Unless they have a lapel mic, you're gonna have to do this. Do you wanna be able to walk around?
I'm gonna just take care of it.
Okay.
Yeah.
This timer, 25 minutes?
Yeah.
You'll see it start, and then just fill the time however you see fit.
Okay.
So, we good?
Ready when you are.
Okay. Claudia, you ready to go?
I am ready.
Good morning. For our first presentation of the day, we're pleased to have Claudia Goldfarb, CEO of Sow Good.
Yay!
Take this.
Awesome. Hi, guys. I didn't know I was the first one of the day, so I'll try to be good. So yes, I'm Claudia Goldfarb. I am the CEO of Sow Good. and of course, that doesn't work. It's the morning. all the disclaimers, forward-looking statements, and onto who we are. So, Sow Good, we started six years ago. Originally, we focused on just building out freeze-drying technology. That was our core competency. About a year and a half later, we entered the CPG market, and we started with fruits and veggies, and then we entered the freeze-dried candy craze. Over the last 52 weeks, we've done $24.4 million in dollars, 4.4 million in units sold, and we're in a little under 17,000 doors. Now, freeze-dried candy really came to be about two and a half years ago.
And so in that two and a half time period, we are still the number one independent freeze-dried candy brand, but we have had a lot of competitive pressure from some of the large CPG brands that we'll be discussing shortly. What really makes us different than all the other freeze-dried candy companies out there is our manufacturing expertise and the power of our technology. We built our freeze dryers from scratch, so they freeze-dry much better than anything else on the market. All of our freeze dryers, and we have six currently in operation, are in our 21,000 sq ft facility in Irving, Texas. And just to kind of give you a rule of thumb, each freeze dryer does about $10 million in revenue. The management team, my husband and co-founder, me, and our fabulous CFO, Donna Guey, who just came on board about two months ago, Donna?
Prior to that, she was our SEC consultant for two years, and she has just been a fantastic addition to the team. Now, I don't know how many of you guys are familiar with freeze-dried candy. If you guys have little kids, you've probably had some bags in your house. What freeze-dried candy is, is you take, you know, gummy products, a Skittles-type product, you put it in our freeze dryer, and over anywhere between seven and 24 hours, you take all of the moisture out of the product, and that results in a super crunchy, super dried, and very flavorful candy. Because you took all the moisture out, all the water out, all you're left is the flavor of the candy. Now, candy continues to just grow at great rates. You know, we're estimating about 6% in all sugar confectionery sales between now and 2028.
It's rapidly growing across retailers, and you know, when we first launched freeze-dried candy, there were very small, independent, regional candy brands. Today, because of the success that we had in this space, Hershey's and Mars has entered, freeze-dried candy, solidifying the fact that it is an everyday product. You know, I think for any of you that were here a year ago, one of the biggest questions I always got was, "Is this just a fad? Is this going to stay?", and I think as we see all of these large entrants enter the space, it is very much established that freeze-dried candy is gonna be its category for a long time. Now, what makes us different? You know, we'll talk in a little bit about how Mars entering and, Hershey's entering really affected our trajectory in sales.
But what makes us different and allows us to have remained the independent leader, even with all of that competitive pressure, was our broad product mix. So we really tried creating something for everyone. We have sweet, we have sour, we have chocolate, we have ice cream. So that broad product mix, as we start reengaging with buyers, is really what is calling them to our brand. So along with that, what's really important is innovation. You know, Five Below is still our largest customer at this time, and we're having quarterly meetings with them about what new products can we bring. I think what freeze-dried candy really showed retailers and buyers was that the candy category had been stagnant for too long. Now, you know, a lot of our competitors, they've got four main freeze-dried SKUs, and what's really differentiating us now is this innovation pipeline.
We're super excited for our Caramel Crunch. That's something that we're making in-house in our Irving facility, so we're making it from scratch. Holiday SKUs. We just shipped Albertsons holiday displays. Albertsons has chosen not to have an everyday candy model. What they focused on is innovation and holiday. So on a quarterly basis, we're doing some really interesting and exciting in and outs. So how is it shaking out? As you can see here, you know, we represent, on the independent side, so outside of Jolly Rancher and Skittles, 30%, 34% of the market. One Up is primarily just in Walmart, so that market share is really just the Walmart side, and then everyone else kinda splits up the rest. One of the things that I think is really interesting about the freeze-dried candy category is it's outpacing overall candy sales.
So, you know, candy right now is growing at about 4% annually. Freeze-dried is growing at about 8.5%. So you bring in Jolly Ranchers and Skittles, and obviously it changes a little bit. You know, over the last year, what we've really been focused on at Sow Good, as Jolly Ranchers and Skittles came in, is treading water. You know, we really felt if we could survive this year of competitive pressure, you know, they signed exclusivity contracts with some of our main retailers, then, you know, once the dust settled, we would be able to rebuild. And so that's really where we are right now, rebuilding those relationships with our retailers that we lost during the initial launches, and it's starting to work. You know, the last year was really like, we were at the peak, we hit the valley, and now we're coming back out.
And so even with all of the exclusivity agreements and the millions of dollars that they threw at retailers, you know, obviously Skittles and Jolly Rancher are performing well, but we are holding our own, and that's really what our focus has been on. So of the top 10 freeze-dried candy items, we hold four of the 10. As I mentioned earlier, sugar is outperforming chocolate, and we see that as a tremendous market opportunity. You know, a lot of you know that cocoa prices are going through the roof, and so buyers are actively looking for items that, customers want, that don't have the high premiums that chocolate has right now. And ta-da! Good news, we're finally starting to, you know, beat out the big CPG companies where it counts.
You know, over the last 13 weeks, we've really started seeing, you know, recovery in our units per door. So, you know, Skittles popped eight units per door, Jolly Ranchers, four, Crazy Candy, six, and we hit 16 units per door. So that, you know, excitement for the large CPG launches has started to settle, and our customers are coming back to our product. You know, we're neck and neck with Mars and Velocity. Jolly Ranchers, while still higher, and they launched after Skittles, over the last few weeks, we've seen 11% decline week over week. So, you know, we're making a comeback. Global candy market growth, again, you know, about 4%. North American candy market's growing at about 7.6%. And so why do we keep saying that we're better than everybody else out there? And excuse the formatting.
It really comes down to what our core competencies were, which was manufacturing. So, you know, freeze-drying, it's not like an oven. You don't just stick the candy in there and set it at 425 for 90 minutes. It's really a very nuanced process to get the outcomes that you want. So because of our expertise, you know, the things that we focus on are precision hand packing, not short-cutting the freeze-dry cycle. As I mentioned earlier, some of these products take up to 24 hours. You can cheat and do it in a much shorter time period, but you're not gonna have the same crunch and outcome and flavor that you do if you do it the right way. You know, we custom-engineered our equipment from scratch. There is not one piece of the freeze dryers that we have not built out.
If you know anything about freeze dryers, they're these big, large chambers. They're like a tractor truck size. Most freeze dryers on the market only control their heat, and, their freeze-drying cycle on a chamber basis. We get down to the tray level, which is what allows us to have such control over our process. We're vertically integrated, so here you see some of our hand packaging. Because of the fragility of the product, we found this the most effective way to keep the quality high. You know, our freeze dryers, we're an SQF2 certified facility. We scored a 97 on our last audit, which is just some of the highest rates that you can get. Some of the retailers that we're in, Five Below, Kroger, Ace and Orgill have been really interesting.
So over the last four months, we've entered the hardware space, and just week over week, it continues to grow. So what we've really been focused on is stabilizing our customer base over the last year. Now that we feel like we've stabilized, now we can go back to, you know, slowly increasing, sustainably increasing our door count. Five Below, what we're really focused on with them is innovation, really bringing to their customers something new, something exciting, something that keeps the category fresh, and we're one of the only freeze-dried candy companies that are doing this. Now, over the last year, you know, as candy has gone through the growing pains that we've gone through, it's really allowed us to go back to what are our core principles, and what are we really about as a company?
We refocused on what makes us special, which is our technology, and so that allows us to start opening up other categories. Right now, we're in conversations for some private label baby snacks. We're gonna be looking at air-dried and freeze-dried meat products and ready-to-eat meals. Those are opportunities that over the next year we'll be able to explore. The Middle East not somewhere I expected to be, but it has been such an exciting launch. We launched about three months ago during the slowest time of the year for them, and according to our distributors there, we are exceeding expectations. Starting in October is when we believe that the cadence and the quantity of product that they're ordering will increase significantly. I really hate this chart, but that's okay. It's gonna look different next year. You know, at...
We don't have our peak on here, but second quarter of last year, we did somewhere around $14 million. Mars and Hershey came in. It really took a beating on our market share, and so now we're just in recovery mode, and this is the recovery slide. Not quite there, but we're getting there, so you see where we peaked, where we came down, and now we're holding steady. We believe that we're going to be holding at this level for about the next two to three quarters, and then go back to seeing growth and some resurgence late in this year and early the following year. Donna, do you wanna come up and go over the financial overview?
Okay.
Does anyone have any questions? I know I did that really quickly 'cause I'm still waking up. Okay, then no. I guess I did a good job. And I will turn it over to Ms. Guy.
Okay. Where, where do we tap?
Right there.
Oh, okay, great. Good morning. Okay, so this is our, let's see, summary income statement compared to last year. Yeah, I think this recaps the graph that we just saw. We had net revenues of $15.7 million last year for the second quarter. This year's second quarter, about $1.9 million in net revenues. Margin 57.6% last year. This year, negative 7%. So speaking on the decrease in margins real quick, you know, we just have certain allocated overhead costs that at these sort of rates that we're doing right now are you know not fully absorbed by the current sales and revenue. So, we do expect margins to increase in the coming quarters as we kind of work to lower that overhead.
Yeah. One of the things that we've seen from a margin perspective, labor costs, raw material costs, our hard production costs have not increased. We just built out a 320,000 sq ft facility that we no longer need, and so until we right-size that, that's really what's affecting our margin profile.
Yeah. OpEx decreased. I think one thing, Sow Good operates pretty lean, so a lot of the sort of decrease in OpEx is we're kind of, you know, where we need to be, not a lot more to really cut there. Just, we just need to grow top line, which we plan to do.
Right now, I mean, an opportunity for us is that we have so much capacity in our freeze dryers. Obviously, we'd rather not have capacity in our freeze dryers right now, but once sales recover and some of these adjacent categories come into play, we have the ability to scale very quickly because all of the infrastructure and all of the CapEx is already done.
That's right. Yeah, I would say last year, when revenues were $16 million and kind of predicting to grow, the company wisely did an offering and raised about $12 million, and just put all that into expansion with the six new freeze dryers-
And the larger space, so that's all sort of at the ready when the time comes to build out, you know, which we predict to be within the next year-
Yeah
Next four Quarters. Other income expense has that is our interest expense on our debt, which decreased from $1.3 million last year to $100,000 this year. That's due to paying down a lot of debt, which, you know, that's another great thing about Sow Good is we're not highly leveraged. We don't have huge debt service, and that it's also helping us with our cash right now.
Yeah, cash management has been key over the last year, and, you know, we've been able to manage that successfully.
Yeah. Our debt that we do have is long-term, and convertible. So, there's bright points, even though this comparison year over year doesn't look great. But, good things to come. This is the last four quarters and LTM adjusted EBITDA. You know, it's kind of... It's negative right now, just the aforementioned reasons.
Yeah.
So not great, but I think it's not insurmountable to get back to break even in the next coming quarters, and then back to positive EBITDA, hopefully, in the next year.
That's the goal.
Balance sheet. Talk a little bit about this. Cash, we have burned about $2-$2.5 million. I think this is kind of where we are with cash right now. Like, today is still, we're still about $1 million of cash. I think we're kind of able to maintain about $1 million of cash with, you know, like, the current sales, AP and AR situation, working capital. Inventory. Inventory increased from December 2024 to June 2025. We're kind of selling what we produce right now. So inventory had increased a little bit at June, but a lot of that is the allocated overhead, which hits inventory. I think as of today, the inventory number is lower. We have sold off some more, so inventory's decreasing.
This inventory, we do get the question a lot of the shelf life, and it does have a very long shelf life, which we're not in danger of impairment or obsolescence or spoilage, really.
Yeah.
Yeah. So that's kind of good. To the extent that we can kind of sell out of our inventory that we have, it doesn't cost us a lot to do so.
We have three minutes left.
Oh, okay, great. Well, I'm happy to speed this up. Cash flow, again, we burned looks like $2.7 million compared to cash inflow of $12 million last year due to our capital raise over the six-month period, and we feel like we're actually fine from a cash standpoint. Working capital from December until June, net working capital is kind of the same. We did burn some cash, but we also restructured our debt so that all of our current debt is now long-term debt, and so you know that was good work-
Yeah
By the management team to restructure that and put us in a good place. Again, our high, a year ago, we were at $20.2356. Our 52-week low, $0.54. You know, this kind of goes along with our other peak and valley slide, wherein during this period, we were, you know, just kind of targeted by some anti-competitive practices, that you, we really just have to wait out and, you know, do our best to find new markets, new products, and get the share price back up. I'll let Claudia-
Yeah
Give you the rest of the vision.
So it's been a bumpy year, but we've survived. And so now it's going back to rebuilding and going back to growth. I really believe that with the category expansions that we're doing, with the management team we've put in place-