All right. Hello, everyone again. Welcome to the 17th Annual Ideas Conference. My name is Erke. I'm with Three Part. Today we have the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory traded on the NASDAQ, ticker RMCF. On behalf of the company, we have Jeff Geygan. Please.
Of course.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here today. We're Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. I'm Jeff Geygan, interim CEO. This is Carrie Cass, our CFO. We have some slides prepared for you. Let's go to... While you're looking through this, just a couple of things. Number one, we did put K out at 9:00 A.M. Eastern today. That's this deck. There's some information here that we haven't previously disclosed that I'm glad to be able to talk to you about, so that'll be good. Number two is our brand is pretty well known, which always surprises me. We're only in 26 states. We have 143 stores. Yet, wherever I travel, I ask people about Rocky Mountain. They say, "Oh, no, I love your brand.
I love it. I say, "How do you know our brand?" Erke just said, "I love your brand." I said, "How do you know our brand?" This is the story. When I was five years old, I went there with my mom, my dad, my uncle, my cousin, whomever, and I've been going there forever. I said to Erke, the next question I'd ask is, "Do you have kids yourself?" because there's this generational issue. He said, "Not yet." I said, "The next thing is you start bringing your kids." He said, "I'm going to bring my kids because I want them to have the same experience I had as a kid with Rocky Mountain." There's something really special about this company. By the way, I'm a finance guy. I've worked on Wall Street 35 years.
I used to sit in your seat coming to listen to this. This is the first time I've ever done this stuff. I do a bad job. You can tell me afterwards. It is a super interesting company because of the opportunity that rests with it. We've had one-on-ones with investors today, and a lot of guys have said, "Well, I've been following this company for a long time, and you never really seem to be able to get it right." I joined the board in August of 2021. In May of 2024, I was asked to be the CEO, which I accepted on an interim basis, and I'm still there 18 months later on an interim basis.
Everyone said, "How long are you going to stay?" I said, "Until we get it fixed." You'll know the company's fixed when I say it's time to pass the baton on to someone else. There's an enormous amount of opportunity here. The company started in 1981. It was a single store up in Durango, Colorado. If you know where Durango, Colorado is, it's in the southwest part of Colorado. It's far away from everything. It's beautiful. It's 6,500 ft above sea level, surrounded by mountains. The closest interstate is three and a half hours away. Logistically, it's a challenge to do business there. There's this heritage from the single store that we started in 1981. We grew. We went public in 1985. In the 1990s, we expanded rapidly. Somewhere in the mid-2010s, we peaked with about 238 stores.
The company lost its vision. For about the next 10 years or so, the company moved sideways to down. Revenues contracted, stores contracted. The company was really looking for the next shiny object. We veered into a whole bunch of things. It really took us away from our primary business, which is that of being a franchisor and selling premium chocolate products. I joined the board in 2021. By 2024, they had asked me to come and run it. Again, I'm a finance guy, so I needed to surround myself with a lot of smart people who understood franchising and marketing and distribution and production and so on, things that I instinctively would not have known, but I have learned a lot about it. Right now, we have really four primary cornerstones in our plan to transform the company.
Number one is data and analytics, and that's in the corner here, which was POS, ERP in place. We needed a lot more data in order to run the business. Number two was to focus on revenue growth. We knew we needed to take this from $30 million to something more. Full disclosure, at some point in the past, the company did about $40 million with a production facility that we have in Durango, Colorado. Number three was operational efficiency. We know there's a lot of room to squeeze costs. To Carrie's credit, when she came in a couple of months after me in August of 2024, she's been able to squeeze about $1.5 million out of our income statement in terms of SG&A, which is pretty meaningful if you look at our income statement.
The last cornerstone of our foundation here was financial stability. Shortly after we got there, we sold everything that was not nailed down. We sold a note payable. We raised some equity in August of 2024 and then refinanced our senior credit facility at the end of September. There has been a lot of work that has been done to try to get the company really turned around. As we talk about a turnaround, it was really more than a turnaround. It is a transformation in terms of where we intend to go with the business. During the last 10 years, and I show you this to say this is what went wrong, which is why I have talked to a lot of investors who said, "I have just been watching your stock for a while." The stock is down almost 90%. This is $1.84.
Last I looked, it was $1.55 or so. I say causation-wise, if you look at the store count on the right-hand side of this, we peaked at 238 stores. Ten years ago, we had 217. Today, we're about 139. We have three company-owned stores and a number of licensees, which is primarily Cold Stone Creamery. I'll talk a little bit about the economics as we move along. Part of the transformation, it was important to get the right people in. This is Jim Collins' good-to-great kind of story, really. I came in as interim CEO, immediately brought Carrie Cass in as CFO. Shortly after that, we brought a marketing and sales guy in who is really, really good. He's responsible almost solely for the new box product that we have, which if you'd like to try some afterwards, I'd love to give you a box.
Recently, we brought a fellow in who runs our operations, tremendous background, Six Sigma, lean manufacturing. Not too long ago, we added a fellow to do franchise business support. For all the royalty revenue that we come in, the quid pro quo is you pay us royalties, we come out and we provide some service to you. That would be Niman. He's doing a very good job of that. Lastly, at the point when I really felt like it was time to start growing under the concept of nail it, then scale it, I think Carrie and I have got most of the nuts and bolts are in the right place now. It's time to scale it. We brought Dave Danker in, who does franchise development.
One of the items that we disclosed in here is we signed a deal with a new franchisee to open nine stores down in Miami, which I'll talk about in a minute or two. In terms of the progress we've made to date, I'm just talking first half 2026. Remember, we run a March 1 fiscal year. From March to the end of August, we have $13 million in revs versus last year, a little bit just under $13 million at $12.8 million. More importantly, as for our Adjusted EBITDA, we're about at break-even versus last year. We lost $2 million. A couple of slides out, I'll show you the overall decline in the business over the last three years. It was pretty bad. Back to the point, one of the foundations is we needed to put ERP and POS in place so that we could get real data.
We were really lacking information about what was happening inside the stores, which made it difficult to sell a new store. Explain it to a potential franchisee. This good store looks like. Here are the economics of it. We also recently updated our website, rmcf.com. If you have not seen it, I take a look at it. It is really beautiful. It also incorporates in a section for franchise development, which we previously had not had integrated. We have had a lot of success in selling new franchise stores, which is a critical part of the third point, which is additional revenue. When you think about revenue, we have royalty revenue, we have revenue from stores, and then we have other revenue that is related to that, primarily company-owned stores. E-commerce, we updated our packaging, which I pointed to a little bit earlier.
All of this is iterative in terms of where we're taking the brand, how we're trying to grow it, the way we're trying to really elevate it back to the premium brand that it has always been intended to be. In the midst of all this, we did a complete refresh, which is a new logo. If you know our old logo, it was purple and brown, and the logo that you're seeing today is really a refreshed label. That permeated the store design as well. As far as the overall dynamic in the industry, there's a huge amount of opportunity. I'll highlight the second to the right here. No one of our competitors has more than 15% market share. It's highly fragmented. I feel like there's just an enormous amount of opportunity for us to grab additional market share as we move forward.
As far as the company drivers itself, there are very few people that look and feel just like us. If you know Kilwins, it's a Michigan company. They're probably the closest in terms of their franchising, where they're located, their store model. We have something that's really special. If you ask people that have been in the store, if you haven't, there's special experience going on there. We have a tremendous amount of demand. As I said to open, 26 states, 143 stores. Almost everywhere I go, people know our brand. Over the last 44 years, we've done a good job spreading the brand, spreading the store-wide experience. The bottom point here, just modernizing the store. We'll show you a couple of pictures of that as we go on. The new store design is very contemporary. It's very warm and appealing to our customers.
I mentioned a few slides ago, historically, whether it's net income or EBITDA, we ended up losing a lot of money over the last three years. The turnaround is the numbers I just showed you, $13.2 million versus a slight break-even. We're a little bit of a seasonal business too. Our Q1 and Q2 tend to be slower. Our Q3, Q4, which Q3 starts on September 1, Q4 starts on December 1, are generally our stronger times of the year. We have an expectation that we'll come out of this year with positive EBITDA. Most of the investment that we've made has been in human capital as opposed to capital equipment. Last year, we did spend a little over $3 million in putting equipment into the production facility. By and large, versus the people that I just showed you, we've been investing in human capital here.
We're starting to see the results of that investment right now. Strategically, just to kind of walk through a whole host of issues around the data and analytics, we completed the ERP. The POS implementation is done across about 80% of our stores today, which means we're getting a much richer stream of data into corporate so we understand what's happening out in the field within our stores. Historically, the data that we got from the stores wasn't as strong as you might have expected. We also, trying to defend our operating margins under the cornerstone of revenue and financial stability, have gone to dynamic pricing. When we look at the cocoa market, which trades in the futures, that market had gone for years and years. The cocoa traded between roughly $1,000 and $3,000 per metric ton. About 24 months ago, it spiked up to $10,000, then $12,000.
When I arrived, cocoa was sitting somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000. It's relevant because 47% of our raw material costs are actually chocolate. And chocolate's a derivative of cocoa. As the cocoa market goes, so goes the cost of chocolate. 47% of our raw materials is chocolate. We pay pretty close attention to that. For perspective, the next biggest as a percentage raw material is sugar or cream, which are about 5%. We pay a lot of attention to chocolate. When we arrived, there was no hedging strategy in place. We've tried to put a natural hedge on, recognizing that there's a certain amount of chocolate we consume in the year that we can go in to buy in tranches, pieces of some commitment of chocolate on a forward basis.
For probably the better part of nine, 12 months, whenever we could lock in about $8,000 a metric ton, we would. Recently, if anyone follows the cocoa market, it broke down to seven, then six. On Monday, we locked in some meaningful amount of production or demand at $5,200 a metric ton. That is moving in our favor. The headwind with that is the tariffs. There was a tariff imposed upon imports of cocoa that affected us sub 10%, but it was a meaningful amount. I think on Thursday evening, the president signed an executive order which removed the tariff on certain countries that will affect our import of cocoa, which is a big plus for us. I mentioned earlier, we refreshed our brand. We are working really hard on strengthening our franchise network. That is, we currently have about 110 unique franchisees across the 143 stores.
We're working very hard to attract a new, more sophisticated, well-capitalized franchisee to our system. We're trying to attract individuals that have the capacity to open five, 10, 15 stores in a single swoop. Today, from our franchise demographic, the most any one franchisee owns today is four. Recent evidence, we brought a brand new franchisee in from Miami who's committed to opening nine stores in the next three years. I think that's proof positive from an investor's perspective. When you look at that, you say, "Oh, it sounds like you guys are making some progress here." We recently opened a store down in Charleston, South Carolina. It's under the new look and feel. It's done very well. Currently, it's annualizing at about $500,000. New store, new market.
It's our expectation at some point that store can produce round numbers of about a million dollars in sales, which will be great. Our average unit volume across stores is about $613,000 today. If you think about our overall retail, we have $600,000 average AUV, 140 stores. At retail, we do about $85 million. At corporate, we generate about $30 million. We get paid a royalty based upon that retail sale. We're collecting 5% + 1% marketing fee on the $85 million in sales. In some ways, it's a recurring revenue model here where we're picking up royalty on that retail sale. All right. On the right, you'll see a little bit of the look and feel of our new store. This really represents the new signage and design of our stores. I mentioned to you we opened a store in Charleston, South Carolina.
We're also weeks away from opening a store in Chicago. If anyone's from Chicago, it's downtown, one State Street on the corner of State and Madison. It's a beautiful location. We have a store that's under construction in Palladio, California, which is near Sacramento, Jersey Shore just outside Asbury Park. I just mentioned we have a nine-store deal down in Miami. This is by far the biggest multi-store deal we've signed in probably 10-15 years. Additional multi-unit deals we'll probably sign within the next two to six weeks. There'll be more to follow. Yeah. I think it's important as you think about these 140 stores and the revenue opportunity for us. The second cornerstone of our plan here is to drive revenue. The easiest way for us to increase sales is to go to an existing franchisee, ask them to buy more product.
We want to go from $85 million to $100 million, but 15% pickup at the existing stores. The easy way to do that because it's an existing customer, existing location. We already have a truck going there. The second arm is store. I think for the last 10+ years, there's been a decline in store count. As investors, someone asked, "What should I pay attention to?" I say, "Can we grow revenues and can we increase store count?" Will be very important considerations. In addition, we need to improve our margins. For every pound of product that we sell out of Durango, we need to produce it more efficiently. As we think about growing the number of franchisees within our system, we're really trying to attract existing franchisees that routinely would own two or three different concepts.
Think they have an Auntie Anne's, a Wetzel's Pretzels, a Cinnabon. They are kind of in the business of running a franchise operation, not necessarily just a franchise or two. Investors like that would typically say, "I'd like to add Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory to our portfolio." I think this franchisee may have 10 or 20 or 30 stores. The idea of us to approach them and say, "Would you like to add a Rocky Mountain? We'd do a 10-store deal with you or a 20-store deal with you," is very real in terms of how do we end up growing the system. Bearing in mind we are at 140 stores right now, what we have held out publicly is that we are going to try this year to be net store positive, which means if we lose five, we want to open five or six. We are net positive.
Again, first time we've done that in well over a decade. We're on track right now to do that. We recently remodeled one of our three company-owned stores. We have a store in Durango, Colorado, a store in Camarillo, California, which is northwest of LA, and a store in Corpus Christi, Texas. As a result of the remodel, and that remodel round numbers cost about $100,000, we've had a positive sales impact. In fact, that store does about $500,000-$600,000 a year. Within a month of the store doing a remodel and kind of the grand reopening, the store hit its all-time highest sales day. We feel like the remodel, the rebrand will end up driving top-line revenue for us, which is important. Camarillo, California, which we acquired mid-August. This is public information. We paid about $165,000 for it.
It's about a $700,000 a year in sales store. We assume stores like that would generate, round numbers, about a 15% EBITDA margin. That store will throw off, round numbers, a little over $100,000. We bought it for $165,000. That will be immediately accretive to our corporate margin. There are other stores like that. At some point, today we own three company stores. I would assume in the future we probably own half a dozen, dozen stores for a host of reasons. Number one, if we can buy them at margins like that or multiples like that, you'd say you should probably do that all day long. The ROI looks pretty good. Number two, it gives us a strategic reason to be in a market. For example, in LA, now we have a foothold there. We have a store. We have people. We have an infrastructure.
It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that we own two, three, four, five stores in Los Angeles where we can really run a business down there. The margin is pretty attractive for us. When we own a company store, it gives us an opportunity to really treat that as a petri dish for doing new product, new ways of selling, new merchandising, and so on. The company stores are an important asset for us. Some of these I've touched on a little bit just in terms of data and analytics with the ERP and POS system. It is important for us to get as much data as we can in order to run the business. Store websites, which heretofore had not been—we've not allowed that to happen. We are now launching a website for each unique location, which will have a buy now.
This is under the heading of we want to help stores drive sales and improve profitability. We're leaning pretty heavily into third-party delivery. Think Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, and even EzCater, which tend to have almost a 2x average ticket value compared to what happens in our stores right now. These are some ways that under the heading of driving revenue, we can take the existing base of 143 stores and drive incremental sales there as a supplement to what's happening with our new store development plan. We recently brought our consumer packaging in-house that had been outsourced about 18 months ago to maybe a little bit more than that. Maybe like 24 months ago, we outsourced that to Salt Lake City. Economically, it hurt us. We brought that back.
Our rough estimate is we probably saved about $1.5 million a year in operating costs bringing that back in. We have changed how we deliver our product to franchise stores just in thinking in terms of our logistics and how do we get product on a timely basis into stores. With the hiring of Luis Burgos, who brings Six Sigma lean manufacturing, we have experienced a substantial amount of efficiency improvement and cost savings in manufacturing. We touched briefly on the cocoa market. The price had dropped to $6,000. As of yesterday, it was $5,200 and moving favorably in our direction. I mentioned that we have been able to reduce our G&A significantly. Year- over- year, at least $1.5 million we have saved. We brought our packaging back to Durango, which gives us better control.
We've rationalized SKUs, and this is a hard number to believe. Previously, we had close to 1,000 items in our POS that were considered everyday items. Within the last two weeks, we did a rationalization of that, brought it down to 356 SKUs, which will vastly improve our production efficiencies. I mentioned the flat fee getting freed out, which ensures that we get product to stores on a more timely basis. Our long-term goal really is to drive top line, get a margin back to where it has been historically, and then open more stores. We've talked a little bit about our initiative to open new stores here, system-wide refresh, logo store signage. If you have not been into a store, I'd encourage you to go in. The look of the new stores is fantastic.
We're working on stronger new franchisee relationships, financially sophisticated, well-capitalized entrepreneurial individuals that will open up 10+ stores for us. I think that's probably all here. This is just in terms of what we're doing with our digital assets in terms of a new website. We'll roll out a loyalty program, which will help drive same-store sales. That's early part of 2026. Third-party delivery, which with certainty will drive additional sales to stores and improve profitability for the stores. Just in terms of how to think about the business, really, with the sources of revenue here, probably one of the most important parts is the royalty revenue. If you have an investment management company, you get paid on assets under management, think of the same thing. We get paid at retail sales. We have round numbers about $85 million in retail sales.
If we show up next year and we have the same $85 million, we're going to collect 5% plus a 1% marketing fee, so 6% of that. If we just come in and we don't open a single new store and I don't hire a single new person, we can drive that by 10%. Our royalties go up. It is a really attractive piece of the business. The gross margin on that business is north of 50% routinely. It depends a little bit on how much staff I bring in to support it, but it is a very attractive piece of the business. Albeit, it is only about 20% of our overall revenues today, but it is an important piece of it. We brought in what I would consider to be some very motivated individuals. They're all equity-focused, as am I, in terms of delivering to shareholders.
I've said to people, "I'm your quintessential equity-oriented CEO. I live to drive value for shareholders. That's my job here." This is the first time I've come out to do a conference. Our IR firm had said to me 18 months ago, "When do you want to go out and talk to investors?" I said, "Got to get the story right." He said, "When will that be?" I said, "I'm not sure." About three months ago, I called him up. I said, "Okay, it's time to go out and talk to investors. The story is right. We've got proof positive. We've got the data. We've got the analytics. We're driving new stores sales. We're driving existing stores sales. It's time to go out and talk to investors about it." Yeah, and here's strong franchise momentum.
Again, we've got a whole host of new store opportunities coming on board here. Of course, it's a very large and growing market. Our franchisees have said to me, "We have a lot of competition." I said, "I don't think we have any competition." "Well, what about See's? What about Kilwins?" I said, "Now, look, our model is really different than theirs in terms of See's is all company-owned, so that's not a franchisee. If you go into a See's versus our store, it's quite a different experience. Same with Kilwins. I like Kilwins. There are two of them down in Charleston where I live. It's a great brand, but our offering is really very different than theirs. If you go in and you try their product next to ours, I think you'll see that.
Other than that, at the very high end, there's Venchi and Lauterrock, which I think is more comparable to the premium product that we produce. We're not getting $80 a pound yet, but there could be a time in the future when we go from something closer to $40-$50-$60 as we reposition the company through this whole transformational process. In our consumer's mind, in the person that's buying our chocolate, we say, "This is really an aspirational brand. If you're walking into a Rocky Mountain store, at some level, you should be saying, 'I made it. I can go in and I can afford to buy Rocky Mountain. And it's really premium.'" From the day Carrie and I got there, the mandate was, "Guys, whatever you did previously, assume it wasn't working. If it was, I wouldn't be here. So assume it's not.
Everything's fair game with one exception. Do not screw with the formula. We make a really, really good product. We're not going to touch that. Everything else is fair game. As a result, we've had a lot of change, a lot of turnover, a lot of change in culture, a lot of change in attitude. We put a huge emphasis on the culture of the company. Most important, you have to show up to work. You've got to be on time. You've got to think critically. You've got to follow through. If there's an issue, you got to own it and then solve it. Probably the biggest challenge we had from day one was getting the culture right. We're moving in that direction.
I think that's about it. We got seven and a half, eight minutes. Glad to answer any questions. Sorry, I hustled through that, but wanted to make sure we had opportunity to answer questions. Yes, sir?
Two questions. How do you go about vetting potential franchisee? What criteria do you use to say, "Okay, you're a good fit for us?" Secondly, what's the shelf life of the product? How much turnover is there? You can't all stay on the shelf forever.
Yeah, yeah, sure. It's a good question. Let me answer the second one first because that's easy. The best buy date, because it's really hard empirically to say, "On this date, it's sour," like a quart of milk or something. On the short end, it's three months. On the long end, it's 18 months. Generally, most of our product is turning every four to six months. In terms of how do we vet a new franchisee, I've spent a lot of time in the investment management business, and everyone wants to look at an income statement, but it's most important that you get the CEO or leadership right. There's no spot on an Excel file to really handicap the CEO. A lot of it's experience, a lot of it's judgment. You interview people, you talk to them.
With a CEO like me, you could call me up every three months or so, and I get to report out to you. It's the same with us with a prospective franchisee. I'm looking for a guy that's smart, so he's financially sophisticated. I will definitely talk to him. Explain to me your business plan, your financial statements. If you don't understand an income statement and a balance sheet, I'm not going to let you come in as a new franchisee for us because we've been way too frustrated talking to guys about how do you run your franchise store. They're my customer, but really, they're my salesperson too. That's the guy that I need to be able to run the business. You have to be financially sophisticated because I don't want to explain to you how income statements work.
You have to be well-capitalized because these stores' round numbers are going to cost anywhere from $400,000-$600,000 to build. My expectation is if you're with the company and you're a franchisee, I want you to be growing. Every two, three years, I want you to spend $400,000, $500,000, $600,000 to build a store. If you don't have the money, I love to have you as a customer, but you're not going to be a franchisee for us. You have to be entrepreneurial because I don't want to get up in the morning, come to work, motivate all my guys, and then go out and motivate 140 franchisees. I just don't have the energy to do that. We're looking for guys that are self-starters. Those guys are out there, for sure. The whole process is there are a series of interviews.
Part of the reason I got a couple of guys on my executive team that have industry experience, franchising experience, they can help me. They know what the red flags are. They're like, "This guy's not going to be good. He tells a good story, but he'll not be good." It is really important as we go forward. I have said to investors, "I'd like to open 100 stores, and I'd like to have 10 new franchisees. They each have 10 stores because I can manage 10 more guys. I don't want to manage 100 more guys. If I pick 100, I'm definitely going to get it wrong. If I get it wrong with 10%, I only have one bad apple out of that 10 versus I can compound my problems if we have too many guys." Thanks for the question. Other questions? Yes, sir.
How many stores are you guys closing before market time?
Yeah, it's a good question. We don't target stores to close. Usually, it's natural attrition. One of the reasons is, and the one I hear most often, "Jeff, I've been doing this for 30 years. I've lost my mojo. I want to close the store." Before Carrie and I showed up on a Friday, someone would call up and say, "I'm closing my store," and we'd announce we have a closed store. Shortly after we got there, and that happened two or three times, I'm like, "Wait a sec. Someone doesn't just wake up Friday morning and say, 'I'm closing my store.' It's a business. This takes time." We should know that. We didn't.
I charged my guys in franchise business support, "You got to get out and talk to franchisees because if it's a decent location and someone wants out, I'll definitely find someone to buy it." On the one or two earnings calls earlier, I said, "We have 110 franchisees, 140 stores. Round number is about 1.34 stores per franchisee. I want to drive that number. If someone wants out, I'm like, 'No problem. I'm going to find someone to buy your store.'" I said to the franchisee, "You have to think about this. This is a real business. This has equity value." That was a novel concept when I first talked to my franchisees about it. I said, "No, think about this. We're going to sell your store. It has intrinsic value." I can tell you that. I've been valuing businesses for 35 years.
I can say to a guy in, say, Houston, "I've got four stores down there. One guy wants out. Do you want to buy it?" Much like Camarillo, which I described earlier, which was a real steal, that's easy money for a guy who's already in the business, already in the market, has all the assets and infrastructure there. I say, "You want to open another store? It'll do $500,000-$600,000." Usually, the time that someone's ready to cash out like that, their store is underperforming. Routinely, when we have change in ownership, we'll see a 20% bump. Bear in mind, I want to have fewer guys owning more stores, easier to manage, more effective. If you own one store versus five stores, the guy who owns five stores is going to run a much more efficient business. Yes, sir?
Do you have a view of the economics of new stores from a franchisee perspective? Profitability of stores?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the FTC takes issue with me talking to franchisees about that. They say, "You're not allowed to do that," which as a finance guy was unusual to me. I am going to talk to you in concept. If I propose to you, you open a $1 million store, I would also propose, if you're a decent operator, you'll generate a 15% EBITDA margin. If you generate a 15% EBITDA margin and we back into it, you're going to say, "What's my ROI?" I say, "If I can build you a store for $600,000, then you're going to get a 25% ROI on leverage." I would propose you put 20%-50% debt on it, so your return on equity is much higher. I think we can build stores for under $600,000.
Now, the challenge is, when we got there, we were still developing the store. We had not built one. I did not really know. Right now, we have Jersey, Chicago, Sacramento. We are actually doing something down in Houston and Charleston. We have a handful of real examples. The beauty of this is, I think $600,000 was probably the right number. Based upon the run rate after just doing four or five of these, we are probably down closer to $500,000. The same $1 million, the same 15%, the same $150,000, but now over $500,000 of invested capital, you are like, "Wow, this starts to look like a pretty interesting opportunity." If we can do that, I am pretty certain that the guy that opens one is going to want to open a dozen. He is going to say, "This is great.
I am making a bunch of money here." The burden is on us to come up with the right locations. Today, unlike in the past, we use some technology, Placer.ai, which you might know, or SiteZeus, which you might know. Picking a site is real science for us. We have to get the site right. Got two choices. Got to have the right site and the right operator. The right site is very empiric. The right operator, to the gentleman's question over here. There is a little more skill and judgment in that. Got just about another minute. Glad to take one more call or question.
Yeah, what's up with the ship pay real quick? How do you guys hedge your exposure to cocoa prices given that the profitable store output for 2026 has increased from 2025?
Yeah, it's crazy, huh? Unfortunately, our supplier, and the first call I made when I got there was to the guy that supplies, as I said, "I want to go to the futures market. I'm going to put some hedges on there." He said, "We don't do that." I didn't have enough volume that I could do it independently. We've done what I'm calling a natural hedge. Let's say hypothetically, we consume a million pounds a year. I'm going to break that into either five or ten tranches of 100,000 or 200,000. I'm not going to make a big bet. Essentially, I'm going to dollar cost average in here. When the price of cocoa was $8,000, it was bouncing from $8,000 to $9,000 to $10,000 to $9,000 to $8,000. Every time it got back to $8,000, I'd add GBP 100,000, GBP 150,000 .
It dropped under and went to $7,500. I said, "Oh, this is good. We bought another GBP 100,000 ." It went to $7,000, GBP 100,000 . Recently at $5,200, GBP 200,000 . If you assume that there is some known amount of consumption, I just keep trying to push out into the future the amount of commitment that we have. At some point, at probably $4,500, I would say, "Fine, I am just going to lock in a full year or so of production." I need to mitigate the variability and the pricing for that raw material. Anyway, that is all I have for you guys today. Thank you so much. You have been a great audience. Please come up and try some of our chocolate because one of my franchisees said, "You want to sell more stores? Put chocolate in people's mouths." Thank you.