort of do that.
When I look at the latest Trustpilot data, as of early August, it suggests that the negative reviews have dropped by 75% from their peak. If that is the case, why will it take to the end of September to get to a normal trend rate? Is there some kind of delay in terms of when people start complaining and the service levels?
There is a slight lag in that. First of all, you're correct to share that observation that our Trustpilot ratings are recovering. As you know, pre-merger, both companies were very focused on Google rankings. Trustpilot, we're making tremendous progress. We used net promoter scores as well. We looked at call center data, first call resolution, average wait times. All of those metrics are starting to improve. Since we're in peak season, Nick, we're pretty much tipping every five-gallon bottle we're producing, which continues to put pressure on the days on hand at the branch. Therefore, we need about 8- 10 more weeks to get through peak season, through the hot season, and then it will stabilize back to where we need it to be on an everyday basis.
Okay. This is helpful because I think this was a missing link for a lot of folks in trying to understand why it was going to take that much longer. That would make sense, given you're basically trying to catch up at this point. That's super helpful. You know, look, I know you guys have been shying away from giving specific quarterly guidance, but I've been getting a lot of questions just in terms of how we should think about phasing for the direct delivery business between 3Q and 4Q. Any context to just help us frame that would be super, super helpful.
Sure. Again, we look at the business as a single segment. We go to market via our brands and our retail channel partners, which in some cases will have multiple offerings, whether it be premium, regional spring water, purified, and then obviously different formats, large and small. Specific to the direct side, which is a disclosure item in a channel, you would have seen a decline in the quarter. That decline really would have reflected a portion of the period of these service disruptions. It began in late May and only really began to build momentum in Q2.
When you look at Q3, we look at that as a period of recovery where we are still likely to face, because of the issues we just literally discussed with lingering supply constraints and some of that timeline to normalize service, we believe Q3 is going to face part of the recovery actions because a lot of the consumer behavior is on a lag based on when they experienced the disruption. While we've seen Trustpilot and other things stabilize, that's really their experience with whatever their current order was. Our goal is obviously to fulfill a higher percentage of the daily demand that's occurring. As we work our service gap higher across the quarter, that will really shift a lot of the recovery and phasing into more of the late parts of Q4.
You will come out of September and ideally be moving into the portions of Q4 with the recovery activities underway. One challenge there is Q2 and Q3 are where consumers, especially in things that are like exchange, where the demand is pretty much how many bottles you can keep on the rack because of how strong. I think we reported mid-teens growth there in the quarter. Q2 and Q3 are very strong quarters for us. Because we've experienced this disruption, that does make part of our recovery plan a little bit deferred to Q4. You're just delivering less consumption or less product volume in that period. That's kind of the way we look at the phasing.
We don't believe that, counter to that, we don't believe that retail is really in a period where it should be constrained or facing any challenges now that the Hawkins plant and how it handles Ozarka is really back and full speed in production and delivery.
Got it. Robert, you were discussing kind of ERP transition in terms of the non-BlueTriton business. Can you just give us some sense of, you know, should we anticipate any potential hiccups or do you feel really good about this transition going through seamlessly?
The ERP transition, which is mostly transitioning factories and branches from Oracle to SAP, which is the legacy BlueTriton system, has not necessarily caused any issues per se. Where we have mostly seen hiccups in the IT space is the transition in the handheld. Legacy Primo had one system that ran on iPhones. BlueTriton has a slightly more resilient piece of equipment that we use. There were slightly different delivery interfaces, you know, pulling the order out, taking a photo, which is something that Primo used to not do. There are some small adjustments that our drivers have had to make. We've also rolled in a couple of the features that were really beneficial from the Primo Water legacy app into the BTB legacy app. With that, we have improved the overall experience for all of our associates in the front line.
As you probably imagine, that did push some additional delay into the system where people are just learning how to use new equipment. That is really normalizing again. We see that because we track delivered units per day, and we're getting very favorable feedback from both frontline associate populations on the revised, updated app technology. We'll continue to update that as we go. The ERP conversion, which several of the folks asked about on Friday and Thursday, causing a little bit of angst because in other cases with other transitions, we've seen companies struggle with those, is not necessarily causing that many problems for us. It's mostly the adoption of the associate interface app technology and the geographic routing technology.
Got it. Okay. One last question on the direct delivery business before I move over to retail. I spent a lot of time on this company, and I was, frankly, very surprised by this office coffee services headwind that you discussed. I just wanted to get into that and understand, are there any other dynamics that we should be attending to that might cause somewhat of a blind side, if you will, on parts of your business? Just anything along those lines so we're aware of.
Yeah, Nik. When we started bringing the businesses together, we started asking some pretty significant questions about, through different phases of diligence, how much does the product portfolio overlap and where are there areas of differences. As you can imagine, as a private company, BlueTriton, with their private equity ownership, made a pretty intelligent decision to really simplify the SKU profile of what they bring to their customers. Office coffee services has always remained a headwind for the business. It's just been less material in how that is basically portrayed on a per-quarter basis.
It had been in serial decline for the last several years, largely because on a post-COVID basis, it was difficult to maintain a growth in that business where either return-to-office policies had not really brought enough people in for that portion of what they consume, whereas water would have been more of a staple, or as people have just been able to find more attractive ways to purchase products like K-Cups and rent brewers and other equipment. As we came into 2025 and really understanding that BlueTriton had largely moved away from this business, we looked at how should we assess ours. We had been in discussions with several kind of route-based market providers that solely do this as a break room sort of offering where they have more scale and advantage.
The business was in decline year to date, and we simply made a decision with what we had to recover and resolve within our consumers and customer base. We really needed to decomplex basically the supply chain. This is an area where we have things that have expiry like K-Cups and other brew pot coffee. We just thought that it would be an easier way to simplify and frankly really does not provide any headwind or concern with our existing customers. There are opportunities to get this service from others, whereas there are not as many opportunities to get water service like we provide from others. We felt it was a non-core. It was an easy thing to decomplex our business as the team really just solely focuses on resuming the water service to the best of our ability.
Got it. David, there are no other kind of ancillary businesses that could potentially also be discontinued or sold off?
At this time, no. I mean, again, we look at brand rationalization. That came up at our investor day. We have been transitioning brands in our water portfolio, but those really should not have any impact like what we're experiencing here with office coffee. Obviously, there has been a little bit of a tariff environment where we've assigned some of the future guide challenge to us working with retail partners to rationalize price to keep this affordable for their customers who shop in stores like Walmart. At this time, no, there are not anything of the magnitude of what this was, which was in the $54+ million annualized basis that we'll lose about half of that either through route sales or decomplexing. As we head into next year, it'll be fully out of our base, of which we'll provide transparent bridges and tables to help folks look through that.
Awesome. Robert, just a quick follow-up. When you said that there was a 1- 1.5% churn figure, is that net or gross of customer ads?
That was the net number that we registered throughout those two months. Obviously, those are not numbers that would have in any way impressed us through previous years, pre-merger as independent companies, because we tend to see that level of churn on a normalized basis as well. This was maybe slightly elevated, maybe 50 basis points, but we do see turnover in our customer base, particularly as we talked about in previous years. In the first six months right after trial period, we usually see slightly elevated. That's why we track both within the first year and post-first year. The good news is that we see our recruitment through digital acquisition improving because both legacy companies now have access to powerful brand portfolio, regional spring brands, whereas previously only BlueTriton Brands had those. We're seeing the marketing of our services significantly improve through digital acquisition.
We're pretty confident that we can, through both our win-back campaign and with our digital marketing acquisition and then the in-store programs, probably recruit most of those people back this year. If not this year, we'll be getting them back next year. Whilst it's slightly elevated, 1.5% or 50,000 more or less customers on a 3 million customer base was not as high as we could have expected it to be.
What do win-back campaigns look like? Is this providing free product, promotions? Any context around that?
Yeah. Yes, exactly. We would typically receive a cancellation. We would get that over the phone or not any other means. That's usually followed by a pickup of the equipment. Between the cancellation and the pickup, there's a window where we can reach out to the customer and talk a little bit about, "Hey, what went wrong? Apologize for the late service. Can we give you a free product reimbursement or an overall, let's say, an overall discount level, a dollar amount of discounted product over the next couple of months?" We see very high success rates with those win-back campaigns because ultimately, the customer really wants our water and is open to renew very often as long as we commit to restore service levels.
Got it. Okay. Perfect. Just moving on to the retail business, you know, obviously, we all know weather was an issue, that's been well documented. Do you think there's anything from a macro perspective weighing on the business at all? Perhaps movement into private label, that's a question we get a lot on the retail side.
Yeah. Let me give a bit of a perspective. The first quarter, we saw accelerated growth rates in dollars. That slowed down considerably in Q2, primarily as a result of colder weather. We do see a slightly elevated private label share throughout the first and the second quarter, which would be an indication of, you know, consumer confidence. We have grown market share through the first half, as you know, 11 basis points. As you look at the second quarter, or sorry, the third quarter where we're now, and you look at the publicly available data, we continue to grow share. This morning, obviously, we got the data of last week, where we saw in Circana that we grew 2.2% dollar share growth, or scan sales with dollar share growth of 47 basis points and volume share of 1.3 and 48. That's a continuation. That's the week through August 3rd.
That's a continuation of the first four weeks into July. I think it's a sixth week of consecutive share growth that we've had so far. We feel good about our portfolio of brands. Remember, we have not only Pure Life, but we have the leading spring brands in the U.S.: Poland Spring, Ozarka, Zephyrhills, Deer Park, Arrowhead. We also have our super premium brands that are doing quite well with Saratoga, Mountain Valley. In that mix, I believe we have a very robust presence on the shelf. At the front of the store, we have the five-gallon offering in exchange. We really play across all the price tiers. What that helps us do is in these periods of consumer confidence, uncertainty, and maybe a tendency to look a little bit more at what you spend.
We have offerings across all price points in all formats, from premium glass to case packs to five-gallon in the store. That makes our model very unique and competitive right now in this marketplace. This is why we're growing share.
Excellent. Just looking at the distribution, it's been very strong. Some would say, if they're getting so much distribution, how come we're not seeing better retail sales growth, especially at a time where I think, you know, Aquafina and Dasani are both kind of, you know, coughing up even more market share. Robert, maybe you can just kind of address that head-on in terms of, you know, when we can expect to see that distribution really manifest in better top line.
Yeah. I think the distribution, we grew total points of distribution, which is a metric you can find in Nielsen or Circana. It's based on scans, right? So where does the product scan through the store? It's inarguable data. We grew 10% distribution. We're starting to see that distribution materialize into higher shares into the first, you know, month of Q3. Remember, our Q2 share was largely impacted by the weather in the Northeast where we have a 40% share. The Northeast is our stronghold market. With Poland Spring and Pure Life, we have about a 40% share. Nationally, we have about a 20% share in bottled water in retail. Ozarka, obviously, one of our fastest growing brands, was severely impacted by the Hawkins tornado, which would have then resulted in a lower share growth situation.
Now that we're through those things and the weather is normalized, you see the category rebounding on a dollar basis and on a volume basis. We are obviously growing slightly faster than the category behind that portfolio of very unique and competitive propositions. I think that's going to, you know, we're going to hopefully see more of the impact of the distribution. Now, when you build distribution on new items, those include Splash sparkling water with flavor. They include Arrowhead sparkling in California, and they include a lot of the PET offerings on Mountain Valley and Saratoga. Not all of those will have the same velocity levels in day one as our case pack water. We need to build velocity by promoting those brands on display and various other tactics in store.
Our job with the retailer is to drive velocity on those new items and make sure that they prove out in the retail environment.
Great.
All those variables have led to where we are right now.
Excellent. Super helpful. Another big question that's been coming in is just the delta, the very large delta between what we see in scanner for the premium brands, right, over 150% versus what you reported in the last quarter in the mid-40%. Can you just help square that gap? What is going on? I know a lot of that business is untracked, but any perspective would be helpful.
David, do you want to take that one?
Yeah. Yeah. Nick, part of the issue there is simply the untracked pieces, right? Mountain Valley would have grown up in the natural channel where you have to get to different panel data to get to that answer. Largely, a part of this is Mountain Valley has a very, very successful direct delivery component to our customers. It is a product beloved because of part of its glass packaging. Obviously, its spring properties where, you know, athletes, celebrities, everyday users have found it to be a very resilient and important brand to their lifestyle. As we ran into service disruptions, product supply prioritization was done largely in our regional spring water and pure brands, whether it be Pure Life or Primo. Some of Mountain Valley's disruption or gap there between scanner data really is when we consolidate that reporting into our channel disclosures for public consumption.
Some of that is just literally a ceiling on the brand because of some of the activities in direct delivery. Again, it's a combination of that as well as sort of scanner panel data and more sort of off-channel or atypical reported retail channels.
Okay. This is really a Mountain Valley issue because of the direct. You can imagine, with all the Saratoga-Aston Hall dynamics happening throughout the quarter, there was a very high level of expectation for that business. People were seeing it in scanner data, and I think they were a little thrown off guard when they saw the reported numbers. That is helpful clarity. All right. Just moving on to the last kind of few questions here on the financials. The sequence of your synergy opportunity chart that you had in the deck implies that you'll tackle call center after you did IT and ERP. Given that historically this has been a source of some customer headaches in the past, do you see any more further integration issues there? Are you baking that in, or do you feel like that's not going to be much of an issue?
No. Part of it is the aggravation, which, you know, I'm sure investors are curious about as we remain very confident. When you go through our original synergy map and look at how we were going to collect them over time, as we get longer into this journey, certainly in 2026, it will be more difficult each quarter to perfectly parse out which level of contribution and where it is coming from. Within the call center specifically, we were underway in reducing the duplicative resources, the different approaches by each legacy company on how to go to market to support call activity. Clearly, however, when you get into late May, June, and July, you had a resumption, which obviously Trustpilot remains a very strong external indicator of how people feel. We had to ramp some of that activity back up.
As you can look at the complaint data, people were upset with the duration they may have had to wait online, or to get resolution. As we ramped up, what had previously been sort of a declining rate of those associates within our company or the way we go to market in doing that, that's led to some of that aggravation. We do believe, though, as again, service is the first sort of order of magnitude of thing we have to focus on, and everything else is a derivative of that. If you give good service, your quits go down. Your ability to actualize harmonization in price works. Your ability to reduce your staff that's needed to sort of handle interactions via chat, web, or email, or call direct. All those are areas we can start to get back into momentum on, capturing synergies.
Got it. David, you know, the EBITDA margin expanded in the second quarter, but gross margins did contract. You know, can you just walk us through the moving parts there and how we should think about that dynamic as we think about the back half?
Sure. Just as a reminder, and it's not, you know, not leaning in on the question, but just as a reminder, any public data today on a GAAP basis or SEC reported is not comparable because it is legacy BlueTriton only denominator or prior year period and Primo Brands numerator or current year period. When we do look at margins, there is some decline. Part of that is just simply the nature of the two different companies coming together. Regardless, there is a slight decline. Really where that happens is when there's aggravation in the supply chain where we are inefficient with getting volume to the end customer, that's going to show up in where our cost of goods line occurs. Obviously, the resulting impact will be to gross margin.
A couple of things on the longer-term perspective, if you zoom out, a large portion of our synergy capture, the branch, the production, the facilities occurs in our cost of goods. As we're able to affect the synergy capture without a lot of the future aggravation, you'll see that margin improve. Certainly, there are other areas where you're still able to see EBITDA improve because a lot of the fixed costs and the operating expenses, selling costs, more of the human capital or associate capital that we're removing from a duplicative standpoint occurs later in the P&L. Regardless, when we have volume accretive growth, it really helps the whole P&L perform at a much higher level than obviously we experienced in Q2.
Yeah, it makes sense. I guess just kind of two final questions, and I'll turn it over to the team here to see if they have any final comments. You know, the $1 billion in free cash flow by 2027, despite some of the challenges you've had this year, what's allowing you to maintain that confidence?
Yeah. We have not really gotten into, outside of some of the inventory and the inefficiencies I addressed with related to office coffee services, we've really not leaned in yet on sort of where we can enhance our accounts receivable and our DSO sort of turns. As you can imagine, when you're creating friction with the customer and I was supposed to deliver to you on Monday and I don't get to you until Wednesday or Friday or the next Monday, I'm delaying my cycle. When I create a friction experience after I've delivered to you, I might have to have credits or something to sort of retain your customer. That's not really allowing us to be on our front foot with regard to our AR management.
Similarly, we are just going through a lot of the procurement saves, which is great from a cash basis or sort of the OpEx or COGS we have in our company, but we really haven't really unified sort of our approach on AP. When you just think about how much working capital affects our business, we're really very early in those innings on how to sort of improve that. It is going to be an area we have to improve once we have stable service so we really get a good baseline. That remains an area where we can still drive behavior, that regardless of the conversion to a lower EBITDA, we should still have opportunities. A second area, part of this is hindsight, right?
A lot has changed in the macro environment, but obviously, there's been some very important legislation with regard to depreciation policies of in capital or capitalized or in in-service equipment. We feel very fortunate about some of the other macro factors with regard to tax policy and others that we'll be able to take advantage of. I think we also might be coming in clearly to an environment where, as predicted, some slightly lower interest rates where we still do have a term loan B, where we have opportunities. We did reprice that earlier this year in February, but we have opportunities on how we might have handled that debt. We're really looking at how interest expense might be a contributing factor to sort of remaining resilient and committed to that billion-dollar target.
Okay. Super helpful, Bridge. Thank you for that. The final question for me is, you know, as you can imagine, two quarters of results that were lower than what people expected, there are questions that come up about the credibility of the guide. A lot of folks have been asking how much in terms of contingency or cushion do you think they've embedded? It's hard for me to answer. I figured you'd be in a better place to give some perspective on that.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, again, we approach guidance as a range. We've really approached this year on a fiscal basis, trying to have a range that allows us to achieve our results. Clearly, we are not pleased with having to revise that guidance to date. We've tried to at least provide some transparency on what we believe are sort of one-time issues in the 100 basis points of the 350, other areas being the 110 basis points related to retail, which was largely first half concentrated due to Hawkins and weather items. It's where we're seeing the business and calling the ball today. Obviously, we're working vigilantly to recover and do a better job. Frankly, the demand's there. We have to do a better job of servicing it.
That provides us gateways to do other things that were thought of strategically in the merger from the start, like pricing harmonization and the ability to really capture top-of-funnel customers more efficiently. We remain very focused there. The faster we can recover the business, obviously, that has a direct correlation to our ability to perform within that guide or, ideally, we would be in a position to do better.
Yeah. Excellent. David, Robert, let me hand it back over to you if you have any kind of final comments before we end today's Fireside Chat.
Yeah. Thanks, Nik. What I'd say is that we are taking decisive actions to restore the issues that we've had in the second quarter, which were partially self-inflicted operational issues and in some, you know, due to nature with the tornado and then there was a discontinuation of the coffee business. We will continue to implement corrections to restore performance. The value creation thesis of the company remains unchanged. Primo Brands is a leader in the large and rapidly growing healthy hydration segment. We deliver essential beverages to millions across North America with unmatched scale and reach. Our resilient operating model provides stability and performance consistency, even amid economic fluctuations and operational hurdles because of the continued strong demand in the water category.
We are in the early stages of a substantial margin capture, which you know of, and we have the path to get through 25% adjusted EBITDA margins by 2027 through synergies and efficiency gains and pricing optimizations. We have strong organic growth factors. We have innovation. We have market expansion. We believe that we are positioned for long-term growth post-2025. We have a number of value creation levers. We have multiple pathways to drive shareholder value. We have robust organic growth runway. We have creative M&A, an example, and sustainable free cash flow generation targeting high levels of conversion of adjusted EBITDA. We have flexible capital allocation for dividends or share repurchases as we're doing this quarter and strategic investments.
The net of it is if I think of the power of Primo Brands as a bigger and stronger and faster entity post the merger of Primo Water and BlueTriton Brands, with a leader in healthy hydration with unmatched scale. We have a coast-to-coast network of manufacturing and branches, which are vertically integrated. Let's also remember our brand portfolio. We have the strongest and most diversified water brand portfolio. We have product formats across value, core, premium in Poland Spring, Deer Park, Ozarka, Saratoga, Mountain Valley, and Primo Water, which is a big brand on its own, driving innovation in a sustainable, healthy hydration segment. All in all, we have a very promising future. I want to thank you, Nik, for giving us a quick opportunity this morning to talk to our investors.
Yeah. You bet. Thank you again to the team here for taking the time and for everyone tuning in. If you have any follow-ups for me, you know where to find me. Everyone have a great week, and thank you again.
All right, thank you.