Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome. This is Mike Andrews, Associate General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of The Boston Beer Company. I'm pleased to kick off the 2021 fourth quarter earnings call for The Boston Beer Company. Joining the call from Boston Beer are Jim Koch, our Founder and Chairman, Dave Burwick, our CEO, and Frank Smola, our CFO. Before we discuss our business, I'll start with our disclaimer. As we state in our earnings release, some of the information we discussed and that may come up on this call reflect the company's or management's expectations or predictions of the future. Such predictions are forward-looking statements. It's important to note that the company's actual results could differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements.
Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the company's most recent 10-Q and 10-K. The company does not undertake to publicly update forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I will now pass it over to Jim for some introductory comments.
Thanks, Mike. I'll begin my remarks this afternoon with a few introductory comments, and then hand over to Dave, who will provide an overview of our business. Dave will then turn the call over to Frank, who will focus on the financial details of the fourth quarter results as well as the outlook for 2022. Immediately after Frank's comments, we'll open up the line for questions. Our fourth quarter depletions growth was 15%, and full year depletions growth was 22%. Despite these strong depletion results, we experienced a decline in shipments in the fourth quarter as we continue to work through challenges with our supply chain and the impacts of the slowdown in hard seltzer. Fourth quarter shipments declined 24.5% compared to last year's fourth quarter as a result of more aggressive wholesaler inventory reduction than expected around Truly.
Beginning in early 2022, our service levels to wholesalers declined due to supply chain constraints. This led to increased out of stocks for certain brands and packages with our wholesalers. Additionally, the beer industry is off to a slow start in 2022, likely as a result of the large outbreak of Omicron, the continued broad scale supply chain issues, and commodity inflation that is affecting consumer purchases. As a result, thus far in 2022, lower shipment trends have continued, and now our depletions are also declining compared to last year's comparable period. Mostly attributable to the significant shipments from Truly inventory pre-billed and sell through one year ago, and partly as a result of out of stocks.
We are focused on resolving our supply chain issues as quickly as possible, but believe they will continue to negatively impact our business until the inventory levels have recovered, which we expect will happen by the end of the first quarter. In measured off-premise channels through December 26, 2021, where our brand portfolio represents only 4.3% of the total beer industry volume, we delivered 43% of the total industry volume growth, the highest by far of all brewers. In addition, we're pleased that all five of our brands grew depletions during the fourth quarter, a good sign of the inherent demand for our products. We have a broad portfolio of healthy brands, and we expect that our business will recover and grow volume between 4%-10% for the full year in 2022.
We're thankful to our outstanding coworkers, distributors, and retailers whose continued support helped grow our business during 2021. I will now pass it over to Dave for a more detailed overview of our business.
Okay. Hey, thanks, Jim. I'd like to start my comments with some reflections on 2021, as a little distance can provide a lot of perspective. We've been chasing growth aggressively the past several years and still believe this was the right decision. In particular, the nascent hard seltzer category presented a rare game-changing opportunity, and we did change the game. Our three-year depletions CAGR has been 27%. We transformed our company by growing net revenue from $863 million in 2017 to $2.1 billion in 2021. In hindsight, perhaps as innovation leaders in the hard seltzer category, we needed to have a better feel for the category trajectory. We were squarely in line with everyone else, but maybe we needed to be more prescient, even amidst the unprecedented environment of the last two years.
There's clearly much to be proud of and to look forward to. We transformed Truly into a very strong number two player and a billion-dollar brand amidst an unprecedented flurry of competitive activity and innovation for many well-resourced competitors. Hard seltzers have generated tremendous growth for the beer industry over the last five years, and we believe they'll remain a very important beer industry category in the future. Hard seltzers were 10.4% of total beer dollars for the full year 2021, up from 8.9% during the same period in 2020.
Much like the energy drink category, we believe that the top two players will continue to represent about 70% of total share of the segment as they have from the beginning, despite significant attempts from hundreds of brands to enter the category. Consumer metrics remain favorable, and Truly social media sentiment continues to trend positively. The category's household penetration frequency and buy rates all increased during 2021. Truly generated 57% of all hard seltzer category growth in 2021, more than twice the next highest brand. We've gained 18 share points against the category leader since January 2020. We've led the category in innovation and brand building and outgrew the category for 16 straight months from September 2020 through December 2021.
Truly was number one in percentage and absolute volume growth in all of beer in 2021, and grew household penetration more than any other brand, catapulting it to the second highest penetrated brand in all of beer in 2021. This is very important because it means we have a large, avid base of consumers who are eager for more innovation and news from Truly. At our last earnings call, we updated and evolved our hard seltzer growth model and shared our category outlook. As we sit here today, we continue to believe category growth in 2022 will be between flat to +10%. Clarity will probably not increase until we start to lap July 2021, when the category started to decelerate rapidly, especially in the two-year volume stack, which we look at closely.
Regardless of which scenarios prove most accurate, we fully intend to outgrow the category throughout the year, driven by innovation, continued brand building, and superior retail execution and distributor support. Beyond our efforts growing Truly, we also positioned ourselves for the long term by continuing to build our consumer relevant portfolio of brands and creating more pathways to growth. We're the number two player in Beyond Beer with a 26% share, while the number three in Beyond Beer is at a distant 10% share. We led category innovation with Truly, established strategic partnerships with PepsiCo and Beam Suntory, and dialed up our spend behind Twisted Tea. At the same time, we've increased our investment in our R&D and innovation capability over the past few years, and the quality of our innovation has greatly benefited. We're far more than the Truly company.
We have a broad portfolio of brands beyond Truly and a terrific innovation pipeline that's well-situated to address consumers' changing preferences. To be clear, we do not need Truly to grow in 2022 to achieve our growth objectives, because we fully expect to achieve broad-based growth across our entire portfolio of brands. More about our broader portfolio in just a minute. As a reminder, we'd expected the hard seltzer category to grow at over 70% in 2021 and Truly to gain share. Truly grew depletions by 27% for the full year 2021 and gained almost four share points, but the category did not grow as we had expected.
Because of our higher demand projections coming into 2021 and our commitment to avoid the out of stocks that we had experienced during the summer of 2020, we added significant capacity and pre-built inventories of cans and finished goods to levels that ended up exceeding our actual needs as the category slowed down. Wholesalers stocked up on Truly during the first half of 2021, but wholesaler inventory didn't move as quickly during the high consumption months as we all had expected. The lower shipment volumes resulted in extra inventory in our warehouses and led to damaged and expired inventory. As a result, we incurred significant temporary costs as we adjusted to the new category trends. These cost impacts are reflected in our third and fourth quarter financials. In early 2022, our supply chain problems shifted back to out of stocks on certain brands and packages.
As such, we were unable to react to changes in demand and replenish the damaged product at wholesalers. We have the capacity in place and are working through the process to resolve these issues quickly, build inventory levels, and reduce out of stocks. Our depletion and shipment trends for the first seven weeks of 2022 have declined 9% and 26% from the comparable 2021 results, respectively, due primarily to the significant overlap from last year's Truly shipments and depletions, in addition to the out of stocks. We expect them to start to reverse at the end of the first quarter and go positive in the second quarter. We still have work to do to improve our supply chain performance, but we're making good progress.
With respect to our broader brand portfolio, we believe the ability to create alcoholic beverages from a beer base with a range and variety of flavors previously only available to mixed drinks, coupled with the convenience, portability, and affordability of beer will be a platform for long-term growth for Boston Beer. Truly Margarita just launched at the beginning of the year and already is a 5.3% share of hard seltzer in measured off-premise channels with limited distribution. It also holds the highest sales per point of any hard seltzer brand so far this year. While still early, the first 4 weeks repeat rate, according to Numerator, is 16.4%, which is 50% more than Truly Punch and 4 times larger than Truly Iced Tea during comparable time frames. This quick start is a reflection of the large consumer base of Truly drinkers.
In addition to Margarita, we're announcing today 2 new innovations to the Truly lineup this year. The first is Truly Flavored Vodka, a flavored vodka which is being produced and distributed by our partners at Beam Suntory and hits shelves next month. The next one is called Truly Poolside, a cocktail-themed variety pack inspired by Grammy winner Dua Lipa. This will be a limited summer release building on the learning from our highly successful limited release this past holiday season. As Jim mentioned, we have a balanced portfolio of healthy, well-positioned brands, all of which grew depletions in the fourth quarter of 2021. As we look towards 2022 and beyond, our aim is to continue to outgrow the category, especially as consumers drink more beyond beer products.
Our very strong position in Beyond Beer is a result of owning the number 1 FMB in Twisted Tea, the strong number 2 hard seltzer in Truly, and the number 1 hard cider in Angry Orchard. Twisted Tea was the second fastest growing brand in 2021, in measured off-premise channels among the top 25 in beer, and has been the fastest growing brand in the last 13 weeks, in measured off-premise channels at 24% growth. To build on a strong growth and market leading position, we launched Twisted Tea Light earlier this month, and we've also started running winter-themed commercials to help boost the brand year-round.
Angry Orchard remains the number one brand in cider with a 49% share of the segment in the last 13 weeks in measured off-premise channels, up 2 share points thanks to the continued success of Angry Orchard variety packs and Angry Orchard Crisp. Regarding 2022 innovation, we previously announced the introduction of several new brands, the Bevy Long Drink, which launched in 20 markets last November and continues to expand distribution. Sauza Agave Cocktails, which will launch at the end of the month nationwide, and Hard MTN DEW, which will be introduced in 3 states beginning next week and roll to another 13 states by the end of April. We also expanded our lineup of award-winning Dogfish Head Canned Cocktails with new vodka and gin crush styles.
In April, our Dogfish Head brand will kick off a partnership with Patagonia Provisions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Patagonia that offers responsibly sourced food and beverage products to launch Kernza Pils, a classic German-style pilsner made with Kernza perennial grain, organic malt, and organic hops. Kernza Pils is the first in a lineup of collaborative, thoughtfully crafted beers featuring environmentally conscious ingredients that not only taste good, but do good with every pint or can sold and consumed. Lastly, our Samuel Adams, Your Cousin from Boston ad campaign is helping turn the brand around. As Sam Adams depletions grew double digits in the fourth quarter and grew faster than all other national craft brands in measured channels, where the brand is consistently gaining share for the first time in several years.
We just launched a Super Bowl spot for the second year in a row with the extraordinary robots from our neighbor, Boston Dynamics, and it delivered a great PR win with 1.8 billion impressions and about $17 million in ad equivalency. Despite the slow industry start to 2022, we believe we have the plans, the capability, and the grit to continue our string of double-digit growth years, and we look forward to demonstrating that in the weeks ahead. Now I'll hand it over to Frank to discuss fourth quarter financials as well as our outlook for 2022.
Okay, thanks, Dave. Good afternoon, everyone. Before I get into the financial review of our fourth quarter results and financial outlooks, I'd like to provide more detail on the fourth quarter and full-year charges and other costs related to the hard seltzer slowdown. As Dave explained, we strategically resourced against the high side of our 2021 internal category growth and market share projections to ensure we would not be constrained in our efforts to build our share position in the hyper-growth hard seltzer category. Following last summer's rapid slowdown, actual hard seltzer category growth fell below our internal low side projections and resulted in excess capacity and higher-than-planned inventory levels of input materials and finished goods.
As a result, in the third quarter, we reported direct and indirect volume adjustment costs of $143.9 million before tax, and we estimated we would have an additional $36.8 million of indirect volume adjustment costs in the fourth quarter, primarily due to unfavorable absorption impacts at our company-owned breweries. In the fourth quarter, due to slower-than-anticipated Truly Hard Seltzer shipment growth and higher provisions for out-of-code or damaged products, we recorded total fourth quarter indirect volume adjustment costs of $52 million before the related tax benefit, which exceeded our previous estimate of $36.8 million. This $52 million cost impact includes unfavorable absorption impacts at company-owned breweries and downtime charges at third-party breweries of $30.7 million, provisions for out-of-code or damaged products of $13.8 million.
Increased material sourcing and warehousing costs of $5.7 million, and other costs of $1.8 million. These total indirect costs of $52 million have been recorded in the fourth quarter financial statements as a $9.2 million reduction in net revenue and a $42.8 million increase in cost of goods sold. With this background on the third quarter and fourth quarter financial impacts related to the slowdown in hard seltzer, I will now turn to our overall fourth quarter results and our current outlook for the full year 2022.
For the fourth quarter, we reported a net loss of $51.8 million or $4.22 per diluted share, compared to net income of $32.8 million or $2.64 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2020. This net loss was due to the indirect volume adjustment costs of $52 million previously discussed and the decrease in revenue due to lower shipment volumes, only partially offset by lower operating expenses. Depletions for the quarter increased 15% from the prior year, reflecting increases in our Twisted Tea, Samuel Adams, Truly Hard Seltzer, Angry Orchard, and Dogfish Head brands.
Shipment volume for the quarter was approximately 1.5 million barrels at 25.5% decline from the prior year, reflecting decreases in our Truly Hard Seltzer and Angry Orchard brands, partially offset by increases in the Twisted Tea, Samuel Adams, and Dogfish Head brands. We believe distributor inventory as of December 25, 2021 averaged approximately five weeks on hand and was an appropriate overall level, but included too much inventory for some packages, but not enough for others. We expect distributors will keep inventory levels below 2021 levels in terms of weeks on hand, as the need for peak season inventory pre-builds is greatly reduced due to our increased production capacity.
As a result, we expect shipments will continue to decline in the first quarter of 2022 and then return to growth in the second quarter compared to 2021. Our fourth quarter gross margin of 28.7% decreased from the 46.9% margin realized in the fourth quarter of 2020, primarily due to the $52 million indirect volume adjustment costs and higher material costs, partially offset by price increases.
Advertising, promotional, and selling expenses decreased $3.6 million or 2.6% from the fourth quarter of 2020, primarily due to a net decrease in brand investments of $9.5 million, mainly driven by lower media and production costs, partially offset by higher investments in local marketing and increased freight to distributors of $5.9 million that was primarily due to higher freight rates. General and administrative expenses increased $5.5 million or 17.6% from the fourth quarter of 2020, primarily due to increases in external services and increased salaries and benefits costs. Based on information of which we are currently aware, we are now targeting full year 2022 earnings per diluted share of between $11 and $16.
However, actual results could vary significantly from this target. This projection excludes the impact of ASU 2016-09 and is highly sensitive to changes in volume projections, particularly related to the hard seltzer category and supply chain performance. The 2022 fiscal year includes 53 weeks compared to the 2021 fiscal year, which included only 52 weeks. Full year 2022 depletions and shipments growth is now estimated to be between 4% and 10%. As indicated, we expect shipment trends will decline in the first quarter and then grow in the second quarter after lapping last year's peak season inventory pre-build. We expect total shipments to decline in the first half of the year and grow in the second half of the year as compared to 2021.
We project increases in revenue per barrel of between 3% and 5%. Full year 2022 gross margins are expected to be between 45% and 48%. Our full year 2022 investments in advertising, promotional, and selling expenses are expected to increase between $0 and $20 million. This does not include any increases in freight costs for the shipment of products to our distributors. We estimate our full year 2022 non-GAAP effective tax rate to be approximately 26%, excluding the impact of ASU 2016-09.
We are not able to provide forward guidance on the impact that ASU 2016-09 will have on our 2022 financial statements and full year effective tax rate, as this will mainly depend upon unpredictable future events, including the timing and value realized upon the exercise of stock options versus the fair value when those options are granted. We're continuing to evaluate 2022 capital expenditures and currently estimate investments of between $140 million and $190 million. The capital will be spent mostly on continued investments in our breweries and could be higher if deemed necessary to meet future growth.
We expect that our unrestricted cash balance of $26.9 million as of December 25, 2021, along with our future operating cash flow and unused line of credit of $150 million will be sufficient to fund future cash requirements. We will now open up the call for questions.
At this time will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation [Inaudible] indicate your line is in the question que, you may press star two to remove your question from the que [Inaudible] Our first question comes from the line of Filippo Falorni with RBC Capital Markets. You may proceed with your question.
Hey, good afternoon, guys. First on your innovation for 2022, can you comment on the level of incrementality that you're expecting from the innovation and your contribution to top line? And specifically for the Truly line extensions, we're seeing that for Truly Margarita, early results are really strong, but it seems like the cannibalization has been a little bit higher than historically. I'd love to get your comments on that.
Sure, Filippo. This is Dave. I'll answer that. I think as it relates to Margarita, it's really hard to make a comment right now about how incremental it will be. We believe it will be because it's really a hybrid. It's a hard seltzer, but it also plays in the canned cocktail space, and it provides, you know, a margarita drink, which is, as you know, the most popular spirit at a much reduced calorie count versus a traditional margarita. We're optimistic about that, but I'd say it's too early to tell. As it relates to the broader Truly family, it depends on what you wanna look at. You can look at Nielsen panel, you can look at Numerator data, et cetera.
Everybody has a different number for incrementality. As we looked at it last year, even I looked at Punch, which, you know, started very strong, but then it did fade a bit, you know, in the fall. It had at least a 50% incrementality. It's really hard to truly measure what, you know, is incrementality. Obviously, our goal when we innovate is to find a way to deliver something different to the marketplace that will draw new consumers in. It's either into the category or, you know, away from other categories or from other brands.
In so doing, we're, you know, hopefully optimizing the incrementality. But if anybody tells you that they know an exact number what the incrementality is, I'd like to meet them because it's really, really hard to do that.
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. On the hard seltzer category, broadly, for 2022, Jim, you mentioned that the entire beer industry has started 2022 a little bit slower than expected in January, but you're still thinking the category can be flat to up 10% for 2022. I guess, what gives you the comfort that we're gonna see a rebound as we get past the January or maybe the winter season, as we get through 2022?
The confidence really comes from the consumer. I think it's becoming increasingly clear that the growth in all alcoholic beverages is gonna come from this, it's being called Beyond Beer space, but it's also beyond wine, it's beyond the liquor. It's sort of a fourth category that is built on flavor and convenience and consumers that are sort of alcohol agnostic. I see that continuing to grow. I see consumers gravitating towards primarily hard seltzer and sort of beer-based items in there because they offer a better value. You know, spirit-based products because of you know, we've always had different tax regimes for beer, wine, and liquor. They've always been you know, differentiated since the
Well, since the beginning of the republic in 1791, when the first broad-based tax came out, it was on whiskey and not on beer or spirits. As a result, basically, to boil it down, if you want a spirits-based product, you get 4 cans for $10, and if you want a beer-based one, you get 6 cans for $10. You also have significantly better distribution opportunities. All of this is playing into where consumers are moving. You know, the RTD products will certainly get their share, and they're growing last year triple digits, so I think they've got another year or two of growth. At the end of the day, the beer-based products offer better value to the consumer and wider distribution. I just.
I think hard seltzer, you know, it's moved beyond just sort of LaCroix with alcohol. It's, you know, seltzerizing other categories like lemonade, like tea, and now margarita is the most popular cocktail in the country.
Got it. Thanks for the call, guys. I'll pass it on.
Our next question comes from the line of Eric Serotta with Evercore. You may proceed with your question.
Good afternoon. Hoping you could give some color on your confidence in being able to outgrow the hard seltzer category for the year. Certainly starting the year, it looks like you're ceding some market share kinda on both the sequential and year-on-year basis. I realize that comps are very different for you and the largest competitor, and the number four player is expanding distribution nationally. I guess what gives you the confidence in being able to hold or grow market share for Truly for the year? And then separate question on pricing. It looks like you took down your expectation for pricing at the top end slightly. Just wondering what the reason was. The 6% always seemed a little aggressive, but wondering if that's related to any particular brands or regions.
Hey, thanks, Eric. I think Frank and I will tag-team your two questions. I'll take the first one regarding our confidence if we'll be able to gain share. I mean, I would start with, to me the most important thing is that we've built a brand that has the second-largest penetration in beer, about 13.4%. Bud Light is number 1, and Truly is number 2. We have a very large base to play to. We have a base of consumers who are gonna be interested in innovation, interested in news, and we're gonna have their attention. I think that's really important as we innovate. Truly Margarita is the first one we talked about just today, Truly Poolside. There are others that we can't talk about yet.
There'll be continued innovation. The key is to look at. It's hard not to, but you can't look at the category week, you know, one week at a time or even three or four weeks. You gotta look at it over a longer period of time, and that's how we're viewing it. Yes, we have huge overlaps right now. We grew, and Truly grew in January last year 135% in IRI. I think the category grew around 80-85% in IRI a year ago. We have to look beyond these overlaps and just focus on. We've built an important brand that has a large consumer following. We have really strong social media sentiment. It continues to grow.
Our aided awareness levels are still below the number one player, so there's definitely opportunity to improve that. We have the highest repeat rate, and we have the highest buy rate. We're starting from a position of strength, but it's really, it's up to us, though, to find the right ways to innovate and also to build the core business as well, the base business. You know, market that business. We have in fact a new ad campaign that kicked off today that started with Truly Margarita. There's a multiplicity of things we need to do, but we feel like we've got. We understand the brand, we understand the consumer, and we know what people are looking for. We feel like we're, you know, in a good place.
We've now, though we're gonna put our heads down, and we drive the business, and we'll see 3, 4 months from now where we are. That's sort of my, that's anyway, that's my response to the confidence level growing and gaining share. Now I'm gonna hand to Frank, who can talk a little bit more about the pricing piece here.
Yeah, Eric, I mean, we slightly narrowed the range from 3-6 to 3-5, as you noted. It's just like we've learned a little bit more. There was not a singular event. When we gave the last guidance, it was in October. Since then, we have executed quite a bit of pricing. As we came into 2022, there's naturally a lot of carryover pricing, which is defining a big part. You know, pricing is a very local affair. You know, we give you a national average for our company, but it's a very local affair.
As we see what makes sense for our product, and also as we look at the inflation that we have in our cost base, we feel that the 3%-5% is more realistic and it's more unlikely to get to 6% on average. There will be markets that have a little bit more, there are variances between markets, but on average, we feel that's the better range based on what we've learned and the pricing that we've implemented. No big differences between brands or anything or no one major event.
It was just like when we came out in October, you just don't know a lot, and we felt this was kind of the range of 3% range where we would land at the end of the day.
Great. Thanks. I'll pass it on.
Our next question comes from the line of Kaumil Gajrawala with Credit Suisse. You may proceed with your question.
Hi. Thanks for the question. If I could ask maybe for some more details, it was quite a kind of notable change in the beginning of January versus where you were trending before. As you've dug into it, is there anything additional you can add into what's behind, obviously not from a shipments perspective, but from a depletions perspective, just what you're seeing in this sort of short period of time? Because it's quite a big change versus where you were in the fourth quarter.
Yeah. Kaumil, let me take that. You've seen the shipments. I think the shipments is pretty clear. Year to date, we're at 29%. The drivers are somewhat similar. I mean, you have, we're lapping the pre-build for the shipment one. The pre-build is also that we had last year is impacting a little bit depletions as well because if you recall, we were growing shipments in Q1 60%. Depletions were up 48%. Yeah, everybody was building up the inventory, not only at wholesaler level, but also at retailer level. So this, you know, in a more flat category, as we are now or slightly growing, that has reversed very clearly. So this is one thing.
The second thing I'd say, you know, as we indicated, because we had more damaged products, and we suddenly had a bit of a gap in our inventory. Inventory that we thought we were going to have, we didn't have. It took us a while to pivot our supply chain and replenish that inventory internally and at wholesaler. We didn't have the production that we needed to get to the shipments that we needed, so that had an impact as well. Then I think the third one is, you know, in general, the beer category.
I'd say our internal problems account, you know, I would say probably for, you know, two-thirds of the depletions decline that you see in year-to-date numbers that we gave you, the 9%.
Okay, great. Thank you. Can I ask about your outlook for can costs over the course of this year? Maybe can availability?
Availability, we feel confident that we have the available cans. I mean, clearly the dynamics have shifted quite a bit. You know, as in the past, there was like up until I'd say the middle of 2021, the shortage was clearly in slim cans, which was all the seltzer. Then with the slowdown, slim can capacity became more available, and standard cans became more scarce, which is mainly where our Twisted Tea is and our other products and Truly is the slim cans. We feel confident we have secured the volume for all the cans. Then on the pricing in itself, we don't expect major changes.
The only thing that we will see is like, what is the pass-through? It is the commodity costs, which is the aluminum and general inflation, and that is going up, and that's reflected basically in the cost that we've taken as a basis for our pricing that I covered earlier.
Okay, thank you.
All right.
Our next question comes from the line of Laurent Grandet with Guggenheim. You may proceed with your question.
Yes. Good afternoon, everyone. I do have two questions. The first one is really a follow-up from an earlier question. It seems like on Truly share, a bit of softness in at the beginning of the year has been discussed already, but when you dig into the numbers, it seems like the share loss is coming more from the what we call the mild flavor, the white can, not the bold flavors where you pivoted, I mean, two years ago. It is a declining subsegment. It's still the largest one where you are losing share. Is there anything you would do about that piece of the segment that I know is not growing, but it's still about 60%+ of the category?
That would be great because that is impacting your market share right now.
Hey, Laurent, this is Dave. I'll take that. Maybe Jim wants to layer on top of this. I think, yeah, I mean, what you see is correct. We are, you know, focused on that because we can. The challenge with this category is that, you know, consumers want news and innovation. The further you go out on the innovation limb, the more you have to support where you started at the base. In this case, the white cans, we call them the OGs, if you will. There will definitely be news that we will be sharing, you know, later in the year when we can about what we're gonna do to support the OGs.
Certainly, there's a new campaign, but we have to look at everything to focus on that part of the business 'cause it's important. To your point, it's sizable and it hasn't been growing. It's a point well taken, and that's something that we are focused on.
Thanks. Because ultimately you don't want, I mean, especially in convenience store, having, you know, retailers choosing, I mean, to have White Claw to represent that segment and you focusing on more the bold flavors. Okay. Second question is really about margin, trying to figure out the put and takes here. You mentioned about the aluminum costs already. But on the other hand, on the positive side, I mean, to get to probably a better level of comfort on the gross margin guidance, there are probably some elements of mixed benefit between selling less Truly and more Twisted Tea. There is probably a bit of upside coming from the new contract manufacturing setup with focusing on fewer but probably more profitable contract manufacturers.
Probably also a bit of shipment benefits as you've got two facilities now operating on the west part of the U.S. in California and Arizona. Could you help us kind of figure out basically the puts and takes and how you get to your gross margin that you indicated? Probably give us a bit more on the positives.
Yeah, Laurent, this is Frank. I'm gonna cover that. I think on the dynamics and on the building blocks to get the gross margin back to target ultimately to over 50%, those building blocks have not changed. You know, you mentioned that partly. One is the network. We have, like, four anchor breweries that we have that will be able to produce the key products that we have that will give you benefits internally on the efficiencies and lower internal freight, which is showing up in gross margin. Then in addition, you get outbound freight benefit, which technically is not part of gross margin, but that's part of the savings. The other one is the lower variety pack cost.
That's really where we had the highest cost. As we grew Truly, nobody really had variety pack costs that were affordable. It was like when you went outside, they were significantly higher than what we had inside. We were like planning to bring a lot of that volume in-house. We're still doing that. We're a little bit delayed on that because the startup took a little longer. You know, the focus on the cleanup that we had to do end of the year took a little bit of time. We're getting some of the benefits in 2022, but not as much as we had originally projected. That's coming a little later, and a big chunk of that will come in 2023.
There's also we get a better mix between internal and external, and we also lower overall the cost of variety packing internally and externally. We're working on higher internal throughput. You know, we put the lines in relatively quickly. As we improve the running of those lines, we will create more capacity. As we've mentioned before, there's, you know, the supply chain transformation efforts that are underway will give us significant efficiency. Those are yeah clear changes that we have, like, they're structural changes that we're pursuing. Those have not changed. You know, based on, you know, the slow start at the beginning of the year, and the slower start-up costs versus what we had originally projected.
They're a little bit delayed, but the drivers haven't changed and the absolute target hasn't changed.
Thanks, Frank. Maybe you can specify what's the percentage of in-house manufacturing now for Truly, where you are right now?
The in-house, we don't give it by package, to be honest, Laurent. You know, we were at 50/50 and it has come down overall because the in-house has increased. I'm sorry, the outside has decreased. The in-house has increased as the volume has come down. I believe that, you know, for total, that has gone up by about 10 percentage points. Again, that depends, you know, we're running our internal breweries to 100% of the capacity that is available and only the balance goes externally. As we create more capacity during the year, that mix shift should improve over time.
Thank you. I pass it on. Thank you very much.
All right. Thanks.
Our next question comes from the line of Nadine Sarwat with Bernstein. You may proceed with your question.
Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for taking my question. This is Nadine. Two for me. First, in the past, you've had EBIT margins in the high teens. Is there any reason why you wouldn't be able to get back to that over the next couple of years? I know we've touched on the gross margin, but taking that down to the EBIT margin would be helpful. My second question, you know, you've discussed the narrowing of your shipping guidance towards the more bottom end of what you had said in January. Could you give us color on what exactly had changed in your expectations over the last month? Thank you.
Yeah. Nadine, let me talk to the EBIT margin. Your assumption is correct. There's you know the drop from where we were before in the mid- to high teens% is essentially due to a reduction in gross margin. As you know, there were a number of reasons. We wanted to take advantage of the volume in the hard seltzer category. We were focused on getting incremental capacity rather than focusing on cost. I just went through we have the building blocks to improve the gross margin that should fall through. We have clearly increased our operating expenses over the last few years, but below the top line growth. Okay. We gotten some leverage.
We didn't get a ton of leverage, but we got some leverage, and we expect more over the years to come. Operating income margin should clearly increase as the gross margin increases.
Got it. Thank you. On the second, on the change in expectations?
The change in expectations. Again, the main shift happened literally late in December. There are two things. One is the wholesalers reduced inventory a little bit more than what we had expected. Then the other reason, which is kind of related, is there was more damaged product. You know, we had, like, quite a bit of damaged product that we had discovered internally, but also at wholesalers, and that came back. With that amount of inventory that we thought we had available for depletions, that kind of left the supply chain, and we needed to replenish that. We have enough capacity in the system, but we couldn't react quickly enough to replenish that.
You know, part of the reason was that we're delayed in the startup of our internal lines and then also the external capacity. There's a little bit of time notice that you need to give to bring the volume on stream. We're getting this volume in February, but clearly, January was impacted by that. Those are the main reasons.
Perfect. Thank you. I'll pass it on.
Our next question comes from the line of Bonnie Herzog with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed with your question.
All right. Thank you. Hi, everyone.
Hey, Bonnie.
Hi. I just had a little bit of a follow-up question first on, you know, sort of what you were just talking about or just gross margins and costs. I guess what I wanted to make sure to understand is that your guidance, which is a pretty wide range for gross margins, you know, what does that assume in terms of, you know, further inventory reductions, any other, you know, fees? You guys incurred a fair amount in Q3 and Q4. Just trying to understand, you know, is that behind you, or should we assume a lot of or some of that continues into at least the first half of this year?
In terms of write-offs, if we get to the volumes that we have given you as a guidance. In terms of write-offs, that is essentially behind us. The shipment decline that you're seeing is literally largely driven by the fact that we're lapping last year's inventory build. As you know, we're expecting you know, a significant summer. As I mentioned before, shipments were up 60% in Q1 and then 48% in terms of depletions. It is we feel relatively good. The question on the gross margin is like, you know, what is the actual split at the end of the day between internal manufactured volume and external manufactured volume?
How quickly can we get the benefits from supply chain transformation? If there are no significant changes in volume versus our assumptions, we should have that behind us, and that should be in the results.
Okay. That's helpful. Frank, just to clarify in terms of, you know, any of the contracts you have with some of these third parties for this year, I mean, I guess it will depend on your top line and what you know, you buy or need. I'm just kind of trying to think through, could there also be some fees if you don't need that much volume this year, depending on how the category evolves?
Yes. That is correct. The way, I mean, as you know, those third-party contracts are structured. You have shortfall fees if you fall below a certain threshold. Now, I think we've done a fairly good job in, like, limiting our external contracts to what we really need. We have essentially two external partners, where we had, you know, quite a few more last year. We've, you know, listed the shortfall fees in the K that you will see. We don't expect, like, if the shortfall fees come, that should be less than half a percentage point in gross margin. That's what we have also reflected in the guidance that we gave you.
Okay. That's really helpful. If I may just ask a different question more on your top line, just thinking about, you know, your shipment and depletion guidance. You know, I really do appreciate that you guys are, you know, taking a step back on everything, but just kind of thinking about it and wondering, you know, if your guide is conservative enough right now. I guess, you know, what really needs to happen for you to hit the high end, and then, you know, what happens or needs to happen for you to hit the low end of your guide? You know, you mentioned that Truly doesn't need to grow this year, so I guess I assume that would put you at the low end of your guide.
how much share would Truly have to take, I guess, to put you at the high end? Thanks.
Hey, Bonnie, it's Dave. I'll try to take a shot at that. I think as we look at this year, I mean, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we have a lot of activity around the base business and a lot of innovation. We look at it. There's many different ways it could come out at the end. There's different scenarios where we end up at 4%, different where we end up at 10%. As I mentioned, to hit that in the range, Truly doesn't have to grow. We want it to grow, and that's the intent, which would put us toward the higher end of the range. We have a lot of momentum behind Twisted Tea. We have some really nice momentum behind Sam Adams.
Angry Orchard has been hurt a little bit by these out of stocks that we talked about, but it shows some good momentum in Q4. Dogfish, we have canned cocktails coming that we're hopeful about. We have, basically, we're placing a lot of bets this year. Again, there's a lot of different permutations in terms of how it could come out. Between just big, you know, just base, you know, investment behind Sam Adams and Twisted Tea, Truly innovation and the other innovation we talked about around Hard MTN DEW and Sauza, et cetera, again, we feel like that range, it is, you know, it is a little more cautious than I think maybe what we talked about, you know, at the end of last year, rightly so.
We'd rather be, in the future, more cautious in how we guide. We think there's a lot of ways to get there. It's really hard to say right now how we're gonna get there. I think I understand that now there's a lot of noise right now. Obviously, the first seven weeks don't, you know, they don't look great. I think Frank talked to some of the reasons why in terms of the industry, the out of stocks, the overlaps, et cetera. You know, we just have to get through this moment and let's see how things evolve. We will have covered the out of stocks, as we mentioned, as we get into it by the end of March, and we're off and running in Q2.
That's when we'll have a, you know, a better sense of where it all ends up. We feel like this 4-10 range is got a lot of different ways to hit it. It's not just one way. Again, like a year ago, you know, a lot of it was based on Truly hitting some big numbers. This year, again, we don't have to be successful with any one initiative. We just need to be successful with enough to get there. Does that make sense?
It does. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Grundy with Jefferies. You may proceed with your question.
Great. Thanks. Good evening, everyone. Two for me, if I could. The first one, a follow-up for Frank on gross margin, the second for Jim on the Treasury Department's report. First, Frank, not to belabor this, but just longer term on the gross margin, I think you mentioned a number of times the potential to get back to the low- to mid-50s%. Can you box in a timeframe for that, any sort of steady state? What is the internal planning for that for the company? Are we talking 2 years, 3 years as supply chain pressures sort of ease and commodity costs ease to some degree? How would you characterize the importance of this metric to the company?
Because I think historically there's a lot of focus on depletions and operating income as sort of the key performance indicators and key metrics for management comp. Is there sort of a willingness to sort of heighten the importance of this as a big value driver, for shareholders? I'd appreciate your thoughts then. I have a follow-up for Jim. Thanks.
Yeah. Let me start with the end first. It is clearly a key value driver that we see. Our target is absolutely to get it back to over 50%. It's not an absolute though. I have to be honest, and that's what you've seen during the hard seltzer. If we hit, like, a product that's growing tremendously, we will always prioritize getting the product to the consumer and build market share. And then, you know, we flatten out, we will very clearly focus on the gross margin. Our model is typically, you know, service level first, like, service the customer, and then we go to the cost. It is a very important initiative that we have.
Yeah, I laid out the building blocks, and if you look at the timing, the network we're implementing, we've started implementing it, and that's what we're seeing this year. We're gonna get some benefits from the network. The variety pack cost, that's a little delayed, as I mentioned. We don't get, you know, we have some higher cost, you know, variety pack productions still out there, that we will be able to bring in. The effectiveness saving, the supply chain transformation savings, this is a combination of systems and processes that will drive waste reduction, handling cost reduction, warehouse cost reduction. We have significant warehouse cost, waste product that's coming back. Once that gets in place, that comes.
It's staged. You will see the benefit we've given it in the gross margin guidance for 2022. There will be a significant chunk coming in 2023, but it won't be 100% of all the building blocks. That will come after 2023, probably in 2024. There's a big chunk that's gonna come in 2023.
Okay. It sounds like you'll get most of the way there by 2024. Okay. Thank you.
Yeah.
That was helpful. Just a quick follow-up, because I know the call is kind of dragging on here a little bit. Jim, it'd be great to get your thoughts on the Treasury Department's report, and it touched on competition in the U.S. alcohol industry. I think a number of different sort of conflicting findings, but I think competition certainly sort of stands out. It would be great to kind of get your take on the report, what you think the implications are gonna be for the beer industry, if anything, and then I'll pass it on. Thank you.
Did we lose Jim?
Yeah. Hey, Jim is in a different location. Hopefully he's still with us. Jim, are you there?
I'm sorry.
Oh, good. Okay, good.
All right.
Good.
Sorry. I heard everything. Kevin, my take on this report is, you know, they noticed and stated the obvious, which is this is a fairly concentrated industry. You know, you've got two big players who are losing share but still have maybe 70% of the volume in the industry, you know, and you've got one big one that Anheuser-Busch, you know, probably has, I think, they average 94% of the volume on their wholesalers' trucks. That channel to market is dominated by a big brewer, and it sort of forecloses it to independent producers. I think the Treasury Department, you know, I was biased maybe as they should be to protecting the small independent brewers. Also noticed that on a local basis, the wholesale tier is very consolidated.
Often, you know, there is only really two viable players who give you a comprehensive route to market, and they probably, you know, did not give to me appropriate weight to the beneficial effects of a three-tier system that has in between brewers and retailers this unique tier of independent, you know, often family-owned wholesalers. Frankly, without that, if we had the system we have in many, many other countries where brewer owns the wholesaler and sometimes even the retailer, there probably would not have been craft beer. I mean, craft beer emerged in the United States in part because of the independent wholesaler tier. I was heartened, I guess, that the Treasury Department questioned previous decisions that have allowed, you know, the two big players to grow by acquisition.
It always struck me a little weird. You know, if you got two guys who have 70, even 80% at the beginning of the last decade of the market, that they're allowed to grow by buying up their competition. Standard Oil, I don't think they had that big a share when they put the antitrust laws in place. The big question is kind of, so what? I think, you know, clearly the Treasury Department came out on the side of small brewers, small producers. You know, many of the tweaks that one might wanna make to the three-tier system, like, you know, limiting the reach of franchise laws that give permanent monopolies to wholesalers, those are state issues.
The feds really, it's not an appropriate place for them to go. While they, you know, might like to have more options for small producers to move wholesalers, it's probably, you know, not really gonna happen. That's a long-winded answer. I thought they made a lot of good points. I'm just not sure what any major levers. I doubt it. They do have some small levers, like better enforcement of, you know, the tied house laws that through things like category management and tying up venues, big brewers are able to preclude smaller brewers from, you know, a lot of venues and maybe getting their beer on shelves.
Did the call end?
Yeah, that's it.
Our next question comes from the line of Vivien Azer with Cowen. You may proceed with your question.
Hi. Thanks very much. I know it's been a long call, so I'll try to be quick about it. With the reduction in terms of the incremental A&P spend, I'm contrasting that with some of the commentary around focused innovation, you know, clearly, Truly a focus, clearly some of your partner brands a focus. I was a little bit surprised not to hear about Bevy because that's kind of unique and organic innovation. As we kind of think about what your priorities are for 2022, is it fair to assume that it's a little bit more concentrated in terms of where your priorities are gonna lie to achieve the full year guidance? Thank you.
Hey, Vivien, it's Dave. I'll take it. I think I would say we're going broader this year than we were. I mean, a year ago, there was a lot of huge investment and focus behind Truly. There's still gonna be that support. We see, you know, we're fueling the fire on Twisted Tea, and it's working. It is with Samuel Adams as well. We've got a lot of innovation, including Bevy, which we're excited about. We're gonna support all of that. I think, you know, some will play bigger regionally, some will play bigger nationally, but our intent is to support. I think if you look back over, you know, year to year between, you know, last year was an anomaly for many reasons.
If you look back just a couple years, you know, to 2019, 2020, our AP&S is up by like 50%. Frank, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's up significantly. We feel like we have the resources to support a broader portfolio. We're focused really very much on the brand positioning, who we're targeting, how to reach them. We've also done a lot of work in the last couple years to really improve the quality of our creative that we put out there. We have a highly analytical approach to measuring the impact of creative, and we feel like it's working harder for us.
I think Samuel Adams is a good example, honestly, 'cause we're not spending crazy dollars on Sam, and it's having an impact on the business. Anyway, I mean, I'll hand it back. I'll hand it over to Frank, who wants to build on top of that.
Yeah. On the overall spend, I think, you know, looking at the variations versus last year is a little bit misleading because of, you know, the spend that we had. We're clearly planning to grow Truly significantly more than what we ended up, and as such was the spend. You know, we entered the year like really spending against the category. You know, until we realized that the growth wasn't gonna come through, the majority of the money was spent. We scaled it back a little bit, but you don't have too much flexibility. 2020, as you know, was COVID related, so a lot of stuff happened there.
What we did is if you take 2019 as a base year and just like look at the high level numbers, you know, our top line growth was, you know, 70%-80%, yeah, between shipments and depletions. Like versus 2019, we have grown the top line over 70%. Our AP&S spend in the same timeframe has grown 60%. That's 10 points below, that shows you leverage. I would argue with such a growth rate, you should see more leverage that you're gonna get. We kept the spending high because, you know, we were going after share. But that also means we have, you know, sizable spending in our P&L that we can allocate to the brand.
While it looks like we are not increasing much versus last year, we feel the overall spend is quite healthy.
Absolutely.
I would add.
Okay. Please, Jim.
I know it's been a long call, but I like to talk about this stuff, so I'm here as long as anybody has questions, and I think Dave and Frank are too. What I would say is, you know, I think what happened with Truly was once in a lifetime. It's not gonna happen again. In the last 50 years, there've been like two huge really disruptive beer innovations. One was light beer, and that took, you know, at least 10 years to get to 10% share, and the second was hard seltzer, and that got there in 4.5 years. The hard seltzer phenomenon was exactly that, a phenomenon. At least as I'm thinking about our innovation going forward, you know, we're innovating into a fairly fragmented category.
Consumers, you know, are getting more and more niche-y, as they choose beverages by occasion and by cost and who they're drinking with and what time of day. The innovations may, you know, take longer to develop, and they're not gonna turn into 10% of the beer category. So something like Bevy, we, you know, we think it's got a lot of promise, but it's not gonna be like, Truly was. It's just not gonna take off that way, and it may take some years to develop. The, of course, best example is Twisted Tea, which is, you know, now a major brand, big part of our business, big driver of our growth in 2022. That brand has grown double digits for over 20 years, but it never grew triple digits.
You know, seltzer or Truly, I guess, grew triple digits the first four years. Tea never did, but it has the same kind of potential to be as big as Truly at some point. It'll just take it 25 years instead of 20. We are kind of you know, with Truly, we hit a grand slam home run. We've never done that before. We'll probably never do it again. Our business has historically been built on, you know, retail execution, the blocking and tackling, high-quality products that slowly find their place in the marketplace, and we score runs by, you know, singles, occasional doubles, maybe a bunt or a sacrifice fly. I think that's more going to characterize the future than pulling another rabbit out of the hat like we did with Truly.
Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate that perspective. Since you gave me the opportunity, I'm gonna ask a follow-up, and it is for you. I think your comment during the prepared remarks around some of the near-term softness really stood out to me, because you did call out consumers' kind of response to inflationary pressures.
When I try to pair that, you know, with some of the commentary that Frank offered in terms of the narrowing of your pricing outlook at the high end of the range, I'm just curious if there is any kind of incremental detail you can offer in terms of what you're seeing in terms of the health of the consumer, because I feel like most of your larger CPG peers are just really leaning into pricing, and they assume the consumer can absorb all of it. It seems like perhaps you're a little bit more cautious on that. Thank you.
I mean, it's a competitive industry. You know, pricing is maybe a little more restrained than a lot of other CPG categories 'cause it is, you know, we all wanna grow share. We're all very mindful of volume. It's just, you know, it's competitive in some ways. I think our revenue per barrel might not grow as much as other people's because we don't have trade-up opportunities.
You know, pretty much, you know, all the big players, they can get their revenue per barrel up by, you know, dumping the low end of their brand portfolio and, you know, and trying to replace it, maybe not fully replacing it at the high end, but their revenue per barrel goes up, more than ours 'cause we don't have a high end to migrate, and we don't have a low end to dump. I guess the last thing is just, frankly, I think we've been surprised by the softness in the first six weeks of the year. I mean, I think the whole industry has. You know, depending on your data source, volume is down kinda 6%-10% for no obvious apparent reason.
You can explain a little bit of it by some timing changes, notably the Super Bowl being, you know, a week later this year. We're looking at an IRI data set that last year had the Super Bowl and this year didn't. A little bit of noise around, I think, you know, New Year's Day was on a Monday. That might have, you know, it's better if it's in the middle of the week. There's a little bit of noise like that, but frankly, it doesn't explain what we're seeing. I honestly don't know.
I really appreciate the perspective. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from the line of Wendy Nicholson with Citi. You may proceed with your question.
Hi, guys. My question is kind of a follow-up to a lot of the things we've talked about, and I guess it's more a question of how you approach managing the business, kind of given the, you know, lack of ability of, on anyone's part, to really forecast the business. I say that in the context of just the increasing SKU complexity in your business and the fact that lemonade was a hit, but punch was not. Looks like margarita is gonna be a hit, but might cannibalize something else. You know, you said a couple of times, "Hey, our focus is to make sure we have enough product on the shelves," but the reality is, you know, your margins were a lot stronger when you had out of stocks.
I'm sort of wondering, should we be bracing for more write-downs this year? Because the odds that you're able to forecast exactly which SKUs sell how well seems very low. Again, that's not a statement about you. That's just a statement about how quickly the industry is changing. Curious about your priority of making sure you've got the inventory out there, even if it costs you on the margins or even if there's a risk of another write-down.
Yeah, I can go first. Wendy, I think the situation last year was very, very different. We had, like, as we said at the beginning of the year, we're thinking that the hard seltzer category was gonna double. We wanted to be really prepared. We saw Truly gaining share. That was a massive increase versus the prior year. We had incurred out-of-stocks in 2020 and in 2019. We did line everything up to have the capacity, to have the cans available, and to have the flavors. Those were the three bottlenecks. We committed to everything at the beginning of the year for peak season. When it slowed down, we had everything. There was no way to react because we didn't have the capacity.
That picture has changed dramatically. At the end of the year, we ended up with too much capacity to the point that we had to cancel external, you know, manufacturing contracts. We still have a lot of capacity. We don't pre-build anymore. Our reactivity and firepower has greatly improved. Now, we need to execute, you know, between the external and the internal because we wanna run our internal breweries 100%, but we're not really producing a ton of inventory. In fact, our ultimate objective is to go to a replenishment model, which will significantly reduce inventories. Now, that's hard to execute at the moment, because, you know, we don't have the systems and the processes, and we talked about supply chain transformation, which will enable that.
We should not see a repeat of what happened in 2021 just because of the sheer size of the increase and the growth that we experienced and we were forecasting in 2021. That's not the case in 2022.
Fair enough. For example, I know you've called out a couple of times the damaged goods in the fourth quarter, and I think it was $14 million, the charge that you took for that. You know, again, it's not a big number. It's kind of a rounding error. At the same time, damaged goods are something we don't hear about all the time. I'm wondering, you know, in this shifting supply chain, in this increasingly complex supply chain, you know, what led to the damaged goods? Was that on your part? Was it because you used, you know, a newer or third-party supplier who, you know, wasn't as good as the ones you've used historically? Again, just wanna make sure that some of the supply chain stuff that you got stuck with over the last couple of quarters really is truly behind us.
When it comes to damaged goods, there was a certain part that was unique, and there was the aftermath of the tremendous stock build. Normally, you have like 2 to 4 weeks in inventory at the wholesaler. It rotates through your visibility of the product. What happened is that, you know, we were building up to significantly higher weeks of supply that then suddenly doubled because the demand didn't come through. The product stayed a very long time in inventory, and it wasn't really visible. It didn't turn. When we had certain damage and product was leaking, the damage was growing, and it was invisible. It was a bit of a result of like that we had that much inventory.
As we have more manageable inventory, that part should not really repeat to the same extent. Having said that, we need to execute on our supply chain. I don't wanna take that away. There's work to be done as we improve. The big-ticket items that led to the major write-offs, those big-ticket items should be behind us if the volume doesn't change dramatically versus our forecast.
Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of today's question- and- answer session. I would like to turn this call back over to Mr. Jim Koch for closing remarks.
All right. Well, thank you for your endurance, and we'll talk again in a couple of months. Bye now.