All right, great. I'm excited to introduce our next presentation from SunOpta, producer of better-for-you products including plant-based beverages, broth, and fruit snacks for top brands, retailers, and food service providers. With us from the company today, we have CEO Brian Kocher and CFO Greg Gaba. Great to have you guys here with us. Thanks for spending some time.
Thanks so much for having us.
So maybe to start, for investors who might be newer to the story, how would you describe where SunOpta sits today in the evolution, especially compared to where the company was two years ago when you came in?
Yeah, sure. Again, thanks for having us. We're really glad to be here. I think SunOpta has been on a journey. Many of you who may know the name from several years ago knew it as maybe a more commodity-based business with a lot of commodity volatility on the revenue and the EBITDA line. And SunOpta went through a portfolio optimization that shed some of those commodity businesses and really unveiled this jewel of a private label and co-manufacturing solutions provider. And we primarily do that in the plant-based beverage aseptic space. We do a little bit of broth and tea as well. And in our fruit snacks business, which is a better-for-you, hot extrusion, all-natural product fruit snack business. But the growth has been tremendous since we've unveiled this business as a continuing operation: 13% CAGR, increased profit. We've almost doubled our EBITDA since 20.
Last five years.
Last five years. So really a lot of, and we're in great categories. I'm really excited that we've deployed our capital and now are working on the operational efficiencies that can gain us both volume growth and margin expansion here in the short term.
On the categories, the plant-based milk category, you've talked about it being a mid-single digit grower, at times faster than that. That's in a food and beverage backdrop that's been pretty challenged. So to what do you attribute the strength and the growth in the category? And how do you think about the sustainability over time?
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. One, and we've actually, not to correct you, Andrew, but we've actually seen it now growing in the high single digits for a period of time. We might as well squeeze that in there. But I think it's a couple of things. One, if you look at consumer habits, better-for-you, healthy medicinal purposes, so those who still experience either allergies or intolerance to traditional milk, environmental, animal welfare concerns, all of those are still true. I think the other thing that has fueled this plant-based category is now some demographic changes. We over-index to younger generations, many of which who have now grown up on plant-based milk, both consumer behavior as well as demographics that are really tailwinds for the category. On top of that, we are very strong in two significant channels.
We play in all the categories, whether it's retail, mass merchandise, food service, club, but two in particular. One is food service, primarily driven by coffee chains and large coffee chains, and what's really interesting is in the backdrop of a consumer environment, those coffee chains are growing. They're growing significantly. As a matter of fact, if you look at the public statements for the top 10 coffee chains in North America, they expect to add 20% more units between now and 2030. Additionally, menu proliferation has happened in food service, so I'm going to call them the old days, in the old days when a consumer would go and get their coffee and they'd add either milk or oat milk, that was a usage occasion, well, now you see menu proliferation where the plant-based are the core ingredients to a finished good.
So someone doesn't go in and say, "Give me my oat latte," and they say, "And I'd like that with oat." No, it's part of the finished good. So that's really driven growth. And again, in food service and plant-based, we see high single digits growth, and our past revenue growth has really been fueled by that. The other area is club channel, where you see no matter where a consumer operates, especially when consumers are pressured, and you see a migration sometimes from maybe brand to unbranded or private label, maybe you see it from high-end coffee chain to QSR, maybe you see it from retail to club. Club has been a really growing channel for us, offers a great value. Our products are aseptically produced, so they're shelf stable, and that gives the pantry shopper a reason to engage with our products as well.
So it's an attractive category, a lot of growth opportunity, and you've talked about gaining share with new customers, gaining share with your existing customers. What is it about SunOpta that makes you a preferred partner for the brands and the retailers in the space?
Yeah, the number one way we grow share, either with a new customer or existing share, or existing new customer existing, is solving a problem. Maybe they have a problem with a tertiary or a secondary supplier. Maybe they have a particular problem with a product scope. So we deploy, first of all, our R&D team. We've invested heavily in food scientists, 21 food scientists on staff that can design anything from nutritional content to taste profile to cost to shelf life. So really, what is the problem that these customers are having that we're trying to solve? Two, we've got this nationwide network that provides a surety of supply for our customers. And if you think particularly about food service, but even in retail, whether it's club or traditional retail, no one wants to take an item off their menu or their assortment.
So when we can have a nationwide network and we have our own resiliency inside our network, we can provide some assured supply for customers. I think those are the big two reasons that we're solving problems. I think the other reason for customer, what's the number one way to grow customers? Retain your existing customers, don't cause problems on the other end. Service the volume, fulfill the orders. Our service metrics have actually, over the last two years, improved, continued. We thought they were industry leading, and they continue to prove. So that's where we're really focused: service, innovation, assured supply. And when doing that, you can be a differentiator in the market.
The better-for-you fruit snacks part of the portfolio doesn't get as much attention from investors, but has been really a strong grower over 20 quarters in a row of double-digit growth, continues to become a more meaningful piece of the business. How should we think about the role of the fruit snacks business over time? How big do you think it could be? Just maybe frame some of the context around that.
We love that business. I mean, 21 straight quarters with double-digit growth. If you look at the category itself, it's high 20% growth for the category. So we're super excited about the long-term trends. Better-for-you, convenient, portable, and a tremendous value, really. So you get a serving of fruit for more or less 50 to 60 cents a unit, depending on where you buy it. So really a valuable product, and it just continues to grow like crazy. In fact, we would say we've constrained the market. And one of the reasons why we're excited, we announced a small CapEx project to expand one of our facilities by one line. We're going to add one production line into an existing facility. And that alone should give us $40 million in annual revenue of additional growth. So it's.
A bunch of business earlier than maybe you had anticipated and accepted some near-term inefficiencies on the other side. Can you walk us through how you evaluated that trade-off and why you felt taking that business was the right long-term decision?
Yeah, you know, again, we're in the business of growing revenue. If you think about our growth, it's all volume-based for the most part over the past couple of years, volume-based growth. So that means we're resonating in the commercial market as well. When customers are voting for the wallet and you're gaining volume, that's a very positive sign. We had these initiatives in our pipeline. We just had them in sort of the first quarter of 2026. A couple of customers came and said, "Look, the categories are growing. We're excited about the categories. We don't want to wait. Here's an opportunity for you." It's always in a competitive environment. It's never just our single option.
But we took and looked at this and marquee customers in great channels with products that we can make and said, "Yes, there might be some inefficiencies when they come on, but in the long term, this is going to give us a better chance to delivering and then exceeding our 2026 and our 2027 goals if we take this volume on now." The other part of that is in these types of arrangements, typically our customer contracts are three to five years. We may have had to forego if we didn't take this opportunity now, we may have had to forego that for three, four, multiple years. And then probably the last thing that, and I don't mean this tongue-in-cheek, it's going to come out a little bit that way, but you can never improve the volume, the profit of the volume you don't get.
And so we knew once we were able to capture this that we'd have a chance to work on volume. And I'm sure we'll get to it. We made a nice little announcement today that we're making progress on these temporary headwinds as a result of digesting this volume. We're making progress faster than we thought. And so I'm excited about, A, we knew we had a plan. I'm excited that the plan's coming together and producing results a little bit more quickly than we anticipated.
So that was going to be the next question. So maybe first, what was the action plan? And then secondarily, kind of where are you pacing versus your expectation? Obviously, you're ahead based on the announcement this morning. Kind of how is that playing out versus what you might have expected?
Yeah, so for those of you that don't know, we did issue a press release this morning raising our full year 2025. So the year that completed on December 31st raised our full year 2025 guidance. I think the revenue midpoint guidance we raised $3 million, and the Adjusted EBITDA we raised $3.5 million. In a large extent, that increase in Adjusted EBITDA was associated with progress we were making on these initiatives. When you take volume on and you take it on quickly, it causes congestion, might be the best way to say it, in the supply chain. You have to worry about getting raw product in. You have to worry about staging the raw product. You have to worry about the transportation for the raw product, scheduling the plant, getting the equipment to run.
And remember, when we were already running relatively full, squeezing in some more volume out, we spent more time over time. We spent some time on third parties to help our equipment continue running capacity. So in essence, we said those were all of our problems that were caused by accelerating this volume. What's our action plan associated with that? And so we went through a fairly detailed plan that we announced at the end of the, when we released our third quarter results, that said we're going to work on digesting this volume, improving the efficiencies of the volume, and improving the yield that we get essentially out of the raw products associated with this volume so that along with some other investments we're making, by the time we get to the second half of next year, we'll see some margin expansion.
Really, we've just made more progress than we thought. That's largely, to a large extent, the reason for the increase in the adjusted EBITDA outlook for 2025. I would say if we operate at this trajectory, Andrew, of improvement, trajectory of improvement, and look, we still have a lot of work to do, right? We said that digesting this volume could take us up to three quarters, fourth quarter, first quarter, second quarter. We still have work to do, but if we continued on this trajectory, I could absolutely see us performing at the high end of our adjusted EBITDA range next year.
Okay. So this, excuse me, the fourth quarter was going to be a $10 million headwind. Now it sounds like midpoint, $7 million headwind. You gave some nice buckets to kind of bridge that $10 million when you released the third quarter. Is there one bucket in particular that maybe is tracking ahead? Is it broad-based across them and maybe 10 now, 7? How do we think about what that 7 becomes in 1Q and 2Q as you bridge back towards margin expansion?
Sure. I'll probably just walk through the four buckets. Probably the easiest way to do it. So one was clearly one time. We said we would be $2 million impact in October specifically as we shut down our Midlothian plant to get ready for a new investment that's coming online in 2026. So that happened in October, $2 million impact, no impact going forward. The second issue at Midlothian is our wastewater constraint. We've been talking about this for a couple of years now. We basically have a wastewater system that constrains the output that we can put out every day as we have to control the wastewater that we have. This will continue until we put in our new equipment at the end of the second quarter of 2026. That has roughly about a $2 million impact quarterly, and that will continue until the second quarter of 2026.
The bucket that we saw the improvement on was a $3 million estimate of absorbing this volume. And Brian just walked through some of the things that occurred in the quarter. We thought there'd be about a $3 million hit here, and it turned out that there really wasn't as we were able to really improve in November and December. When we gave our guide for 2026, we thought that that bucket there was $3 million in Q4, and it would step down in Q1 and then step down again in Q2. And by the midpoint of the year, we wouldn't be impacted anymore. So a good way to think about that, Andrew, and how that impacts 2026 is originally we thought there'd be a $2 million impact in Q1, $1 million in Q2.
If we keep operating how we are today, that goes away, which ties to what Brian said. We'd look at the high end of our range at $3 million if we didn't have that impact. The last bucket continues to be on track is our margin improvement plan. We said that by the second half of 2026, we would be able to work on these initiatives as these resources were deployed to absorbing the volume. And that will roughly have about a $3 million benefit per quarter. And we're on track. We have a good list. We just need to get to the plan by the second half of 2026.
Is there anything that organizationally you're doing differently to make sure that maybe you're better prepared to, or so that something like this doesn't take place again? I mean, there were some maintenance elements and things like that. Is there anything with the onboarding process or anything like that that maybe changes that prevents some of this from happening?
I think we certainly learned. I mean, telling customers to hold on and wait is always a hard thing. I think I would have done a better job and should have done a better job fighting to phase this new customer volume. I think that would have helped and allowed us to digest it a little bit better, plan for it a little bit better. I don't regret taking any of the volume on. Again, I think we'll look back on this in sort of the end of '26 and say, "Wow, this was a lever that allowed us to get margin enhancement to maximize the effectiveness of our facilities." We got into great channels with marquee customers. So I don't think we're going to regret that at all. In fact, I've said publicly, if I had 10 opportunities to do it again, I'd take all 10.
I would really fight to space it out a little bit more. I also think we spent a lot of September and October trying to get our equipment able to handle this surge of volume. We got it out the door, but it really wasn't efficient, and we ended up spending overtime on mechanics and extra maintenance, and we're now able to better plan 2026, so we've got maintenance windows scheduled. We've got them in the right time. We've got them resourced well, and that's what I meant a little bit about planning. When it all comes on at once, you're scrambling just to get whatever you can out and maintain your quality and your service and your safety standards, because we'll never negotiate on those, but with a little bit more time, now we can better plan our maintenance windows.
We've already seen better transportation planning and the impact that that had on the fourth quarter, better raw product planning and the availability of raw product, sequencing that out. So I think we've made a lot of really nice steps this quarter. There's still more work to go to do. I don't want to take our eye off the ball, but if you can grow at 13% for the year now, which our updated guidance would put us at 13% for the year, you can do that while with basically the same equipment you had at the beginning of the year, and your service metrics have actually, and quality metrics have actually improved over the course of that year, I'd say that's pretty darn successful.
I wanted to ask about pricing and pricing power maybe. Given the growth, given some of the capacity constraints in the industry, obviously you guys being a preferred partner, how do you approach pricing? I know some of it's passed through, excuse me, but do you feel like against that backdrop, your pricing opportunities have improved maybe versus kind of historical levels, or has it changed at all? How do you think about that?
You want to talk just mechanically about raw product price through and tariffs maybe, and then we'll talk a little bit about categories.
Yeah, in general, how we handle pricing with our business model is we make a fair manufacturing margin. So when raw materials increase or raw materials decrease, we pass that on to our customers. Same concept with tariffs. And that's how we were able to fully pass on all of our tariff exposure as we viewed it no different than a raw material increase. We took the tariff increase. There was a little bit of timing lag as typically we do it every quarter, but we took that hit in Q2. But since then, we've been fully covered from a tariff exposure perspective, and we've fully passed it on to our customers. But I would say, based on the current environment, some of those tariff costs were substantial to our customers, which does kind of, in the short run, hurt our ability to take additional price on toll.
But overall, it's a great business model for us that works well, transparent with our customers, and limits our exposure.
Okay.
I think overall, Andrew, on base pricing or toll pricing, as Greg would say, one thing to remember, in any competitive situation, I can promise you one thing. We are never the lowest priced. In fact, we're always the highest price provider. So we take our chances and our opportunities where we can on price. I do think the pressure of passing along tariffs has been dramatic in terms of the end user and the price on our shelf, but we're always mindful of that. The other thing that I would tell you is if we look at some of the guidance that we gave for 2026, and we look at really our long-term algorithm that we outline in our investor deck of 8%-10% annual revenue growth and 13%-17% EBITDA growth, we haven't assumed any pricing in that.
Pricing would be upside for those models.
You'd already talked about some of the capacity on the fruit snack side. You also have some capacity line that you're adding on the aseptic side. I think it's a 10% increase, if I'm not mistaken. Given your growth, 10% will get absorbed, which is a good problem to have, right? It will be absorbed reasonably quickly. How do you think about capacity needs over time and funding that capacity increase over time? How are you planning strategically for that over the long term?
So with the aseptic line we're adding in 2026, again, not necessarily for 2026 growth because it comes on in the second half, and the fruit snack line that we're adding, we really believe that that will be able to manage our growth at our long-term rate through 2027 and through 2028. The one thing I can tell you is we don't foresee a new plant. We still have room to add another line in fruit snacks, add a couple more lines in aseptic. So I don't see the need in the next several years really to add a new plant. And this growth CapEx will last us for our growth targets through 2028. So I'm excited that we should see 2027 and 2028 be nice cash flow years too.
Can you talk a little bit about allocating that capital, kind of the framework that you use and kind of how you think about the incremental dollar allocation, please?
Absolutely. Leverage remains a top priority, right? Our size of company, I think, is really important that we stay under three times levered. So even with this capital plan, with the growth capital here in 2026, we do plan on staying under three times throughout the entire year. And as we improve in the back half of the year as we start to get some run rate out of this equipment, as well as the margin improvement plan, we expect to be around 2.8 times levered by the end of the year. Our second priority are these growth CapEx projects. We've listed the projects. They're out there. They're being implemented. They're coming in 2026. They're funded, and they have great returns. With our third capital allocation priority being returning to shareholders, we do have the share buyback plan authorized. We have $24 million available.
If we can do that while hitting the first two priorities, it becomes a nice opportunity as well.
Great. We're basically out of time. Any closing thoughts?
I want to thank you for your time, for your interest. There aren't a lot of consumer products companies right now who can demonstrate the growth that we can. And you're coming at it with a business that has margin expansion opportunities and real catalysts, real reason why we can expand margin with our wastewater investment, with our new growth CapEx investment. So we're really very bullish on the outlook for the next couple of years. We've got a lot of work to do, but we've got our resources marshaled in the right direction to focus on driving margin while continuing the customer service metrics and the growth that you've seen the last couple of years. So thanks for your time.
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here. Thanks, everybody.