Good morning, everyone, and welcome to SunOpta's 2022 Investor Day. My name is Michael Mulgrew. I'm the Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development. On behalf of our team, I'd like to thank you all for this opportunity to share our excitement and enthusiasm for SunOpta with you today. Before we get started, just a reminder that today's presentation includes forward-looking statements that reflect current beliefs and are not a guarantee of future performance. For more information on the risk factors and uncertainties that could make results not reflect those indicated today, please refer to the Risk Factors section in our 10-K. Today's presentation also includes non-GAAP financial measures and figures that have been rounded. With that said, we have a great agenda for you today. We'll be covering our strategy, our operations, our values, and our financials.
With that, to get started, it's my pleasure to introduce or CEO, Joe Ennen.
Good morning. Did you enjoy the tour? Learn a few things? Yeah. Good. Good. You know, we're gonna talk a lot today about strategy and numbers and competitive advantages, etc , but on some levels, I've already showed you what makes the company special, and that was the people. I have to think one of the hardest parts of your jobs when you assess companies and evaluate investment opportunities is strategy is a PowerPoint, numbers are numbers, but it's always about the people, isn't it? It's always about can the people make the numbers happen.
We were very purposeful today in wanting to show you some of the people, some of the talent, some of the culture that we have here because at the end of the day, what you have to believe is that the people that we've got on this team are gonna make all these numbers happen. I am extremely confident and extremely proud of the talent that we have built here. If there's one thing that we've done well over the last two or three years, it's execute. We're an operations-driven company. We're operators. We make stuff happen. We execute.
I wanted you to have a chance to just see some of the people and some of the talent that support the business and drive the business and make it happen every day 'cause if you don't feel that, then this is just PowerPoint. What I hope you take away from today is four things. Number one, an appreciation for our competitive advantages and capabilities. We've tried to show you a little bit of that. Mike is gonna unpack for you in detail the core competitive advantages that we have in the plant-based space. Insights into where and how we will drive growth. This is unapologetically a growth plan. 75% of the business growth and EBITDA that you're gonna see is gonna come from revenue growth. I spent a formidable part of my career at PepsiCo. They had a phrase, growth is oxygen. Okay?
I was imprinted by that idea and that philosophy that growth is oxygen. You see a growth fueled growth in EBITDA. We're gonna outline for you in detail by initiative, by business unit, our build to $100 million of EBITDA next year. By the way, we recognize we're seven months away from 2023, and we're still saying $100 million of EBITDA next year. I think some people were a little bit surprised by that number when we shared it on the Q4 call. We're still saying it, and we're seven months closer than when we said it the last time. $100 million of EBITDA next year. 150 million in EBITDA in 2025. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, we hope you leave with an understanding that this is a compelling investment.
Just some of the participants you're gonna hear from today, myself, Mike Buick, who is our general manager of our plant-based business. Some of you who are on the tour group two got a chance to meet Mike. You're gonna hear from him, and he's gonna unpack the plant-based business for you. Scott Huckins is doing double duty and continues to do double duty as both the general manager of our fruit business as well as the CFO. We're getting good value for money here at SunOpta. You're also gonna hear from Jill Barnett. Jill is our Chief Administrative Officer over our HR functions as well as is our General Counsel.
We have a number of our leaders on the back who you would have had a chance to meet this morning, as well as three representatives from our board, Eric from Oaktree, Ken Kempf from Engaged, and there he is, and Dean Hollis, our Chairman, back here. Welcome to them as well. I'm not gonna drain the history of SunOpta, but I think it's important to understand where we are and how it was influenced by the history of the company. The company was founded in 1973 as a sustainability company. It was sustainable before it was cool to be sustainable. It was started in Canada, and it was a series of entrepreneurial ventures, some of which make for interesting reading.
The company got into the food business in 1999 on the kind of very commodity-oriented side of the business. 1999, they bought an organic corn and soy milling business in, I believe, North Dakota or Minnesota, and that started their entree into the food business. What you saw from 1995 - 2015 was 40+ acquisitions. Basically, they saw something interesting to buy, they bought it. They ran it like a holding company. Corporate, I think, was six people, and they really ran a holding company business model for almost the entirety of the history of the company.
In 2015, SunOpta acquired Sunrise Growers, the fruit business, frozen fruit business that you're all very familiar with. That really put in motion the need to centralize because it was a really big acquisition, and the company focused on trying to bring the pieces of the business together. That saw then a chapter of some significant quality challenges, business challenges, etc . In 2019, I joined the company as CEO. One single thing attracted me to this opportunity, and that was I've spent my entire career building and managing nutrition businesses or pivoting businesses to be driven by nutrition. As well, I'm a bit of a fix-it guy.
I looked at the portfolio, I looked at the opportunity, and I said, wow, this thing should be doing way better than it is. I didn't see the focus on the right pieces of the business, et cetera. In 2019, we did a couple of key things that have been instrumental and powerful to the turnaround of the business. We built a new management team, changed the structure of the organization, put great general managers in place like Mike Buick to run their businesses. We sold off portions of the business. We sold off the Tradin Organic business, which at the time was 40% of the revenue commodity trading business, took the proceeds and invested in capital, invested in the most profitable, powerful, advantaged parts of the business.
We stopped trying to fix everything that was broken, and we said, let's spend our time and our energies on the parts of the business where we can win, as opposed to trying to fix everything that was broken. The result of that was a pretty significant turnaround. In 2019, we made $20 million of EBITDA. In 2020, we made $60 million. Some of you will remember, and those were certainly fun scripts to read when we talked about tripling EBITDA, doubling EBITDA, etc . Where we are today. A little bit of a speed bump in Q3 and Q4. Everybody felt it, supply chain challenges, etc . We feel like those are all materially behind us. We are doing great in our plants. We still have some labor turnover, etc , but the output of our plants is outstanding, absolutely outstanding.
The innovation agenda that we have going is gonna drive significant growth, and we absolutely believe that we'll deliver $100 million of EBITDA next year and $150 million by 2025. Where we are today, just a quick grounding in case you arrived not knowing anything about us. Two business units, plant-based. You see some of the products there. $76 million of gross profit. More than 80% of the gross profit comes from the plant-based side of the business. On the fruit side, really two very different businesses. The only thing they really share is the word fruit. Okay. Customer profile is completely different. Nature of the customer contracts, very, very different. Profitability of the two businesses, very, very different.
When you look at fruit, you need to think about it as kind of two different pieces, the frozen fruit side of the business and the fruit snacks side of the business. We have a lot of manufacturing plants for a company our size, really a function of just that kind of acquisition-oriented chapter in the company's history. I'll bring your eye to the green. Those are our plant-based manufacturing plants. You see they make a beautiful diamond shape around the U.S. that was strategic in nature. Everybody knows diesel is, I think, $5.40 a gallon last week. Imagine shipping product from Allentown, Pennsylvania to San Diego if we didn't have a plant in Modesto. By the way, most of our customers pick up the product at our warehouse. Okay?
Imagine if they're only working with SunOpta and we only had a plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania. They're driving their product on their account all the way from Allentown, Pennsylvania to San Diego, Texas, etc . We're the only company in the U.S. that runs a network. We're the only one. We're the only one that has more than one plant. Everyone we compete with is trying to meet with customers and say, please come and pick up your product and ship it all across the U.S. on your dime. Huge competitive advantage for us in today's market as well as going forward because the redundancy that it represents, the capacity that it represents is a huge competitive advantage for us. One of the things that's different about SunOpta, and we're incredibly proud of, is we got a lot of ways to make money.
We have four different ways that we make money. We go to market through our own brands. The purpose of those is really to be the tip of the spear for innovation. It gives us the confidence that we can develop a product platform and bring it to market, and bring it to market through our own brand, and I'll talk more about that. We go to market ingredients. You would have saw oat base and all the different things that we can do with oat base, and you're gonna Mike is gonna share with you a video that explains all the different ways that we go to market. Co-manufacturing is a big part of our business. We manufacture for many, many, many of the brands that you see on the shelf, especially in the shelf stable space.
As a matter of fact, I think if you closed your eyes and just reached out and grabbed one, there'd be a probably 8/ 10 chance that you grabbed a product that was manufactured by us. Private label. More predominant on the frozen fruit side of the business. On the plant-based side, we have a couple strategic partnerships that we do private label for, and Mike, again, will explain a bit more about that. Net-net, we have a very strong foundation, lot to build on, lot to drive growth off of. Where are we going? We have a description of our company which is fueling the future of food. We are a sustainability company. You're sitting in a building with 18,000 sq ft of sustainably sourced bamboo.
Just yesterday, they were starting the process of putting 36,000 sq ft of solar panels on the roof. There's no paper products in this building. It's all dishes, etc . You heard some of the sustainability efforts that we have going within our plants. All of our plants have achieved zero waste. We are a sustainability company. The business that we're in, value-added food manufacturing focused on high growth, supply constrained categories. That's a hugely important part of why we're successful. We're focused on plant-based sustainable products, principally cow dairy alternatives. It's not the easiest thing to say, but, you know, cow alternative. No cow. Multi-pronged go-to-market approach, I mentioned that. We are channel agnostic, full service business model, and again, Mike will unpack for you just what that means, but we don't just run manufacturing plants. Many co-manufacturers just say, here's our plant.
Show up with your formula. Pay us $15,000 for the day. You can run your product through our plant. Hope it goes well. That's the level of R&D support they get. You saw the level of R&D support we can provide. Lastly is we're focused on creating growth runway for customers outside their capabilities. I grew up in brand management my whole career. Okay? They're really good at doing what they do, and they're really bad at doing things they don't do. What we afford them is the opportunity for a brand to say, hey, you wanna be in this category? Great. We'll manufacture it for you. We'll do all the work. All you have to do is put your brand on it, and they can drive growth. It's a huge part of the value that we give brands. I mentioned these results.
What I can tell you is they're impressive numbers. They're not aspirational numbers. These are not pie in the sky, airy-fairy aspirational numbers. These are the numbers that we're going to deliver. They're impressive, but they're actually incredibly achievable. Try to make this really simple for you guys, which is in order to believe this, you only need to believe four things. Okay? To believe we're gonna deliver $1.3 billion in revenue, and in order to believe we're gonna deliver $150 million of EBITDA, you have to believe these four things. The first is that we can continue to grow our plant-based business at the rate that we've grown over the last three years, 15%. That'll deliver the double in revenue that we have talked about for 2.5 years.
You have to believe that we can deliver a 19% gross margin in plant-based, which we effectively delivered in 2020. You have to believe that we can double our fruit snacks business to $115 million, a significant portion of which we just inked a major new contract with our biggest customer. The last thing you need to believe is that we can manage our business with the SG&A growth in line with revenue growth. If you believe these four things, that's 90%+ of the EBITDA I just showed you. There's no bend in the curve. Not asking you to believe a bend in the curve. I'm just asking you to believe we can continue to deliver results that we have already delivered.
I mentioned growth, and again, this is unapologetically a plan that is built on driving revenue growth, and we have three ways to drive revenue growth. Organic growth from existing categories and customers. We're blessed with customers who are winning in the marketplace and categories that are growing. When you hear and understand the depth of our competitive advantages, you'll understand why we're so bullish about our ability to grow market share from competitors. Lastly, we're taking our capabilities and our competencies and extending the TAM of the business significantly. Five strategic imperatives for us to deliver outstanding financial results. First is transforming the portfolio through structural changes and prioritization of resources. This is not a new headline for us. You've been hearing about this since I joined the company.
Fortifying our competitive advantages in margin-accretive categories, leveraging our core capabilities to expand the TAM, being recognized as a sustainability company, and Jill is gonna kinda unpack that for you because we feel somewhat disrespected that we are actually an incredibly strong sustainability company through the products we produce every single day, yet the scorecard doesn't necessarily reflect it. We are committed to remedying the scorecard and getting credit for the company that we actually are. It's a little bit like Tesla's offense at getting kicked out of the S&P 500 ESG Index recently, and then the last is codifying our vibrant culture, and again, this is the core of the engine room of the business. Portfolio transformation. The core of our business, plant-based milks, we also run some tea and broth products and fruit snacks.
75% of that part of the business, and we'll refer to this as core from this point forward, core, 75% branded, $470 million in sales, 90+% of our gross profit, 15% year-over-year revenue growth. In the optimized category, we have a couple businesses, frozen fruit, and our sunflower business. Margin-challenged businesses, and really, really dominated by the private label side of the business. Less than 10% of the gross profit. You will not be surprised that 90% of the content of this meeting is focused on where 90% of the gross profit is.
We will unpack frozen fruit a little bit, just so you understand and are grounded, but you'll notice in my four things you need to believe that we didn't ask you to believe anything on frozen fruit. I didn't ask you to believe a revenue improvement in frozen fruit. I didn't even ask you to believe margin improvement on frozen fruit. I absolutely can tell you we are going to improve margin in frozen fruit. That's for us to prove and us to demonstrate to you. We're not gonna ask you to believe that. The company has a long history of not delivering great numbers on frozen fruit, so we're not asking you to believe anything on frozen fruit. Nothing. You don't have to believe anything. We hold ourselves to a much higher standard than that.
When we built the numbers, we're not gonna ask you to believe anything there. Just a quick slide on how we view the optimized side of our portfolio. Obviously, we're trying to fix these businesses, and Scott's gonna share with you our margin improvement plan on frozen fruit. When you look at it, I mean, and this would be true of any business, right? You know, you focus on trying to drive improvement. If you're successful, great, reevaluate it as core. If not, you know, you look at either redeploying those assets, risk managing that part of the business, considering alternate owners or ultimately ceasing operations. I just wanna give you a sense of how we're thinking about some of those optimized sides of the business. Our focus right now is on executing our profit improvement plans.
Now, we have been, and again, back to part of what bent the curve on the EBITDA performance of the business. Back in 2019, from 2019 - 2020, $20 million of EBITDA to $60 million, what bent the curve? This, in its most simple of terms. This is what bent the curve. We shifted our focus to focus on the things we were good at. 75% of management's time, 80% of R&D resource, 90% of our CapEx investment against the core businesses driving profit improvement. What's been the result of that? It's one of my favorite pages in the deck. You look at 2019, 30% of the business was value added, 70% of the business was commodity. I mean, we were effectively a commodity business in 2019. Fast-forward to today.
In just four years, we've doubled the size of the value-added segment of the business from 30% of the portfolio to 60% of the portfolio, and we'll continue on that journey. I mentioned we're very focused on plant-based milks. If you haven't gotten that point yet, this will be a good reminder. Why? Huge growth opportunity. You see on the right-hand side, the plant-based milk category growth. One of my favorite reminders is that this is a 20-year overnight success. Plant-based milk started in the mid-1990s with soy milk, and has delivered a comfortable 20%+ CAGR over the last several decades. It continues to do outstanding in the marketplace, and there are core consumer drivers behind it. You can see on the left-hand side some of the growth rates and size of the categories. Plant-based milks is obviously the dominant part of the plant-based universe.
Milks is fully 40% of all of plant-based, out of all the plant-based categories, all the beverages, dips, spreads, yogurt, plant-based meats, add it all up, milks is 40% of it. You see the growth rates that have been delivered for decades on the left. Why? Why? Get asked that question a lot. Why? What's the buzz? Why, why are all these people drinking plant-based milks? One of the most important ones is taste. People actually prefer the taste of plant-based milks. Here's the thing to understand, and again, as a consumer marketer my whole career, people don't change behaviors. If kids grew up drinking almond milk or kids grew up drinking soy milk, they don't suddenly go, ph, wait, I'm an adult.
I need to reevaluate every single thing in my pantry and every food choice I've ever made in my whole life. No, they just keep drinking almond milk. When they go off to college, when they get their own apartment, when they have kids, da, da, da, guess what the kids get? Almond milk. It's called the cohort effect. It's demonstrated for 100 years. Cohort effect. People prefer the taste of dairy. It's funny, you know, we do a lot of product cuttings here, and recently, several months ago, we did a product cutting comparing our products to cow milk. It was so funny 'cause people were like, "Ah, just tastes funny. Like, ugh, ugh, I'm like my mouth is coated, like, kinda bleh. It tastes sour, tastes eggy, da, da, da. That is a core fundamental part of plant-based milks.
Because unlike some of the meat analog spaces where their goal was to make it taste exactly like the cow alternative, therefore, if it tastes the same, there's no opportunity for there to be preference. If two things are identical, you can't prefer one over the other. They're identical. By definition, there's no preference. They're identical. Whereas if something is different, there's the opportunity for preference, and that's one of the reasons why plant-based milks continue to do very, very well. Health, allergies, this is probably a not well-understood driver. A third of the people in the U.S., one-third of the people in the U.S. are lactose intolerant. 65% of people on planet Earth are lactose intolerant. 65%.
Now think of the demographic changes going on in America that have been going on for decades and decades and decades, and you'll understand some of the drivers of plant-based milk growth over time. Sustainability and animal welfare are two other drivers. I'd be remiss if I didn't also acknowledge while our current focus is on internal expansion of capabilities, that M&A is, you know, I would say something within the planning horizon out through 2025 that we would certainly consider if the right opportunity came along. Next section is around competitive advantages, and I'm not gonna drill this 'cause Mike is going to go through it. You know, you're in Minnesota. They don't like to brag. You know, they're kind of really, you know, understated, cautious people. I'm gonna brag for a minute, okay.
My apologies to all the Minnesotans in the room, but I'm gonna brag for a minute. We are outstanding at running manufacturing plants. Mike's gonna show you some data from Tetra Pak comparing us to every single person in the country who runs aseptic manufacturing plants, and we are the best in North America at running these plants. Factual data. Technical expertise. You would have saw in the R&D labs how great we are. National manufacturing footprint, I talked about that. Thank you. All the lights are on motion detectors 'cause we're a sustainability company. Aggressive investment in a capacity-constrained environment, right? We are doing the hard work right now of building capacity. It's hard work. There's no labor. All the raw materials are in short supply, and we are standing up plants and adding capacity and building out capacity when it's really hard.
We're going to get paid for that because we're doing the hard work. Fourth is vertical integration. Why does that matter? Because if we were trying to go source oat base right now from somebody else, there is none. Thank God! We are making our own oat base because if we were trying to buy it from somebody else, it wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't have an $80 million-$120 million oat business. We wouldn't have it 'cause there'd be no oat base to buy. Lastly is the robust customer service model that, again, Mike is gonna share some testimonials from our customers on how great of a job we do here and how important what we do is for their business. Third piece, leveraging our core capabilities to expand the TAM.
We've done a great job in the last several years of expanding the capabilities of the business. We used to just be a co-man and private label business. We've added brands successfully, and we've added ingredients. You saw that on the tour. Vertical integration. We've gone from really focused on processing and packaging to adding the extraction step. Again, hugely important part of being able to deliver products to our customers. On the packaging format side, we used to do 1 L and half-gallon aseptic packaging in Tetra. We're adding 330 ml. That's opening up a $6 billion TAM for us in the protein shake sector, which is consistently short of supply. Huge opportunity for us. Again, focus on capacity-constrained environments. Categories. We used to be predominantly focused on almond, soy, rice, and coconut.
We've added oat, huge growth pillar for us, creamers, protein beverages, refrigerated beverages. Again, we're already in these markets succeeding. Lastly, it's not a coincidence that we have four manufacturing plants all within a couple 100 mi of a border, east coast, west coast, north and south, and we've never had capacity to go pursue international expansion. Why go hire a broker to take your product into Mexico when you don't have capacity to serve your customer base in the U.S.? As we're adding capacity, as we're expanding, that is certainly a growth avenue for us, and we get calls all the time. China, Australia, can you ship us product? We'd love to buy your product. Can you send it? Like. We're busy running our current customers, servicing this market. As we get capacity, this will absolutely open doors for us.
Here's the TAM of the business. 2019, $3 billion TAM. Today, $12.5 billion. Excuse me, by the end of next year, when Texas comes online, $12.5 billion. We started with the core shelf-stable plant-based milk. That's the green slice of the upside-down layer cake. You can see on the left-hand side how we go to market. We go to market packaged, branded, private label, and co-man. $1 billion TAM growing at 5%. The total TAM of that environment is $3 billion growing at 4%. We expanded into creamers and baristas. You would've tried several of those products again this morning. Another $1 billion of plant-based TAM, 33% growth. Huge. That whole sector of the creamer barista category is blowing up. $4 billion total TAM. We get into refrigerated.
How do we participate in refrigerated milks? We don't make the cardboard gable top cartons that you see. No, we supply the oat base. That's an ingredient play for us. We go to market that way through co-man and private label. $3 billion plant-based TAM opens up, growing 10%. Then you say, you again would've saw the ice cream category, et cetera, right? Big opportunity for us. Again, how do we participate? Oat base as an ingredient play, co-man and own brand, $1.5 billion TAM growing 16%. The last piece of it, which will come online as part of our Texas project, is the protein drink sector. $6 billion TAM. The plant-based side of it is incredibly underdeveloped.
We will participate both on the whey-based side of it, which is the $6 billion market, while we bring our plant-based credentials and capabilities to help build out the plant-based side of it. Okay? Here's a fun fact for you. Protein powders. The powders, 40% of the powders are plant based. 40%. Ready- to- drink protein, 3% plant based. I'm thinking if 40% of the people are buying plant-based powders and only 3% are buying plant-based ready- to- drink, there's some opportunity unlocked there. We'll participate on the whey side of it. Obviously, these are big systems to put in, and we're gonna sign up volume and drive volume against the whey-based side of it.
We're incredibly excited equally about bringing our plant-based credentials and capabilities to the ready-to-drink protein sector. We prioritize six innovation territories, three on plant-based, three on fruit-based. You would've saw, again, some of these products this morning. Oat, and you see some of the products and go-to-market optionality that we're pursuing there. Protein, next generation milks, and then on snacks, one of our core strategies on snacks is portfolio transformation to more value add. You won't be surprised then to see that we have an incredible focus on the fruit side of building out value-added products. As opposed to just freezing a strawberry and putting it in a bag, we're now sourcing organic acai and organic dragon fruit, pureeing it, putting it in a bowl with pepitas and soy crisps, et cetera, et cetera.
That's a much, much different value proposition, and you would've saw we've commercialized 12 products already against this bowls platform, and then value-added blends. Three and three on each side. You would've seen many of those products this morning. I get asked often about our go-to-market strategy and the role of brands. It's important to understand everything, how you execute starts with where the idea come from. Okay? When a customer comes to us with an idea or we bring an idea to a customer, then that's a pretty simple process, isn't it? We look at, is this a good idea? Can we commercialize it and make money? Then we go develop it, we launch it, and over time, we'll look to kind of extend that into the other parts of our business. Pretty simple.
Problem with that is that's not gonna help us achieve the growth aspirations that we have for the business. We have started initiating self-identifying growth opportunities. The problem and the challenge in that is no one will buy a product from you if all you have to show them is PowerPoint. If you don't have any manufacturing equipment, and you don't have a plant to run it, and you don't have any product formulations, but you say, we'd like to get into manufacturing bowls. They say, have you developed any products? No. Do you have any expertise sourcing those ingredients? No. Do you actually have any equipment to run it? No. If you say, y es, we'll go do all that, they're gonna go, why don't you call us when you got something? This process starts with us identifying, is it a good idea?
How can we commercialize it and make money? We get to just one little difference in the process, which is, are we prepared to launch this with our own brand? Because if you're gonna spend all the time and money and energy to develop the product, you better be willing to commercialize it. We said, great, if we had brands, we can use them as proof of concept, proof points for the innovation so that we can bring it to market, and that's exactly what's happened on bowls. If you look at this product, this Sunrise Growers, we showed this to customers. Some customers said, we love it. We'll take it in as Sunrise Growers. Some customers looked at this and said, wow, we love that.
Can we do that as private label? We say, yes. Some customers look at that, big CPGs, and says, wow, you're already making this. Can I just put my name on it? We say, yes. We're trying to monetize the platform, and we're agnostic as to how we bring the innovation to market. Fourth, be and be recognized as a sustainability company. It's my Rodney Dangerfield moment. What are we focused on? Number one is driving growth in our core business, okay? The products we make, and you're gonna see from Jill, the products we make, the core products we make, plant-based, is about being a sustainability company. We're putting solar on the roof of our building because we think it's the right thing to do. We're not doing it to prove to somebody that we're a sustainability company.
We're doing it 'cause we think it's the right thing to do. Number two, I mentioned this, understanding and managing the external evaluator's scoreboard and managing to that. They're scoring. There's a score being kept, and we need to do a better job of making sure that we're putting points on the board in the right places. Setting aggressive ESG goals. Activating this through the network. That's our network. Lastly, marketing our efforts to stakeholders, and Jill's gonna share with you what we're doing in this space. Lastly is codifying our vibrant culture, and again, tried to explain that, this may be one of my favorite quotes of all time from Peter Drucker. Strategy. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I absolutely believe that. You know, I've been doing big CPG for 30 years.
It's always about the people and the team and the culture of the team. Again, if you can understand and appreciate that and understand and appreciate how important it is for us, you'll appreciate why I'm so confident that we're gonna deliver the numbers that we've outlined. We have a set of what we call MVBs, Most Valued Behaviors. I think every company has something that looks like this. It's real here. It is absolutely real, and Jill's gonna share with you some data on just how many people have taken the opportunity to recognize a peer, et cetera, around these.
I think if you stop anybody, and I would wager a heck of a lot of money, you could stop anybody who works in this company, third shift, Alexandria plant, and say, w hat are our MVBs? I think they'll get 4/6 right. Those are the five imperatives that'll deliver our results. What do those results look like? I'll unpack a little bit more for you. On the plant-based side, revenue $471 million last year, growing to $850 million, and $86 million of gross profit growth on the plant-based side of things. On fruit, $100 million of growth, $21 million of gross profit, I think split pretty evenly. Scott will unpack this, between the snack side and the frozen side.
Again, you see the dominance and the preponderance of our effort against the plant-based side of the business. With that, Mr. Mike Buick will come up and take you through more on our plant-based business, what our competitive advantages are, and how we're gonna deliver the numbers that candidly he's already been delivering. I mean, you know, Mike.
All right. Thank you, Joe, and good morning to everyone. You know, I've had the good pleasure of leading the plant-based food and beverage team and the incredibly talented people on this business for the last few years. We're incredibly proud of the results we've delivered. But I'm downright thrilled about what we're about to do over the next three years. It's an incredibly interesting space. SunOpta has some advantaged capabilities. We've got great customers, and we're gonna put all of this together to continue to drive growth. We're gonna start with just unpacking what is in the plant-based food and beverage business unit. It's a reportable segment for SunOpta, but I'm not sure everyone really understands what's in the business. First, we have our plant-based beverages business.
It's 72% of our revenue, it's more than 80% of our profit, and it's the strategic focus for our resources, our investment, and our growth. The second is our broth business. It's 15% of our revenue, it's less than 10% of our profits. While it's not a strategic focus for our business, it is, we do have strategic customers with which this is part of SunOpta's total value proposition. Then finally is the sunflower business. Joe talked about that. It's a standalone business. There's a general manager reporting to me who runs that business, does a really nice job. You can see the contribution to the overall business. But we're gonna spend a lot of time over the next 30-40 minutes talking about plant-based beverages.
Our plant-based beverage business competes in a $4.5 billion total addressable market, and that's really underpinned by our strategic foothold in shelf stable plant-based milk, which is a $750 million total addressable market, and SunOpta has more than a 50% share in that market. That gives us an incredible foothold to add new capabilities, expand on current capabilities, and continue to grow in plant-based milk and other beverages. We'll talk a lot about that. Within the plant-based beverage, on the left-hand side, you can see our revenue mix. What's amazing about this chart, you can see oat in 2022 will be the largest type of anything that we do.
If this was 2018 and you were looking at this chart, oat would be 1/3 of 1% of our total business. 1/3 of 1%. In 2022, it'll be 1/3 of our total business. That is a result of a great team seeing an opportunity, leveraging a core capability, working with customers and really taking advantage of our competitive advantages, and executing. In 2022, oat will be 32%. Almond continues to be a really important business for us and for our customers. Soy, coconut, rice, and any other plant-based milk that you can imagine rounds out the portfolio. In terms of go-to-market mix, we have a very diversified go-to-market strategy. This enables us to bring great ideas to market faster and execute them through a number of different channels.
You can see hybrid, 34%. This is a customer that isn't quite contract manufacturing, isn't quite food service, but it's a big, important part of SunOpta's business. You can see 27% is contract manufacturing. This is where we make products for other national brands, and we are the strategic partner behind their success. 22% in private label. It's a small set of private label customers, but the leaders in the area. Then we have a brand business and ingredient business. Then in terms of channel mix, actually more than 50% of our business actually ends up in food service ultimately.
Now, whether that's SunOpta going direct to food service customers or SunOpta through our national brand partners and ultimately to food service, you know, you could call it 50/50, but a lot of our business ends up in the food service channel. Where are we going? The headline, we will double our plant-based business by fiscal 2025. This isn't new news. We've been saying this for two years. We've been building a strategic plan. We've been executing on that, and that's where we're going. In terms of strategies, the first one is we're fortifying SunOpta's competitive advantages. We have some great competitive advantages in a great market, but we're continuing to build on those. The second, building capacity and capabilities to support the growth. We've got some great customer partners. We're working in great categories. We see great opportunity.
We need to build capacity to support the growth, and we need to build new capabilities to drive the growth. Finally, innovation from our core capabilities. In terms of the growth levers over the next three years, four years, from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2025, it really falls into three buckets. The first one is core growth, $210 million. More than 50% of our growth will come from the things that we do today. The second one is oat. $120 million of growth from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2025. The third is our entry into the nutrition space. 330 ml is the size of package from Tetra Pak. That will be a $50 million business by fiscal 2025. The collection of those three growth levers will double our business.
I wanna talk a little bit more about what is the reason to believe, where are we making investments, and what does that growth look like? In our core business, you're gonna see our competitive advantage. We are the market leader in plant-based milks. We have a diverse, fast-growing, and hungry customer base, and demand continues to outstrip supply. We will invest in innovation. You can see that here at EPIC. You can see that with our R&D team. We are building more capacity on our existing network, and we're building a fourth aseptic plant in Texas. In fiscal 2025, $210 million of growth, 80% of that will come from current customers. That's either organic growth or that is us being a bigger part of their business going forward as we have the capacity to support it.
20% will come from customer development over the next four years. We're very confident in that number. The second area is oat. Oat is the fastest-growing segment in plant-based milk. Shelf-stable, refrigerated, retail or food service. The leading national brands have less than a 40% ACV at retail. There's not enough extended shelf life, processing, there's not enough aseptic processing, and there's most certainly not enough oat extraction in the market to fuel and to service the demand of oat milk. How are we going to invest? We're gonna continue to innovate. You saw that in the tour earlier today, right? Our oat-based into shelf-stable milk, our oat-based into refrigerated milk, into yogurt, into ice cream, into other categories. We're going to extend our oat extraction. Today it is in Minnesota. In the future, we will have a network with Minnesota and California.
That West Coast presence is critical for our customers. They couldn't be more excited. A $120 million of growth, 2/3 of it will come from existing customers, right? You can imagine, again, when the leading brands have a 40% ACV, they're busy building refrigerated extended shelf life capacity, and they're counting on us to build more oat extraction. 1/3 will come from customer development. We sold out our Minnesota oat extraction fully one year ahead of our plan. We're working on a business development pipeline with lots of customers who were excited about SunOpta bringing oat capabilities to market, and we had to say, sorry, we're out. Right? We really have to focus on some of our big strategic customers. Some of them are waiting to come into the market in a lot of different categories.
1/3 of that will come from business development. Finally, our entry into the nutrition space. We have a core capability in aseptic manufacturing in 330 ml. Again, there's not enough supply for the growing demand. We're gonna leverage our core capabilities to get into nutrition, and we have great line of sight to a $50 million business. That's how we're gonna double this business. Now I'll talk a lot more about our core growth driven by our competitive advantages. This is really critical. These competitive advantages certainly drive our core, but it's the reason to believe across all of our growth. Let's start with shelf-stable plant-based milk. If you look at retail, right, tracked channels, it's a $220 million category. Refrigerated is 10 x the size, right?
It's only $220 million, but that's dramatically understated. That's less than a third of total shelf-stable plant-based milk. Given its extended shelf life, there's $120 million. It's a perfect format. It's a perfect product for club, for e-commerce, which of course is growing rapidly in a COVID and post-COVID environment. There's $120 million. Through untracked channels of retail and e-commerce, it's almost, you know, more than 50% the size of retail. Then in untracked channels like food service, and that's primarily coffee shops, this is a $400 million business and growing rapidly. The total is actually a $750 million market, and SunOpta has a 70% supply share of that $700 million market.
We have a greater than 60% share in retail and a greater than 60% share in food service, which again gives us a very big, important strategic foothold in plant-based milk. Who's the competition? Who has the other 30%? It's really broken into two buckets. The first are subsidiaries of large CPG companies, and while they are focused businesses for them, one, a lot of them are actually using contract manufacturers such as SunOpta. But two is, you know, within the broader context of the large CPG, they're not building more plants. They're not building oat extraction capacity and capabilities like we are. The second area is regional co-manufacturers. We'll talk a little bit more about who some of these are, but they're really focused on being full, not on doubling their business.
They don't have the means, they don't have the aspirations that SunOpta does. That leadership position has translated to strong revenue growth and margin improvement. 15% CAGR is what we've delivered over the last three years, right? We've improved our gross profit. Again, Joe talked about what you need to believe is a 19% gross margin on plant-based. We delivered that in fiscal 2020. We would have delivered that again in fiscal 2021 were it not for a global supply chain crisis, of which SunOpta and every other manufacturer in the country struggled. We'll talk a little bit more about our recovery and how we're doing. There's nothing fundamentally different about our business today than in 2020, and we absolutely have line of sight to getting back to these margins.
Our success is underpinned by five distinct competitive advantages, and again, I think it's important to keep in mind the broader context of which we operate, which is plant-based milk is growing rapidly, there's not enough supply, a global supply chain crisis, and so retailers and branded brand partners are looking for partners who can help them be successful. We do that in five ways. One, world-class operational and technical expertise that results in high case fill, lower cost, speed of innovation, and quality. Two, a national manufacturing footprint, lower supply chain costs, supply redundancy. Three, aggressive investments in a capacity-constrained environment. We have been investing in capacity. We're accelerating that investment. Four is vertical integration, right? We can control the quality, we can lower costs, we can get into new markets faster.
Five is robust customer service model, which provides supply chain integrity and the ability to serve our customers. Let's talk a little bit about the first of our competitive advantages, which is our technical expertise. SunOpta is a world-class aseptic operator. Tetra Pak, a global leader in processing, packaging, and service of aseptic technology, runs a benchmarking study of all of the manufacturers in the Americas who run aseptic technology. SunOpta's three plants are in the top seven, all of them in the top quartile of every manufacturer who puts anything into an aseptic package. Plant-based milk, dairy milk, juice, tea, water. It doesn't matter what it is, SunOpta runs three of the top plants in all of the Americas, and we do that with a more diverse customer portfolio. We do that with a more diverse product portfolio. This matters to our customers.
We have recovered from the global supply chain crisis that absolutely impacted us in 2021. In our first quarter earnings, we talked about our first quarter aseptic production 8% higher than it ever was, 19% higher than Q1 2014. What we haven't shared yet until this moment is that in Q2 2022, quarter- to- date, we actually made more cases. We're continuing to see the benefits of adding more people, investing more in our plants, building a more robust supply chain. We're seeing the results of that in our business. This, again, is in an environment where we run a very challenging product in terms of intellectual property, agricultural understanding, enzyme science, and we have a very challenging manufacturing process. The scale at which we produce is unmatched by almost any of these other aseptic manufacturers.
We're running 500 million units through our network every year, and we do that in a surgically sterile environment through miles of piping, 72 valves. If anything goes wrong in any one of those, you lose sterility, and you put days of production on hold. That's the environment we work in, and we're investing to deliver even greater productivity. We're investing across our aseptic network. One of the areas we're investing is in the digitizing of our shop floor, so bringing real-time technology to the folks who run our products and getting real-time information about the performance and the quality of our products. We rolled a pilot plant out in Alexandria, Minnesota, just a couple of months ago, and we immediately saw a significant step change in our operational effectiveness.
All of our other plants, as you might imagine, w hen are we next? We have accelerated our timeline. We'll be rolling all of our plants, including Texas, in the next 12 months. This is a real game changer for our performance. Finally, in terms of technical expertise is our R&D, research and development. This building is a testament to that. We've more than doubled the headcount. We have an incredibly talented group of people. We have given them awesome capabilities, a 25,000 sq ft lab, lots of tools, a pilot plant. It's a game changer. Finally we have brands that can help us bring innovation to market faster.
We've launched over 100 new items in the last 24 months, and this is in an environment when a lot of retailers are focused on keeping their shelves full and not actually bringing in new items. We think this will accelerate certainly with the investments we've made in EPIC. In terms of national footprint, again, Joe mentioned this, we are the only aseptic manufacturer with coast-to-coast capabilities, and we're completing that diamond in Midlothian, right? These plants have redundant packaging and product capabilities so that we can run large national customers through two, three, and eventually maybe even four of our plants, providing them a lower cost, supply chain stability, redundancy in supply. Our competition can't do that. In fact, our scale and breadth of offering is unmatched. We'll have four plants, four aseptic plants when we bring Midlothian online. Our competition generally has one, right?
One in a region. Our large national customers, if they were looking for an alternative solution, would need to bring on two, three, maybe even four other co-manufacturers to replicate what we do. We're investing. Sorry, the third competitive advantage is our ability and our interest in capacity investment. Again, these are fast-growing customers in fast-growing categories. It's a lot of work to stand up a contract manufacturer. If you're standing up a contract manufacturer who's not willing or able to invest in your future, well, then as you grow, you need to bring on a second co-packer or a third or a fourth. We're building, and we're investing. We have eight big investment buckets. You can see largely we're complete.
Within our own, our current aseptic manufacturing, by the end of fiscal 2022, we'll bring on the very last piece of new capacity in our West Coast facility. We'll be complete. Midlothian, we're gonna talk a little bit more about that shortly. That will be complete in 2023. Our oat-based extraction will be complete in 2023, and the pilot plant, as you can see today, is complete. We're investing more than $220 million to support the growth of the market and our customers. Let's talk about Midlothian, Texas. We're incredibly excited. This will be our largest investment that SunOpta has made to date, and it will be the largest plant in our aseptic network. 285,000 sq ft building, and we've already designed 150,000 additional sq ft for potential expansion.
I'd like to show a video, but before I do, keep in mind that on September 18th, 2021, this was a field and not a single shovel had been put into the ground. It's a quick one-minute video. The progress we've made in building out this facility in this current environment is nothing short of extraordinary. But it's not extraordinary for SunOpta. We have a proven track record of execution, right? Whether it was our oat extraction in Minnesota two years ago, whether it was new processing and filling capacity. Certainly, the test is harder, we're not complete, but we're really proud of our proven track record of execution and our team has stood up to this latest test.
Having said that, we still have a lot of work to do before we're making saleable cases and seeing revenue profit out of Midlothian. Aseptic manufacturing is incredibly difficult and with stringent requirements, and so there is a lot more to do. Installation of equipment, validation, qualification. You can see we have a staggered timeline of line one, line two, and line three. This is on time. This is the plan that we laid out 18 months ago. We are on time, and we'll see in 2023 the rollout of each one of these lines as we continue to get this work accomplished. In terms of business development, we're adding a lot of capacity here. How are we doing, selling out this capacity?
Again, as we sit here today, we have line of sight to more than 50% utilization for this capacity. We're very close on the 330 ml line. We're very close to finalizing agreement with an anchor customer who will be taking almost 90% of the capacity on that line. One customer. We have commitments from two existing customers that would like to move more incremental volume into our network. They see our competitive advantages, they like the capacity that we're building, they wanna bring more business to SunOpta. Third and finally, we have a robust sales pipeline. We're actively engaged with conversation with new customers about bringing new opportunities on board. The Texas facility will amplify the impact of our competitive advantages, scale, capacity, operational expertise, lower cost. We're really excited about what Texas is going to offer. The fourth competitive advantage is vertical integration.
You saw for us, getting into the oat business has expanded our total addressable market. We play in the refrigerated milk business. We play in creamers, plant-based creamers, and the opportunities are limitless, almost. We've done a lot of really good work in oat extraction in a very short period of time, which really demonstrates our entrepreneurial spirit of the team and the people that work on this business. We have a four-minute video that will bring to life what oat means. This will go from $1 million in 2018 to a $200 million business in 2025, and we'd like to share a little bit more about how we bring oats to market.
Oats are shaking up the plant-based milk category. Oat milk already makes up 20% of the category, with strong growth expected for years to come. One reason oat milk has been so successful is its clean, neutral taste and creamy texture. Baristas find it's a perfect alternative to dairy in the spectrum of coffee applications. It is also used as a base for dairy alternative products like creamers, yogurt, ice cream, and spreads. To enable these amazing products, whole oats must be turned into liquid. This is accomplished through a process known as extraction. The resulting liquid extract is referred to in the industry as oat base. This highly technical extraction process is known as enzymatic hydrolysis. SunOpta's oat extraction features a proprietary recipe and process, which was commercialized in 2018 after several years of focused R&D.
Our selected enzymes and process conditions break down oats into specific carbohydrates and proteins to create precise flavors and textures. Our R&D and operations experts can modify the recipe and process to address customer-specific requirements. Once the extraction process is complete, we sell oat base as an ingredient three different ways. The first way is by turning the oats into a liquid oat base, which can be sold in 5,000-gallon tankers to high-volume customers that sell oat milk in the refrigerated aisle. Into 275-gallon totes for smaller customers that sell oat milks and other oat-based products such as ice cream and yogurt. SunOpta is the only company in North America that has the capability to sell oat base in aseptic totes.
The second way we sell oat base is by converting oats into a soluble powder for international customers or customers who prefer this format for their applications. Finally, SunOpta takes the insoluble output of oat extraction, known as oat cake, and dries and mills it into a high-protein, high-fiber, certified upcycled oat flour with broad application for food products. Additionally, SunOpta utilizes oat base as a critical ingredient in our aseptic operations for our growing oat milk and creamer business. We are continuously innovating and expanding our capabilities to address new and emerging market opportunities. These capabilities, combined with SunOpta's agnostic go-to-market approach, combine to create six revenue and profit streams. One, we are vertically integrated, utilizing our own oat base to make oat milks and creamers under our own brands for food service and retail operations.
Two, we aseptically package oat milk as a co-manufacturer to make the shelf-stable versions of leading national brands, as well as private label options for major retailers and food service providers. Three, we sell tankers of oat base as an ingredient to manufacturers of refrigerated oat milk. Four, we fill aseptic totes of oat base to serve smaller manufacturers. Five, soluble dried oat base can be used like liquid oat base. Because it is shelf-stable, it has a longer shelf life and can be sold internationally. Six, the insoluble oat by-product becomes our proprietary and upcycled Oat Gold, which provides an excellent source of protein and fiber in baked goods, dips, and spreads. We see continued demand for oat products, yet capacity isn't keeping up with the growth. SunOpta continues to invest in capacity and capabilities for current and future customers.
In fact, we are building a second extraction facility on the West Coast, all to assure we can keep fueling the future of food.
Pretty exciting stuff. Two things I wanted to mention. One is to bring this to life, we showed some images of retail and some shelf sets that by no means is intended to be indicative of who our customers are. It's the type of customers that are in the market. Secondly, on the tour, the question was asked, I thought you sold the ingredients business. Now it sounds like you're getting back to an ingredient business. I think you can see from this is a value-added ingredients business, right? This is not trading a commodity. Look at the size of the facility needed to convert raw oats into an oat base.
We call it an ingredients business because it's an essential ingredient in plant-based foods and beverages, but in no way is this an ingredient business, like a commoditized ingredient business. We're really excited about the future of oat. The fifth and final competitive advantage that we'll talk about today is customer service. Customer service certainly means high case fill rate and the customer service function within the organization, but at SunOpta, it means so much more than that. We have local embedded resources at key customers.
We have wired organization, supply planning, demand planning, R&D, quality, and so on and so forth, to really understand our customers' needs, and we work incredibly close on a day in and day out basis with our customers to bring their products and drive their growth. A couple of our customers were kind enough to share some testimonials specifically for this audience and today, and I'd like to quickly read them. The first is from HP Hood. They said, we've leaned heavily on SunOpta to respond to the seemingly endless array of supply chain challenges we've all experienced this past year.
The competence, and professionalism of SunOpta's customer service team stands out among its peers. A second customer, ekaterra, which is a spin-off from Unilever for their tea business, said the following: From partnering on innovation for the Tazo brand, enabling growth of the brand in day-to-day operations getting Tazo into market, we appreciate the support. As a strategic partner, we share with you our growth ambitions. We are confident that in SunOpta, we have the right partner to match our ambitions. These are two of our customers. Final point. On a quarterly basis, we survey all of our customers to understand how are we performing as a company in terms of customer service, and we consistently get very high marks on our Net Promoter Score. It's incredibly important.
All of these competitive advantages get wrapped up at the end of the day in our ability to service our customer. I wanted to talk a little bit briefly about how all of these competitive advantages come together for our biggest customer. At the end of the day, we are uniquely wired for large national scale customers, and we bring all of these competitive advantages to life. Operational expertise looks like high fill rate. It looks like having an R&D team that can customize and formulate products that uniquely match their needs. The national footprint, again, I mentioned this earlier, but it's being able to make the same product with the same consistency across each one of our plants in our network, allowing them to save on freight costs and have supply chain redundancy. It looks like investment and capacity.
We've invested, and in this particular customer, we are the only half gallon network. It's a unique package that works for their needs. It drives higher store level execution, it lowers their costs, and it's a really important part of their sustainability strategy and brings that sustainability story together for both of us. Vertical integration. Being vertically integrated in oats allowed us to quickly enter this market with an oat milk. Finally, customer service, again, every function in this organization is uniquely positioned and focused on this customer. Starbucks was kind enough to share the following testimony. "Starbucks and SunOpta have had a great relationship together over the years, and we appreciate the innovation and collaboration that SunOpta brings to the table which has led to success for both our brands.
We look forward to continuing our relationship and are excited to see what the future holds for our two companies. This is what that success looks like. A nearly 20-year relationship that spans multiple products and unbelievable growth. As you heard from the testimony, we expect that growth to continue. It's not just for our largest customer, it's for all of our customers. These are our top 10 customers. Because of the various ways we go to market, in 20 years, this is the most diversified customer set I've ever had the benefit of managing. This includes global coffee chains, it includes large, vertically integrated dairies, global mass retailers, global CPG brands. It is a blue chip list of customers. Four of these customers have been long-time partners of SunOpta.
They represent 53% of our total revenue, and the average tenure of those four customers is 18 years. To say that our company feels like it's part of our company would be an understatement. We've been in business together for a long time. It also represents the impact and our ability on the business development side. The other six customers were not customers five years ago, so we went out with our capabilities and our competitive advantages and told our story and brought new customers into the fold. They represent 25% of our total revenue and they're leaders in their respective channels. Oat growth is our second growth lever. Again, I talked about this earlier. In fiscal 2018, it was a $1 million business. $1 million. We bought oat ingredients from the outside.
We turned it into a finished good for a small, an emerging brand. It was a $1 million-dollar business. Three years later, it's an $80 million dollar business last year. Certainly line of sight to a $120 million dollars this year. We believe this will be a $200 million dollar business by fiscal 2025. This is a great example of SunOpta leveraging a core capability, investing, executing, and really taking advantage of some great market opportunities. Again, the $200 million dollars, and I think you saw it in the video, this is going to go to market in a number of different ways. Certainly plant-based milk and our plant-based creamers. Then you look at it and say the oat milk base can go into refrigerated oat milk, it can go into ice cream, it can go into yogurt.
We can continue to innovate oat milk lattes, oat milk with protein. You tried that on the tour this morning. We've got a lot of opportunity, and we have a diverse go-to-market strategy that will bring this to life. Third growth lever, expanding into the ready-to-drink nutrition category. Again, leveraging our aseptic category, our aseptic expertise. Right? We are an aseptic manufacturer. This requires aseptic manufacturing. It's a big growth or it's a big market. Today, it's a $6 billion total addressable market, and it's continuing to grow, and it's under-serviced. There's not enough capacity, not enough supply to match the demand. We're really excited to take our core capabilities and get into this market. You heard Joe talk about the opportunity in plant-based.
Initially, this will be a whey protein product that we will bring on some big strategic customers to help us get into this market. Over time, similar to what you see in protein powder, tubs of protein, there is a consumer demand and need for plant-based that doesn't currently exist in ready-to-drink format. That will be a big part of our innovation efforts going forward. Last two pages for me, and it's a page you already saw. Bring all this back together on we are going to double this business by fiscal 2025. We're gonna do it by focusing on three things, and the growth levers, our core, $210 million. In four years, $210 million.
In the last three years, we've grown $160 million, and we're gonna do that with a stronger team, with a stronger set of customers, with a higher level of investment and proven execution. Our oat business went from zero to $80 million in three years. It'll go from $80 million-$ 200 million by 2025. We will get into the nutrition business. What must you believe to believe that we'll double the plant-based business? As Joe said earlier, it's pretty simple. You need to believe that we will grow over the next four years at the same rate that we grew in the last three, again, with a stronger team, more investment, stronger category dynamics, and a stronger customer list. You need to believe that we'll grow our core business by $210 million, driven by our competitive advantages.
You need to believe that we will take our $80 million business in oat and grow it to $200 million in fiscal 2025. Finally, you need to believe that we'll build a $50 million nutrition business. I said earlier, we are very close to finalizing agreement with one of the leading brands in that category that wants 90% of our capacity. It really becomes an execution, and you saw that we are the best aseptic manufacturers in the Americas. We have a lot of confidence in our business. Again, I'm excited about our opportunity. I'm fortunate to lead the best team in the industry with the best customers and with the investment and support from our senior leadership team. I'm excited about our future, and I hope you are as well. Thank you very much.
At this point in the agenda, I think we're gonna take a 10-minute break. We'll come back in 10 minutes, and thank you very much. Awesome. Thank you. I'm sure I missed, like, 10 key talking points, but. Again, restrooms here. If I need to do a tour stop of our other restrooms on the other side.
Okay, we're gonna get started again. Please take a seat. I'm Scott Huckins. Many of you know me as the Chief Financial Officer of the company. I came to SunOpta in 2019. More recently, I took over the leadership of the fruit business. I'm gonna take you through a few pages to try to dive into fruit, give you a good understanding of where we've been and where we're going. Want to start with a level set. I think Joe teed this up properly. There's really two pretty different businesses that sit within, quote, fruit. Arguably, the only thing they share is the word fruit. The first business is the frozen fruit business. This is individually quick frozen fruit, primarily sold through call it top five, top 10 U.S. retail.
If you look at some of the statistics, about a $280 million business in 2021. Revenue actually contracted 14%. That was on purpose. You may remember we have done a lot of work on SKU and customer rationalization, hence the decline in revenue. We'll talk about the outlook in a moment. Moving over to the fruit snacks business, called the alter ego. It's really a co-manufacturing business. Some of you had a chance to test or sample the organic, better for you, pure fruit snacks. That's what this business really is. If you look at 2021, did about $63 million of revenue, up a mere 28%. 28% growth.
When you think about the size of these segments at retail, frozen fruit business, call it about $1.007 billion, again, at retail, grew about 4% last year. When you move over to fruit snacks, that overall category is about $1.004 billion. It actually grew 12% last year. Again, just to kind of ground you on the basics of the business. We have for, call it three years, talked about three strategies for the fruit business. The first two are applied to the frozen fruit business, the third is specific to the portfolio. First strategy is to de-risk the frozen fruit business end-to-end. Second strategy, we'll cover this in detail, is to take a significant amount of cost out of the business to make it a low-cost producer.
Third, looking at the portfolio, the aspiration, and you're gonna see the details, is to increase the sales mix of the value-added content of the portfolio away from commodity toward value add. From a growth standpoint, basically $100 million of growth from 2021 - 2025. It's roughly evenly split between the frozen fruit growth and the fruit snacks growth. How we're getting there is quite different. The overwhelming majority of the growth in frozen fruit is pricing. You may remember we talked about taking significant price in this business to set up 2022. When you move over and look at the fruit snacks business, the opposite is true. It's predominantly volume growth. Okay, I'm gonna try to unpack, give you some insight into the two topics that we laid out for frozen fruit. All right. Number one, de-risk the business.
Number two, migrate this to a low-cost producer. When we showed up here in 2019, there was basically zero pass-through pricing in frozen fruit. Zero. Fast-forward a couple of years, I'd say about a third of the frozen fruit portfolio has pass-through pricing. Arguably more, the more important fact is the $40 million I talked about. We took $40 million of pricing in that business. I believe we've answered the question satisfactorily. We can take price in this business. You look at geographic diversification, again, kind of going back to our entry point here in 2019, very, very much a California-centric business. Very California-centric. We've really done three things from a, call it a footprint geography perspective. The first is we've taken about 80% of the manufacturing capacity out of California. Where did that volume go?
How did we manage the business? We've had about a 50% increase in our sourcing and processing in Mexico. As you would guess, that's cost advantage relative to the rest of the ecosystem. 50 is a large number, and importantly, the Central Mexico facility is our largest facility in the fruit network. Last piece is improving the supply chain by sourcing fruit in South America. South America is very relevant to the global fruit economy. We've had roughly a threefold increase in our ability to source. So the point is, think of it as much more of a global supply chain management footprint than a California business. Lastly, let me cover low cost producer. We have done a lot in this business in the last couple of years.
I think the takeaway is important, though. It's the first bullet point, which is we've really been streamlining the business. Used to be a long customer tail, long SKU tail business. Really consolidate that, build the business around core household name U.S. retail. They understand the value proposition, frankly, better than the rest of the fruit economy. That's the strategic imperative that then allowed us to unlock the costs. From a cost standpoint, we closed two fruit plants last year. It's about $10 million of fixed cost avoidance. Going back to my first point, that more simplified, streamlined business allowed us to de-layer the organization pretty significantly, call it about $5 million on a run rate basis. We sort of put everything together, again, just trying to drill the facts here.
If you think about the overall low-cost producer objective, if you looked at the plant expense, this is just in COGS, right? Plant expense, 2019 to this year, it's down nearly 40%, 40%. For those of you who followed the company a while and maybe heard some of the messages, we thought it'd be helpful to give you a kind of a double-click, take you through some of the metrics that we've been managing against, and you obviously would have seen in Q1 versus Q4 a nice step up in production. Okay, transitioning to third, the third priority, third objective, third strategy. Again, increase the sales mix of value-added fruit. Again, IQF fruit, think of that as the commodity piece. What we're gonna talk about now is the value-added piece.
If you look at the bar chart on the right, we're just trying to share, kind of like Joe laid out for the company, let's look at the journey, you know, of going from more commodity-driven to value-added. The point is, over the last, call it two years, three years, we've added about 800 basis points of value add. By the time we're done with 2025, call it 25% of the portfolio value add. Again, that's fruit snacks, and what we'll talk about in a moment is some of our innovation. The big driver, really in terms of flow-through or profit flow-through, we're gonna talk about is highlighted in blue, which is taking that core fruit snacks business from about $50 million in 2020 to $115 million in 2025.
I'll show you how in just a moment. Okay, focusing on fruit snacks, wanna start dimensionalizing this, unpack the numbers a little bit. Again, this is a $1.4 billion category at retail. Two things are important. If you look at the growth in the category in 2021, the $1.4 billion grew about 12%. Our focus in that business, as you know, is clean label. If you look at the subset of that billion four that was better for you organic, roughly double that growth profile, + 24%. When we look back at the business, quite a small business back in 2017. $35 million of revenue, so over a four-year period of time, we've delivered a 15% CAGR in the business.
Almost identical to what we have in the outlook, 16% between 2021 and 2025. Probably the single most important proof point of, you know, how real, how credible that is in the middle of the page. If you looked at public reporting, where we show it in the 10-Q, we delivered a little more than $21 million in this business in Q1 2022, right? Multiply it by four, it's an $85 million run rate. The point is, run rate today in the business, we're 75% of the way to our target. We've mentioned, I think, throughout the morning that there's a number of expansion projects. The one expansion project in fruit is in this business.
We're gonna add a little more than 50% capacity to the core offering that we've got here. Okay. In closing on fruit, I want to talk to you about two of the core innovation platforms that we have in the fruit business. I think what's important to understand to introduce these, as you've heard a couple of times, the company's agenda is to be go-to-market agnostic, right? That means bringing these products to life in private label, number two, through our own brands, or three, through co-manufacturing. Fruit bowls or smoothie bowls, as we call them, is a perfect example. We actually have today, you know, each of those categories being deployed. We have one of the largest CPG companies in the world, one of the largest food companies that you would have certainly heard of.
We do this with our own brand. We do it at private label. It's a small segment in the absolute called $50 million, but importantly, it doubled last year. The point being, you know, we have customer traction, scaling the business. We think this could be a significant growth lever. Then probably more recent would be the last topic, which is value-added blends. Think of this as trying to bring that smoothie shop experience directly to the consumer, right? Again, back to the theme of better for you quality, better for you product and accessibility right down the middle of the fairway. The idea again is have that readily available in the consumer's home. This is being commercialized. It's in the market as we speak, and this business also continues to grow.
Again, the idea is how do we go from, you know, a 85%, 90% commodity-driven business, you know, to a business with at least a quarter of the portfolio being value added? This is the answer how. Okay. I'd like to bring up Jill Barnett, our Chief Administrative Officer, to talk to you about ESG and culture.
Thanks, Scott. Thank you and good morning. I'm going to be covering off on our Environmental, Social, and Governance, otherwise known as our ESG strategy, as well as talking a bit about our culture. First, I'm going to start off with a video. Amazing, right? We are incredibly proud of the products that we produce and manufacture here at SunOpta, and the actual contribution that we make to better our planet. SunOpta has always been an environmentally friendly company. Joe mentioned it at the beginning of his comments. You know, from our early beginnings as Stake Technology, we used proprietary technology through the steam explosion in order to create a more sustainable animal feed system.
Later on, when we moved into organic food products, we ended up changing our name, and the whole purpose of changing that name was really to reinforce our commitment to environmental and organic products, as well as to recognize these products are nourished with the sun for optimal nutritional value, as well as our environmental responsibility in growing these products. Our ESG strategy has five key components, and Joe went through these, but I'll remind you just briefly. First off, it's drive growth in our core business. Second is to understand and manage our external evaluator scorecard. Third is to set aggressive ESG goals. Fourth is to activate throughout our network, and five is to market our efforts to our shareholders. Our core business is really driving our sustainability agenda. Our plant-based beverages are inherently sustainable compared to dairy milk.
The crops that are grown for plant-based require less land, less water usage, and use fewer greenhouse gas emissions than animal-based products. As we know, the plant-based milk consumes less water when producing compared to dairy. As we saw from the video, last year alone, we were able to save about 32 billion gallons of water based on 2021 production volume versus dairy milk. We are working hard to improve our external scorecarding, as our current evaluations, we don't believe accurately reflect who we are as a company and give us the credit we believe we deserve. We took steps in order to make sure that we could understand what our ESG profile was externally, understand what our rating agencies were giving us for scores, and then started to work through how do we best improve and set goals for the future.
We engaged an ESG consultant, started setting our goals, and then looked at prioritizing what actions we could take to improve those scores. Given the nature of our business, we ended up landing on 5 key environmental focus areas that we think at SunOpta we can have the greatest effect on. Number one is product environmental impact. Two, greenhouse gas emissions. Three, biodiversity and ingredient sourcing. Four, water management. And the last one, supply management. Specifically, what are we gonna do around these areas? Well, we have bold targets in place between now and 2027. By the end of the year, we're working on making all of our plants zero waste to landfill. We also are implementing actions in order to help us with reducing water, natural gas, and electricity usage throughout our organization.
We are also collecting our Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions data in order to set future targets that we can improve upon those, as well as taking a number of other actions, including creating some policies around carbon, biodiversity, palm oil and deforestation, as well as from a packaging standpoint, we're working to figure out more sustainable alternatives in collaboration with our customers and suppliers. Where we can have recyclable materials, we're looking to implement, and even within our fruit-based platform, we're looking at rolling out and commercializing a new compostable bowl, hopefully by the end of this year. Lastly, we have some aggressive packaging goals. Our packaging engineers are looking to move all of our packaging sourced by SunOpta to recyclable or, compostable or reusable by 2025.
Finally, we continue to create strategies and programs that that elevate the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion in the communities where we operate and do business. In 2021, we've made significant progress against our ESG commitments. 44 of our products, our branded products, are in the Non-GMO Project. We manufactured over 300 organic products, 29 of which were actually our own brands. Additionally, three of our facilities were able to achieve zero waste to landfill. Those were facilities in Allentown, Pennsylvania, as well as our two Alexandria, Minnesota facilities. 97.7% of our packaging, our own branded packaging, was recyclable. We emitted 261 tons of carbon emissions. On the people side, we're also making really good progress too.
We're on track for achieving our diversity goals and have increased the percentage of female leaders in our companies at the director level and above to 37%, and are also increasing our racially diverse employees at the salary level throughout our organization to now 24%. All of this progress is fueling the sustainability of our organization to achieve more, as at both the individual level as well as at the company level, and activating a sustainability mindset. Next, I wanna show you a video of one of our plants, our Third Avenue, Alexandria facility, and how plant personnel there are activating on sustainability.
I think it's really important that we have a way to recognize people for the talents and the gifts that they bring to our team, and the MVB process gives us a great opportunity to do that. I chose to recognize Ray Walters for the passion and dedication he's shown to sustainability. He has worked with a consultant since 2007 to reduce our energy, natural gas, and water usage throughout the plant. In that time, he saved 6.5 million kWh and 8,500 metric tons of carbon. That's pretty awesome. It didn't just stop there. It went further. He and the consultant worked together, and they were able to last year bring in over $100,000 in rebate checks.
Not only did we see the impact of all of those savings of the electricity and the natural gas usage in our plant, but we also got the rebate checks on top of it.
Limiting the footprint of SunOpta is helping future projects because over the course from 2007 to now, we have reduced our footprint, and that helps expansions take place here in Alexandria, which is important to me.
When there was a major demand for more oat base, our Runestone expansion project at Third Avenue helped to increase our oat base production by 175%. Good sustainability practices during the design and engineering phase resulted in a 43% energy reduction per pound produced in the first year of production at the plant. Along with this, we also engineered in state-of-the-art automation to significantly reduce overall water consumption.
To reach our zero waste goal, we worked as a team to come up with many ways to keep our waste out of the landfill. We recycle batteries, metals, oils, and more. We reuse things such as pallets, bulk bags, and barrels. We were able to reuse more than 11,000 pallets last year alone, saving thousands of dollars and many trees. We compost and upcycle the byproducts from our production, and anything we can't compost, upcycle, or recycle is turned into energy to power the hospital, tech school, and a manufacturing plant right here in our own community.
A sustainability mindset is not only used in how we operate every day, it's also in how we design and build the capabilities that will support our growth. Our new Midlothian facility has had sustainability at top of mind from day one. The strategic location allows us to save 5 million freight miles on an annual basis, which results in about 59 million less carbon emissions. We also are investing in a water treatment facility, which will save about 20 million gallons of water when we're fully operational at that facility. Our centralized HVAC will reduce energy usage by 45%, as well as energy-efficient water heaters and LED lights for our plants. We've used both recycled and recyclable materials in laying out the construction efforts as well as the materials that we have in our plant offices as well as our labs there.
We also had sustainability at the forefront of building our new innovation center here. Our new headquarters boasts 13,000 square feet of renewable bamboo. It also has over 920 LED lights, four electric car charging stations, and as Joe mentioned earlier, once we get that solar panel installed on our roof, we will be offsetting about 30% of our energy consumption on an annual basis. Really it's all about how do we incorporate sustainability in everywhere, operations, building capabilities. What are we doing to tell people about it? We have really amped up our PR efforts to talk about our ESG story. You will see things being announced via PR initiatives regarding our new facilities, both Midlothian, EPIC. In the video, the oat video, we referenced our oat upcycled Oat Gold ingredient.
We also are working to become a go-to media source, especially on the oat side of our business. Oftentimes getting references to get headlines and stories from what we're doing on the oat side of our business. In trade shows like Expo West, we have the opportunity to meet with new and existing customers to tell them more about our products and our innovation and sustainability efforts throughout our organization. Online, you've probably seen we've got not only the water counter, but we've got our ESG report, as well as our social media efforts through LinkedIn to tell our stories, get pictures, videos, et c, out there that show more of our sustainability, including our people and our culture.
While I was only able to provide a high-level summary of what we're doing on the ESG front, if you wanna get more specific details, please take a look at our 2021 ESG annual report. At SunOpta, we are passionate about sustainability, and it's part of everyone's job. We've even gone as far as deputizing all of our employees to be sustainability ambassadors. Sustainability is not something we are looking to achieve here at SunOpta, it's who we already are. Now turning to culture. As Joe mentioned earlier, culture is an essential element of our organization. From our passion to sustainability to meeting and exceeding customer expectations, what makes SunOpta different is the people who work here.
Employees have lots of choices where they can work nowadays, and being able to provide them with an opportunity to work for a company that's mission-driven, that empowers them to make decisions, and that allows them to grow and develop is what we're striving for within our culture at SunOpta. Empowering employees at SunOpta means GSD, Get Stuff Done, each day and every day, and it's this GSD mindset that has become the unofficial motto for all of our employees. You'll find GSD on T-shirts, in company communications, throughout meetings. You'll see references to it everywhere. It's all about building a culture around getting things done and delivering what we need for our customers. As Joe mentioned, we've got six most valued behaviors, speed, entrepreneurship, customer centricity, passion, dedication, and problem-solving.
These are the behaviors that our employees are living and teaching each day, and they're driving our results, with our focus being on speed and entrepreneurship. Here are just a few examples of our culture in action. Our team was able to successfully commercialize an oat milk product within a six-week period. We were able, with less than $100,000, invest in a production and scale our new fruit bowls line, and we were able to launch a new SOWN brand in less than six months to support our organic oat creamer line. These are just examples of where our employees are GSD-ing each and every day. One of the ways we reinforce these behaviors is through our MVB recognition program, and this gives our employees the opportunity to submit information about their colleagues who are showing and demonstrating these behaviors on a daily basis.
In 2021 alone, we had over 640 submissions. Out of 1,300 employees, that's pretty amazing. These are opportunities where employees are getting to highlight and showcase their fellow colleagues who are working to speed up projects in order to cut through process. They're also activating as entrepreneurs and saving costs for the company, and generally just doing things in order to deliver what we need to from a result standpoint. You know, how do we show you how our culture is here at SunOpta and what it means to work at SunOpta? This is a bit of an impossible task, I think, to try to convey via PowerPoint or you know spoken words what it means to work at SunOpta.
I know this morning you've had the opportunity to talk with some of our vibrant and passionate R&D people to see what projects they're working on. You were able to look at the video for some of our plant personnel and see how sustainability and MVBs are impacting their day-to-day life and what they're delivering. It's just really hard to convey that culture. I wanted to just take one moment to read an example of one of the MVBs that we received recently as an opportunity to try to give you a feel for what it's like. These are part of the 640 submissions that we've gotten in the last year.
Jared never batted an eye when we explained that the Runestone timeline was tighter than the Suez Canal and worked diligently to complete the controls work to ensure that we were able to hit our practice and go live deadlines. Our RedZ one coach said Alexandria was one of the most prepared customer sites he's ever worked with. Jared has established best practices for SunOpta that will prove invaluable as we replicate to the other plant-based beverage facilities. We are beyond lucky to have a team member that takes ownership to that level and always is willing to help troubleshoot any issues, no matter the hour of the day. Thi`s is Jared Jorgensen, who is one of our PLC controls technicians at our Alexandria, Minnesota plant. This right here is exactly what is driving the results that we are seeing at our company.
I firmly believe that this culture, this empowered, mission-driven GSD culture, is the reason why we delivered our Q1 numbers and will be the reason why we deliver our long-term plans. Finally, our incentive structure is aligned with our culture and our shareholder interests. Manager-level and above employees at SunOpta are on an equity-based annual incentive plan. This absolutely drives the results that we will be able to deliver this year by aligning our performance-driven culture with shareholder interest. When you look at the management team who sits here today, collectively, we represent about six of the largest number of shares of the company just here. What I can say to you with complete confidence, we are ready to get stuff done this year. Thank you.
I'm gonna now turn it over to Scott Huckins, who's gonna take us through the financial algorithm.
All right. Thank you, Jill. We're gonna try to take you through, I think, kind of four takeaways in this section. I'm gonna try to organize it up front so you have an idea where I'm going. I'm gonna unpack and bridge for you 2021 to 2023 revenue, gross profit, EBITDA. The exact same thing from 2023 to 2025. Call it the model. We're gonna talk about current events, the company's experience in managing and probably more importantly, our results in addressing inflation, topic on everybody's mind. Three, I'm gonna walk you through cash flow, leverage, returns on capital. You know, what is the result? How would you think about the result of what we've been investing in? And then four, close with here's our capital allocation framework as we look forward. Okay?
Before we dive in, I wanna kind of set the stage just to make sure that how the projections were prepared, you know, is completely transparent. The first is we did not reforecast the global economy, right? This is a roll forward of the environment we've all been living in. Okay? Second is maybe more subtle, and important to understand is this all hangs together, right? The capital that's been invested, the revenue, the profits for all of the currently known projects we're gonna go through. Okay? Number three is we've assumed that the business portfolio is continuous, right? No acquisitions, no divestitures. Again, roll forward of the company from today through 2025. Okay, just to reset, put on a piece of paper, you know, one page for simplicity. Here are the targets just to recap.
For 2023, $1.1 billion of top-line revenue, $100 million of adjusted EBITDA. I'm gonna unpack cash flow in detail in a moment. Call it $0.09 of adjusted earnings per common share. 2025, again, reset the targets. $1.3 billion of top line, $150 million of adjusted EBITDA, about $100 million of free cash flow, and $0.45 of adjusted earnings per share. Jill made a comment that I think it's important to say again, and then I'll see if I can prove it to you as we go through this, which is when you look in detail at the projections, materially every single financial metric we've done. There won't be a never before unprecedented delivery mechanism. Again, substantially every single number I'm gonna show you we've done. Okay, let's start with the top line.
Okay, again, purpose of this is let's bridge 2021 revenue to 2023 and from 2023 to 2025. You've seen pieces of this, but I think it shouldn't surprise you when you look at this at the highest level. About 80% of the growth, so round numbers, this is $500 million of growth. 80%, as we've been saying for 2+ years, has been doubling the plant-based business. I walked you through a few minutes ago the two pillars that are driving fruit, primarily pricing in the frozen fruit business and volume growth, and we're well on our way, or I think I mentioned 75% of our way there in terms of our growth targets for fruit snacks. Okay. Pretty straightforward. Okay, I'm gonna spend a few minutes. I think this is a very, very important page.
I'm gonna do two things. We're gonna bridge gross profit. When I say the phrase gross profit, I'm talking about GAAP as required. I'm gonna unpack some subtleties again, just in the interest of trying to provide clarity around this. If you looked at the fiscal 2021 financial statements, you'd see $98 million of gross profit. I'll start with the answer, the first answer, which is that's $137 million of gross profit dollars as reported in GAAP or by GAAP standards in 2023. Before I unpack this in a moment, big picture, as reported, about two-thirds of the dollar profit improvement will be plant-based, 1/3 fruit. It's a little misleading because of the red box. Explain that.
You just heard that we have invested to double the entire manufacturing ecosystem of the plant-based business. Not surprisingly, that gives rise to depreciation. For the $20 million, the key is incremental depreciation. Okay. The point is, if you just say what is the contribution margins, if we could use that phrase, or the increase in gross profit without the increment of depreciation, probably a more sensible way to think about it, 75% of the improvement from 2021 to 2023 is plant-based. Right on schedule with the revenue development we've talked about. Moving forward from 2023 to 2025, probably not surprising, about 90% of that increment in gross profit is coming from plant-based. Again, just a reminder, we're now selling through this step change in capacity we've had.
It shouldn't surprise you that the increment of performance will get stronger and stronger and stronger over time. You're selling through existing capacity. Okay. On the bottom, again, a lot of people, we get lots of questions about gross margin rate, so I wanna be really clear about what this is designed to show you. If you looked at 2021, as reported right off the face of the financial statements, gross profit margin as calculated per GAAP, 12%. Keep in mind the depreciation comment I'm showing you. As we fast-forward to 2023, it's 12.5%. But again, a little bit apples and oranges. You saw Mike go through a very detailed schedule, line by line, all the way through 2023. Well, the GAAP authorities are agnostic to time.
You turn the plant on, you incur all the depreciation regardless of where you are in production, okay? The point is, if you compared apples to apples, essentially what's really happening in our contribution margin math is you're going from 12% - 14.3% from 2021, okay? Again, all we're doing there is just saying strip out that incremental depreciation. Fast-forward again, you can see the details on the chart. By the time you get to 2025, 16% flat. I think about this in my mind economically as 12%-14%, 14%-16%. Okay? Okay. Same concept, a little different technology. I'm gonna walk you through this. This is adjusted EBITDA bridge, 2021-2023, 2023-2025.
What we're trying to show for transparency is four drivers, so I'm gonna spend a few minutes on this. The first bucket is what is the proportion of EBITDA growth coming from revenue? Two, which I will unpack in a moment, is what's the proportion of EBITDA growth coming from the normalization of profitability and productivity? Third is what is the amount of incremental SG&A that we have assumed in this forecast? The fourth is essentially the net change in all other adjustments. Immaterial, so I'm not gonna spend a bunch of time on it. As you look at the first couple of boxes, so there's two contributors to profit. Call it 2/3 of that growth between now and 2023 come from revenue growth. I'm gonna spend a moment on this $23 million item, which I've called normalization of profit and productivity.
When you go back to the second half of last year, Q3, Q4, and we were struggling to produce the quantum of cases we're capable of. Mike showed you a very, very important chart. You saw the journey of how case production dipped and then sharply recovered in Q1, right? Just kinda common sense math. You think about Q1 of this year sequentially, $5 million ± of incremental EBITDA, really on the same manufacturing base. That's what I'm driving at, right? I don't wanna ascribe or attribute some of the improvement in performance just to revenue growth because intellectually we know that there was leakage in the second half of last year, okay? As you look from 2023 to 2025, not surprisingly, kind of from the prior page on gross profit, shouldn't surprise you that revenue growth is the answer.
I mean, revenue growth is the story in terms of that acceleration, you know, of adjusted EBITDA. Okay. A really important comment on SG&A. What we did in developing this is we assumed no operating leverage. I'm gonna say it again. No operating leverage. Perhaps a pretty conservative assumption. Said in a different way, we've taken the content of SG&A that affects EBITDA, kept it flat as a percentage of revenue with that growth. Again, we may well do better, but I wanna be really, really clear, that's what's assumed in these numbers. Okay. A little transition. Again, current events, lots and lots and lots, rightly so, discussion about inflation. Wanna be clear, what we're gonna do is I'm gonna unpack. This is our actual Q1 experience.
Joe and I spent a lot of time on the call about this, but I wanna give you kind of a double click, a little more detail. The pie chart is to say if you took our COGS, cost of goods sold, in Q1, broadly speaking, you just decompose them into two buckets. The larger of the two, of course, the green bucket, 65% of the COGS was raw materials and packaging, okay? The 35% remainder is all other COGS, all the plant operating expenses, et c. Okay? That's the framework we're gonna use to talk about inflation. What happened in Q1 is on the 65%, so raw materials and packaging, low double-digit inflation. As a percentage, low double-digit inflation. If you dollarize it was about 80% of the inflation we incurred in the quarter.
80%. Going to the 35%, think plant operating expenses, high single-digit inflation expense incurred, and that represented by dollars about 20% of the inflation in the quarter. Most important thing I'm gonna say on this page is that what was the result? The result was we passed on $21 million of customer-facing pricing, which was just over 90% coverage of that incurred inflation. Again, we passed on $21 million in pricing pressures. Okay. Next transition I mentioned, I'm gonna talk to you about investments, free cash flow, leverage, and I'm gonna unpack this in a little detail. As you look on the left, you can see this is the cash flow statement, capital expenditures, nothing fancy. The blue bar is our estimation of the maintenance capital investment. The green is growth. Pretty straightforward.
What I wanna make sure you understand is as you look at the forecast, so this is for 2023, it shows $36 million in total, $18 million in 2025. The point is not to take away that we don't think we'll have incremental growth opportunities to invest. That's not the intent. It's as I said up front, what we're trying to show you is we've modeled all of the known and in-process investments, the associated revenue and profit, so it all hangs together. Okay? If you look at the center of the page, again, reminder, double the manufacturing footprint of the plant-based business, so not surprisingly, we have back-to-back years of negative free cash flow. Not a surprise.
What new information would be expectations around, again, using the assumptions we're talking about for capital, we'll return to a pretty nice free cash flow profile in 2023 and a very significant free cash flow profile in 2025. Okay? That very same set of numbers, that's what's driving the table on the right. What is leverage? Again, this is debt, you know, all forms of debt is the numerator, adjusted EBITDA is the denominator. We expect to peak this year, call it 4.5x. 4.5x debt to EBITDA. You'll probably remember Joe or I have said on many occasions we'd like to run the business 4x or lower. That would be our general intent. As you look at deleveraging, again, you have two things going down.
You have debt paydown, you also have the escalation of profit expected. We show deleveraging to about 1.3 x in 2025. Pretty comfortable. The point in the call-out box I think is really important. We're gonna talk in a minute about capital allocation. What we're doing is just saying if we artificially impose a cap 4 x leverage relative to that 1.3 turns in 2025, how much financing capacity does that mean? What would be the financial capacity of the company bumping it back up to 4 x? Coincidentally, it's about $400 million. Okay? Again, that's just a delta in target leverage relative to where we think we'll be. What is that as a capacity to do things with capital? Okay. Okay.
A common question we get all the time, wanna be really direct about this, is what was the ROI of all this growth capital? What's the ROI of the growth capital? I'm gonna spend a little bit of time on the topic. If you remember, when I was doing the EBITDA bridge, we tried to be really clear and transparent that we're not ascribing all the EBITDA growth to these projects because intellectually, we know second half of last year, we would have leaked profit relative to our expectations. For round numbers, we got about $90 million of EBITDA growth. Our analysis says about 2/3, of that, let's call it $60 million, is directly attributable to the growth projects.
From our return standpoint, revenue-driven capacity expansion-based EBITDA 60, we've invested in total all forms of capital, CapEx, leases, the whole program, $230 million. Okay? $60 million of return on 230 of investment. I think you'll remember we've talked about this conceptually a few times. 25% return, four-year payback. We've said that at least on two or three occasions on public calls. Okay. Again, I think the point is we talk about sustainable earnings and the ability to invest at nice returns. This would be the proof statement. Okay. Mentioned capital allocation. Think again, this is a framework of how we think about capital deployment over time. Reminder, you know, we're peaking at leverage this year for all the obvious reasons, and we expect to see that decline.
This is to tee up what might we do and how do we think about it. Priority one, let's get leverage to that four turns or lower target. Very specific, very simple. We have three things with which we would evaluate, right? We would hope to have and expect to have incremental organic growth opportunities. Keep that number in your head. 25%-ish return if you looked at EBITDA to capital. Number two, we certainly could choose to return capital to shareholders, dividends, share repurchases, et c, return of capital. Number three, we could choose to add to the portfolio. Joe showed you a slide of a four-pronged acquisition scenario. How do we think about how we might expand the business, you know, through M&A?
The point then is in assessing those three different alternatives, it's an analysis of return. What's the return on capital, whether it was for organic growth, to repurchase shares in the context of that liquidity, that availability, where the shares are trading as of that period of time, and then lastly, M&A. Probably worth saying, they're not mutually exclusive. There could be combinations of each of those actions. Okay. That is the capital allocation framework. Couple of pages kinda wrapping up. One of the things that we get asked a lot is, "Who's the comp of SunOpta? What's the comp? Is there a Coke and a Pepsi?" It doesn't work that way. Two concepts I wanna take you through is when we try to think about those are value drivers, right?
What would be attributes of shareholder value-creating businesses? The columns are categories of publicly available investment alternatives. Okay? As you look at SunOpta on the left, point is we share some similarities and differences from each of these comparative sets. The first, in our view, probably the closest proxy would be the specialty ingredient houses. I won't drone on the slide, but I think you get the point. We certainly share some attributes with other pure-play plant-based milks companies, particularly, you know, the growth opportunity. You look at the next to last category, branded CPG, for example, we both share sticky customers. You look at the last category, you know, private label companies, we certainly share, you know, EBITDA positive characteristics.
What's really interesting, at least to me, I hope you'll find this useful, is when you think about how does SunOpta trade relative to the dimensions of these comparators, I'll offer a couple of observations. Round numbers, you think about SunOpta trade at roughly 11x next year's EBITDA, roughly. Call it one turn of revenue, 1x revenue, okay? Just keep that 1 and 11 in your mind as I go through this. If you look at the specialty ingredient houses, 3.5x revenue, plus or minus, mid- to high-teens EBITDA. Again, these are intended to be reference points. If you look at pure-play plant-based milks companies, maybe 1.5-two turns revenue, something like that.
CPG is a big bucket, so I'll be pretty general here, but I'd say probably 13x-14x EBITDA, 2.5x revenue, round numbers. Lastly, private label trades a lot like us. The point I'm really trying to drive at is, A, let's think about similarities and importantly differences of these investable alternatives. You know, in our judgment, when we go through each one of the, let's call them value creation pillars, we truly believe that we're a very, very solid investment alternative relative to the options. Okay. Okay, wanna close with a recap. You've seen the numbers before. It's just worth repeating just so we're really clear about the targets.
For 2023, $1.1 billion top line, 12.5% as reported by GAAP gross profit margin, $100 million adjusted EBITDA, $0.09 adjusted earnings per share. 2025, $3 billion revenue, 16% as reported by GAAP gross profit margins, $150 million EBITDA, $0.45 earnings per adjusted share. Okay. Some people will hopefully appreciate we have shared the model. Okay. With that, I'd like to bring Joe back up for some closing comments. Thank you.
Thanks, Scott. Just to kind of recap on the day and kind of put all of this together into a bit of an investment highlight. Leading share, high growth categories will fuel revenue growth. I mean, hopefully, if we've unpacked nothing, we've unpacked the idea that we have a tremendous amount of revenue runway in front of us. Really long-term customer relationships that'll drive share. We have competitive advantages. I mean, just look at the share position we have now, 60%, 70%. That is the product of sustainable competitive advantages, and we are doing nothing but insulate and further fortify those competitive advantages. We have an incredibly dedicated, focused set of resources against the biggest opportunities. I would say that would be one of the criticisms of SunOpta of old.
This team is incredibly focused on winning where the game is most profitable to win. Aggressive capacity expansions in undersupplied markets. It's sometimes tough to communicate just the undersupply status of the categories that we compete in. We measure it by, on some levels, the desperateness with which the phone calls we get about, can you guys help us? Can you guys do this for us? You know, we have a company in Europe who's trying to launch in the U.S., and they're like, please, please, like, we don't have anybody to make our product. Can you do it for us? We're like, hey, wait for Texas. It's coming, et c.
It's hard, again, to kind of express some of that, but I would tell you know, there's, you know, public companies on the protein shake space, you know, all you have to do is read their transcripts to understand just how tight capacity is on the protein shake side of things. The growth in plant-based milks and all of these co-manufacturing markets, if you just think about plant-based milks plus protein shakes, right? You're talking about $6 billion, and they're growing at 10%, okay? That's $600 million. Every year, the co-pack community needs to put in the ground $600 million worth of incremental capacity just to keep up with the growth. Some of these companies are family-owned, privately held, owned by private equity. "Hey, we're, you know, a year out from our exit.
We don't wanna sink a whole bunch of capital in. We're gonna sit tight and kick out cash," blah, blah, "and run our plants full." Or, "Hey, you know, family-owned business, you know, we're gonna buy a boat this year instead of, you know, putting capacity in the ground." Whatever it is, right? Like, we are one of the few publicly traded companies in this space who's pouring capital in, I mean, $230 million into fueling and feeding the capacity demands in this category, and we will be rewarded for that. We're doing it in an incredibly challenged environment, and I can't underline that part enough. All you have to do is read the transcripts of many, many, many of the big CPG companies that are talking about delaying projects, putting projects on hold, et cetera, et cetera. Why?
Because there's no trades to build anything. The price of steel has gone up 50%. The price of equipment's gone up 50%, et c, et c. What used to look like a decent ROI now flips to a negative project. We're hearing that across the network. We were fortunate to start most of our projects before any of that hit. The big one, you know, we bought all the structural steel, Chris, back in April of last year. If we had to go buy that same structural steel, so the plant we're building in Texas, if we had to buy that steel today, 50% and a year later. So it would take one year longer to get that steel and cost us 50% more.
Again, represents a huge advantage for us that we're gonna have available capacity in capacity constraints environments, and we're gonna be ready to go. Proven ability to match cost inflation with customer pricing. Again, I can't underscore number eight enough. All we're doing is presenting numbers that are the run rate of the business we've already demonstrated. 16% top-line growth in plant-based, 19% gross margins. Delivered that for the last three years. Arguably, you would say the capacity that we have coming is better than the capacity situation that we had in 2018, 2019, and 2020, 2021, right? We have more capacity coming, so in theory, the growth should be easier. Current share price disconnected from the long-term earnings power of the business.
The last piece is, you know, and again, it's, we've tried to bring some of it to life. It's always gonna feel a bit inadequate, but this whole idea of a passionate team, a unique culture, aligned incentives, and a commitment to GSD. Jill was affectionate. She said, "Stuff." Jill's a swearer. What she really meant to say is, "Get shit done," because that's the motto here. Maybe as kinda evidence of that, I'll share. When we were doing the tour, we asked an innocuous question of a couple people in our group. We said, "Hey, if you could have a new product, new oat milk-type product, what would you want?" Somebody suggested, "Man, cinnamon roll oat milk.
That would be amazing." John said, "Man, I'd love a high protein oat milk." While we've all been talking here, in the pilot plant, we just ran and produced, and you'll be able to taste it on your way out, a cinnamon roll high protein oat milk. Now, what does that represent? Imagine if you were a customer, and you came here and you said, "Hey, let's have a brainstorming session with the SunOpta team," and da, da, da. Boom. You'll walk out of here with a sample you can take back to your leadership and say, "Look what we created on our visit to SunOpta. We can launch this thing." Okay? That's the power of speed. That's the power of GSD. That's the power of the team that we've built. We have a.
Whenever a new employee starts, we give them a backpack because part of the culture here is, hey, listen, everybody's got problems and challenges in their business. One of the great things about the culture here is invariably, when there is a problem sitting on the table, somebody picks it up, puts it in a backpack, and hikes it up the hill. It just, that's the way this place works, and it's magical. Sometimes the people that step up and pick the problem up off the table and put it in the backpack and hike it up the hill are not the person you thought who was gonna reach into the table, grab it, and hike it up the hill.
We've tried to bring that part, that unique culture to life because, again, at the end of the day, it's about the team executing, and this is a team that executes. If we laid out all these magical numbers for you, but you didn't believe that the people can execute it's just PowerPoint. It's just PowerPoint. Hopefully you got a feel for that today. With that, we've got ample time for Q&A, so I'm gonna invite my friends and colleagues up here. We will be happy to field questions. Yeah, let go of these. We weren't sure how long the Q&A was gonna go, so we're getting comfy.
Thanks, thanks so much for doing this. We really appreciate the clarity and the bridge from 2021 - 2025. One thing I was wondering, I did not see in the bridge from 2021 - 2025, you guys sliced it and diced it in a lot of different ways. But curious how the contribution of branded products are gonna contribute to that 2025 goal. It crosses my mind that when we first started chatting a couple of years ago, you know, I think you guys were pretty treading lightly in terms of wanting to compete with your customers. It certainly sounds to me like the balance of power has maybe shifted a little bit more in your favor with not a lot of big players that compete in this product.
You know, just curious, especially now that you have two, you know, very well-established brands in the category that you acquired. I mean, do you feel like the timing is right to really grow those? Or, you know, are there concerns that you'd be competing against some of your other customers? Just kinda curious how you get to those 2025 numbers and what role your own brands play in that.
I'm gonna repeat the questions for folks watching. The question was, what's the role of our brands in the plant-based milk category, and how does that contribute to the overall build? The reason we talked about it in the buckets that we did is to represent our agnostic orientation. We talked about here's oat, and oat's gonna deliver $100 million of growth. Our view of that is, hey, we have line of sight to this capacity utilization. The role of our brands as kind of the, call it the tip of the spear, or the proof of concept.
The thing that is probably not well understood is, okay, in 2024, when we launched this product innovation under our own brand. Will that continue to grow, etc , or are we gonna flip those products to a national brand or et c? The way that we're using our brands is really to work the perimeters or the edges of the category. You think about the Dream brand, WestSoy being repositioned to West Life to give us a much cleaner canvas to drive innovation. For those who weren't familiar, so we bought a brand called WestSoy. We've repositioned it as West Life. That will launch in Q3.
The reason for that repositioning is to give us a blanker canvas, if you will, to be able to drive innovation against it because remember, the role of the brands in our portfolio is to drive and lead out innovation. I would say as we look at the 2025, it's easier to see the 2023 number than the 2025 number. I would just tell you, we absolutely see the role of brands as being important to work the edges of the category and to bring the innovation forward. Ultimately, how that sifts out between co-manufacturing, private label, and our own brands, we're agnostic to. You know, we're certain of the opportunity, and we're certain that we have the go-to-market levers to get it. What exactly it looks like in 2025, honestly don't know.
That's really helpful. Thank you.
John?
I have two quick ones. One, I'd love to get two of the GSD T-shirts. I guess my question is as you move into nutrition, what are the margin implications for nutrition? You also mentioned that you have one large customer that might sign up to take 90% of the capacity on that line. You know, would you wanna dedicate 90% of the capacity on that line to one customer? You know, if so, why? How do you think about the risk around that?
Yeah. Scott, you wanna take that?
Yeah. I think the question starts with the entry into the nutritional beverage segment. How do we think about margin profile and maybe dedicated line time? I think that's the spirit of it. I would say we're not gonna share like line item level margin performance, John, but I would say it certainly would be complementary to the portfolio. It wouldn't be something that would be dilutive, to be clear, but I don't wanna give a specific number on one line, as you might appreciate, for competitive reasons.
In terms of line time, and Mike can chime in, I'd say I think the comment is starting with that particular, you know, customer or set of customers to really, you know, fill that activity, but we at the same time, you know, observe that data point I think Joe shared of 40% of protein powder is plant-based, 3% of RTDs. So you can kinda see where we're going, which is to have that opportunity to incubate and then bring to market plant-based material.
Fair.
Yeah, I would agree with that. You know, I really think of what we showed in our 2025 plan is really the beginning of it. It's the entry into nutrition. Just like aseptic and oat extraction, where we're now building a second capability, you know, what the future holds in nutrition, you know, it's certainly gonna be a focus of our innovation. I think there's a lot of room to run. We're very excited to be able to partner with a leading brand to really kinda create a foothold in that category.
John, if it was partly a risk question, what is typical in that category as it relates to co-manufacturers is the volume's guaranteed.
For like duration?
The duration of the contract. You know, this would be a general statement. If a customer comes to you and says, "I want 100% of your line," then you're gonna buy 100% of the output. Whether you use 60% of it or 50% of it or 100% of it, if you're tying it up, you're paying for it.
What's a typical duration of a contract?
I would say three-five years. You know, depending on the uniqueness of the asset and the complexity, it could be longer than that. You know, we certainly build the contracts appropriately for our investment and what the capability of that asset is.
It sounds like the oat extraction capacity you've put in at Alexandria is kind of sold out. I think someone mentioned it was sold out a year earlier than anticipated. The additional capacity I think in Modesto is scheduled to come online in 2023, might look like midyear. Maybe 2024 is kind of the ramp year for that. Do you have an issue in terms of bridging the gap between in terms of demand for oat base, you know, given where you are with Alexandria largely sold out and when that new capacity will come online?
Yeah. When we think about this year, we have capacity that will produce revenue growth versus last year. Okay? If we said $80 million last year, call it $20 million a quarter. We're saying, "Hey, we're run-rate to kinda +50%," so call that $120 million, right, or, you know, $30 million a quarter. I mean, we're gonna have solid growth on oat for the balance of this year. When we hit Q1 and Q2 of next year, it'll be a little tight for us. We're exploring short-term options to potentially buy oat base externally to help us bridge. As well as just squeezing more productivity out of our existing operations, which, you know, to date, we have been.
It's an amazing team up there, and we are delivering volumes out of that facility that are well in excess of what we originally assumed. It's almost like each and every quarter, we set new high-water marks for our ability to produce volume, and I have a lot of faith that we'll find some ways to squeeze some incremental volume out in Q1 and Q2 before Modesto comes online.
I guess the last one for me. You sound extremely confident. It really helped kind of connect the dots on the plan from 2021 - 2023 - 2025. If you had to say what you consider a main risk, you know, to the 2025 plan, you know, how would you characterize that? I mean, what could set you back from hitting $150 million in 2025?
You know, I think we've been pretty conservative in our assumptions. Again, back to, you know, we didn't put any bends in the curve, right? So it's not like we gotta go from 19% gross margin to 25%, or we gotta go from a 15% growth rate to 25%, right? I mean, like, we have intentionally outlined. Again, I said they look impressive, but they're not aspirational numbers for us. They're what we plan to deliver. I think it would probably just be the macros, John. You know, what's happening with consumer demand and, you know, do we kind of hit some giant, you know, roadblock here? I mean, as it relates to our plan and our ability to execute our plan, you know, we feel great about it. Andrew?
Yeah. I have two questions. The first one, I think the $50 million of nutritional that you guys pointed to, is that, what's assumed in that? Is that just selling out to 90%? Is it 100%? If so, I guess if you could unpack that a little bit. Then just a broader question on the margins. You said 19% of the plant-based gross margin is what you can achieve incremental. By my math, it's like 22.5%. Sounds like branded. It sounds like nutritional are gonna contribute. But if you could just kind of provide a little bit of space around that'd be helpful.
Hopefully, this works. I'll start. I think this. The second question was about longer term margin and maybe incremental margin or flow-through, Andrew. I believe is the spirit of what you're asking. I'd say two things. Remember, we're showing multi-year bridges. You know, as we walk up in absorption, generally speaking, I would expect flow-through to get better and better and better. You know, the reference point in my mind would be the closest period to 2025 is actually 2020, right? In 2020, we were largely sold out. If you'll recall, if you looked year-over-year, you know, flow-through would be certainly higher than low 20s, just to be direct. When we show you a multi-year look, you can't see that level of granularity inside of a 2024-2025 recap.
I don't think anything structurally changed in the business. Maybe it's where you're going with that. We're just trying to show a direct bridge of 21 to three and three-five .
Sorry. The nutritional, just to be clear.
Oh, yes, I apologize. I think your question was what was assumed is that we sell through that line in Texas. Yep, one line.
I just want to ask a question on sort of the agnostic nature between branded and private label. You know, it implies to me that if you're agnostic between the two products, the margin is the same between the two. Branded products should get a premium. Why would you spend the resource developing a branded product if you can't get a better margin?
The question was, the margin structure between private label and branded. I'll start with a couple of things. When we say we're agnostic, we're looking to maximize the revenue potential of that product platform, okay? Maximize the margin and the revenue potential of that product platform. If we can maximize that and through our branded play, and we do have stronger margins on our branded business, yes, of course, we would lean into that. You know, you look at. We will have a $200 million capability in oat. We're not gonna use all that with our own business. As we approach the pricing structure of these, we approach them as, you know, they're margin similar on the innovation side of it, and it's a project-by-project answer.
Yeah, I mean, of course, if it comes down to we think we can lean in on the brand and the brand has a stronger margin, we'll of course do that. Nelson.
Just to unpack ESG for a second, focusing on E. Do you get proposals from time to time that reduce profitability? Maybe you don't, but how do you determine that from a policy perspective internally?
Yeah. The question was, when we think about ESG and specifically the E, do we do anything that undermines the profitability of the business?
Yeah. How do you decide?
Yeah. The short answer is no, we don't. You know, our focus on E is about reducing our footprint, reducing electricity use, reducing natural gas use, reducing water use. You would have saw on the tour the conversion from a plastic bowl to a compostable paper-based bowl. It's awesome. Zero cost impact. Not a penny change in the product cost of that. You know, that's, and that's the orientation that we're leaning into, is cost neutral or better.
For the cinnamon bun high protein formulation, do you own that or do we own that?
Very good question. So you'll have a chance to taste the John and Andrew mix in a minute. It's still warm. That's what Heidi handed to me actually at one point. It would depend really. If you know we a lot of times with customers the way to think about it is the magic is in running the plant. Formulas are fairly germane. It's not the formula that's the power. It's the ability to run the plant and know how to make the product. That's the magic. If a customer said, "Hey, I wanna own the formula," we would say okay. Again you know you look at private label as a concept, 25% of everything sold in the grocery store like there's no magic in formulas, you know. I mean, somebody has a formula.
It's eminently replicable in food manufacturing cause food is simple, right? I mean, you want food to be as simple as possible. You don't want 50 ingredients and a chemistry set in any part of your food. Because food products are pretty simple, they're actually pretty easy to replicate. In that instance, if a customer said, "Hey, we wanna own this formulation," we would say okay. 'Cause again, somebody else could come in and, you know, kind of match it pretty quickly.
They asked about the business. I thought it was interesting kind of highlighting the core versus non-core businesses. You know, it seems to be having, you know, four labs and just unbelievably sophisticated, you know, measuring of the eight different ways you can measure volume from, you know, being produced. Is there anything you're doing on the fruit snacks side of the business that is that differentiator or has such strong barriers to entry, that would keep others from kind of going after that growth as well?
Yeah. The question is what are the barriers to entry around the fruit snacks business? Part of it is the ability to develop and run these products. I mean, it's a pretty bespoke manufacturing process. You know, the kinda bulk of the Scooby-Doo fruit snacks if you will are you know incredibly high volume, massive scale operations. What we do is pretty bespoke in terms of really simple ingredient lists. And it's as much of a sourcing business as it is a manufacturing business. You know, finding the organic sources of all of the raw materials and ingredients, keeping them in steady supply, I mean, that was a really significant challenge to that business in 2021 was just organic apple puree.
You know, to some extent, there's value in the formulation side of it and kinda what is a pretty bespoke operation. Then, the sourcing side of it can't be underestimated. Yep.
The $50 million opportunity in nutritional beverages, that is largely whey-based, right?
Correct.
I know you mentioned the plant-based opportunity there. Is that a beyond 2025 event, or would you scale that up sooner?
I would think that's beyond 25. Just in the planning architecture that you saw, that is principally the whey-based side of it. We would need to add incremental capacity to really drive hard against the kinda plant-based side of it, and we would look to do that with a partner. Again, these are massive. I mean, these are expensive manufacturing lines. They're massive. You need to run them. You need volume flowing through them. So, you know, think of it as an evolution or a transition. I mean, you couldn't put a new, a single line in and say, "We're only gonna run plant-based protein drinks." You wouldn't like the look of that for the first couple years, right?
That's how we view it as, like we're getting into it with the whey-based drinks, but we are fully looking to bring our plant-based milk manufacturing, knowledge and expertise to bear there and help drive and build the plant-based side of it.
Just one for Scott. You mentioned the price cost dynamic in Q1 with over 9% inflation. Do you expect a similar progression for the rest of the year too, or any change there?
Yes. I think the question is how do we feel about inflation recovery Q1 relative to the rest of the year? I'd say start with the answer feel good about it. You know, we don't know what we don't know, so could there be something that's unknown to anybody in this room? Of course. Thematically, structurally, feel good about it.
Okay. Just one last one. I know you say you regularly pull permits for competitive facilities and what not. Anything change there, or it's still kind of quiet on that front?
Yeah. The question was just on the competitive front, what are we seeing and hearing about additional capacity going in? Not seeing a lot of progress. You know, we know there's people looking at putting stuff in, putting additional capacity in, but as I mentioned, I mean, the economics of some people's projects we've heard, you know, just kind of in parallel categories, have kinda flipped upside down. The execution side of it is, I can't underscore enough just I would not be wanting to start a major, you know, that Texas video you saw, I would not be wanting to start that today, and under any stretch of the imagination. You know, it's just the timelines are longer, the costs are higher, and the ROIs look worse.
You know, if somebody's got a marginal project, it's probably flipped to red. Yep.
Scott, you mentioned M&A could be a tool in your toolbox for growth. I just heard you mention you're maybe exploring the oat-based acquisition. I guess could you just talk a bit about what, M&A could look like going forward?
Sure. Maybe I'll start. I think the question is what might, you know, the M&A journey look like, you know, over a time series, if I've captured it right. You know, I think we've outlined, Joe spoke about four different pillars, if you like, of M&A opportunity. You know, the one I usually think about is, you know, we're both used to, and the company is very used to running an international business. I mean, back to December of 2020, 40% of our business was based in Europe. I think there's no reason I can think of that there couldn't be an opportunity to expand beyond the U.S. borders. It's a very, you know, U.S.-centric revenue stream. I think the key is it value-creating?
You know, I was mentioning in my section about this concept about capital deployment. The question is, what's the return profile of three topics, right? Just to reset. Organic growth. Number two would be, you know, returns of capital to shareholders, and three would be M&A. It's impossible to know to have a specific example, you know, how those are gonna force rank, but I think the spirit of the point is it's something we look at.
Thank you guys for your great overview. This kind of detailing different markets on the food side. Can I ask, when you look at the revenue growth opportunities, how much of that is like nutrition of this existing demand with high capacity versus you guys going to the customer like with the sweetening agents and maybe growing out new pool of, customers? Nutrition is pretty much the demand's already there. On the flavor, how much of that is there existing demand versus you guys expanding the potential?
Mike, do you mind taking that one?
Sure. So within the plant-based beverage business, I would say, you know, we're looking at our capacity as really existing demand and the expected growth on the existing demand. You know, that's how we're looking at that today. Certainly, you know, when I talked about our list of blue-chip customers, top ten, as well as other customers who are aware of SunOpta and would love to do projects with us, we're always entertaining and looking at and evaluating opportunities to invest in new capabilities and things where we can partner. You know, if you go back to our competitive advantages and the operational and technical expertise, our network, those are attractive to people for projects.
That's something that we do, you know, periodically, is work with some big retailers, CPG customers and brands, and so on and so forth, for opportunities that, you know, where we can add some value. You know, they really value what we bring, what SunOpta can bring to the table.
Is that $1.3 billion number in by 2025 assuming critical mass you can have online?
Mm-hmm. I guess the short answer would be it's the sell-through of a lot of the capacity. One of the pages I presented, it's probably worth bringing up now, is there is a second phase. I think Mike spoke to it, available to us in Texas that would be considerable. That's not modeled in the $1.3 billion, just to be direct about it.
You guys talked a lot about people and culture. As we look down at kind of plant level, you know, can you talk about labor costs, you know, retention and maybe automation? You know, is the Texas plant from a labor perspective look different from existing facilities?
Yeah. The question was around labor costs, if we have labor costs, labor availability, and are we looking at automation. First of all, our plants are very highly automated. I mean, you know, we might have on a shift 50 people in the plant. These aren't, you know, 1,000 employees. I mean, I've been in those manufacturing environments. You know, you're talking, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 people on a shift. They're already incredibly highly automated. I mean, the people start in the mixing, and there's not another person till you get to kind of packaging, if you will. They're already very highly automated. What comes with that is they're pretty well-paid jobs to start with.
Therefore, you know, we're doing pretty well in terms of the market pay that we have available and finding talent. I mean, it's definitely a harder environment than it's been, I don't know, in years and years and years. You know, you Mike showed the production output in the plants. You know, what you can take away from that is we've stabilized the talent level in the plant. We are probably experiencing more turnover than we would like, but we're we figured out, you know, in true SunOpta fashion, we figured out how to manage the business with the variables that the environment's throwing at us. You know, we feel good about the availability, and Texas has been great. I mean, we've hired the entire management team to run the Texas plant.
We hired the plant manager, I think, nine months ago. At this point, the entire management team's been hired. Just where we are geographically, there's a lot of people that drive through that area to work in kind of South Dallas, South Fort Worth, so we're sort of short-stopping them. We're hearing from employees, "Hey, with gas prices what they are, you know, I'm very anxious to work for you 'cause I don't have to drive another 20 miles to work in South Dallas." We were fortunate in the locational choice of Midlothian. It's a good labor market. A lot easier than some of our others, that's for sure. Go ahead, Andrew. No more. We got time.
Two quick ones. I just wanted to confirm, number one, when you talk about the leakage, recapturing the leakage, it's $23 million or so by 2023. You've already recaptured $5 million. Run rate, kind of in line. There's no real projection there if everything continues as pretty much on track from that point. Number two, on the international opportunity, I mean, obviously, so much capacity constraint and demand domestically. How do you think about or weigh what's the right timing to which you would make that move?
I mean, it would be pure economics. It would be, you know, if we have available capacity, what options do we have internationally to sell product versus domestically, and what's it look like? That's how we would look at that.
Yeah. How much of your, market share or your oat milk growth is gonna come from continued market share taken from other alternative milks versus penetration into the dairy category? Can you kind of give a sense of that?
Yeah. Mike, you wanna answer that one?
Yeah. You know, certainly, you know, oat's growing 30%. You know, the answer probably on the food service side looks a little bit different than it does on the retail side. You know, I think food service, what you're seeing is plant-based milks continuing to take from dairy. Oat is functionally superior. It tastes great. It's a great application for coffee. I think in food service you're seeing a big share steal from dairy. I think in retail you're seeing certainly oat is driving some of the plant-based growth. But I think there is a little bit of churn within the plant-based milk category. Again, that's why we're so excited about the way that we go to market is, you know, food service and retail.
You know, we think the runway for oat is tremendous. So that's how we think about it today. You know, what I would say is oat milk from almost the very get-go, there's not been enough capacity. I don't think the oat milk story is even close to being written. As large as it is, 20% of the retail business right now in plant-based milk, you know, it's out of stock. There's not enough distribution. You know, some of the big coffee chains aren't promoting it. They can't communicate it because they can't keep it in stock.
I think at the end of the day, I don't know if that's three years from now or 10 years from now, where the capacity of oats, oat extraction, and ultimately the finished good processing catches up, I think we'll be a lot smarter about it then. I think we're all chasing our tail at this point.
Yeah. Look, Mike mentioned the ACV distribution of some of the big brands. Like, if you take a particular brand, almond milk is probably in 70% of the ACV. ACV would include, like, the dollar channel and drug and so on and so forth. It's the biggest measure. You're gonna see almond milk in, like, 70% of the ACV. You know, oat's in 40%. You know, there's a long, you know, you would say there's almost a double to come on just distribution gains. Now that distribution gain is gonna be less productive than the first 40% points. But still, you know, you would say there's, what, 30%, 40% category growth in oat just coming from distribution gains. John?
The planning assumptions, I understand, include, you know, the SunOpta portfolio, major portfolio changes. However, you kind of positioned a couple businesses as non-core for the frozen fruit business and the sunflower business. What are your intentions, you know, with those two businesses at this point? And again, understanding they're in the planning algorithm, but, you know, putting that aside, are those, you know, businesses that you would, you know, consider chopping at some point? Could frozen fruit be separated from, you know, the fruit snack business in a scenario where you're considering divesting it, you know?
Yeah. I mean, at this juncture, John, you know, our focus on both of those businesses is running the plan. You know, we look at the frozen fruit business especially and say, "We've executed the structural change in the business." Like, there's not another chapter to our transformation plan yet to come. I mean, you know, Scott referenced that we've taken 40% of the cost structure out of that business. I mean, we've really set it up to be successful. Our focus this year is, "Hey, let's run the business. Let's see what we can deliver." You know, last year wasn't a great year, but we were in the midst of a huge structural reset on that business. I think we're optimistic.
We're anxious to see the results of the plan that we've been running for the last two years.
Okay. One more on the planning through 2025. It almost looks to me like to get to $150 million, you're assuming kind of a static environment where you've made your capacity investments, and you're assuming, you know, no capacity beyond 2025 or no growth beyond 2025. You know, there's kind of a D&A hit between 2021 and 2023 because of new capacity. Assuming the business, you know, continues to grow beyond 2025, wouldn't you also, you know, be turning on additional production that would weigh on that $150 million? I don't know.
Yeah. I think you have two questions, John. The way I'm hearing it is, I'm just repeating it to make sure everybody's following. I think the first one is, will there be more investment for that 2025 period and beyond? Then maybe the subplot is how do you think about kind of that depreciation or an amortization impact? Again, just to reset, the point of walking through the numbers the way we did them was so that the audience could see the roll forward of revenue, profits, and capital all on a like for like or a similar basis, as opposed to we're forecasting there won't be investment. Just again, I'll say it again, that was not the intent. I would expect there'd be another round of investment opportunity for growth.
The company's not trying to just get to 2025. It's being transparent about the revenue and profit curve to get there. In terms of the impact of depreciation, you know, to me it's like a step function. Day one, as I probably mentioned, you know, you incur depreciation and amortization on a GAAP basis. You know, that hits gross profit, not so much for EBITDA. No reason to think that has any differential impact in the future. You know, so I look at it like, I think in Andrew's question, you know, in 2020, similar maybe in some ways to 2025, you could see what the performance of, quote unquote, you know, really highly utilized assets is. Then you reset as you add capacity.
It's inherent in what we do. It's a food manufacturing business. We need to invest for the future.
Awesome. Well, we're at 11:59 A.M. I want to again thank all of you for making the trip to Minneapolis. We certainly recognize it was a big allocation of time for all of you. We appreciate your interest, and attentiveness and hearing for the last 3+ hours the story of SunOpta. Hopefully, you took away a much better understanding of the power of the business that we're building and also the potential for this business to deliver really amazing returns. With that, I think we have lunch. For the folks who aren't rushing to catch a plane, I think we do have a lunch. If you are running to get a plane, we have some boxed lunches that you can grab and eat on the way if you're dashing to make a plane.
Again, thank you and appreciate it.