Greetings, and welcome to the USANA Health Sciences third quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce speaker Andrew Masuda, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us to review our third quarter results. Today's conference call is being broadcast live via webcast and can be accessed directly from our website at ir.usana.com. Shortly following the call, a replay will be available on our website. As a reminder, during the course of this conference call, management will make forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of our company. Those statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ, perhaps materially, from the results projected in such forward-looking statements. Examples of these statements include those regarding our strategies and outlook for fiscal year 2026, uncertainty related to the economic and operating environment around the world, and our operations and financial results.
We caution you that these statements should be considered in conjunction with disclosures, including specific risk factors and financial data contained in our most recent filings with the SEC. During today's call, we will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. Reconciliations of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release. I am joined by our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kevin Guest, our Chief Financial Officer, Doug Hekking, our Chief Commercial Officer, Brent Neidig, our Chief Operating Officer, Walter Noot, our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Kathryn Armstrong, and other executives. Yesterday, after the market closed, we announced our third quarter results and posted our management commentary document on the company's website. We will now hear brief remarks from Kevin and Doug before opening the call for questions.
Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. I would like to speak to the strategy we are executing, where we are seeing progress, and where we still have work to do. Our earnings release and management commentary present the numbers for the business, so I will focus on providing context for the numbers and then ask Doug to add more color on how our strategy is coming to fruition. Overall, this was a mixed quarter, but one where I am encouraged by the progress we are seeing with our strategy. Our strategy is to evolve USANA from a single-channel direct selling company into a diversified omnichannel health and wellness company built on consumer acquisition and loyalty. In core nutrition, we are working to increase customer acquisition and customer loyalty by investing in the USANA brand, bringing new products to market, and further refining our incentive structure.
Through Hiya and Rise Wellness, we're expanding our business to reach consumers at more venues where they already shop, including retail and Amazon. Our debt-free balance sheet lets us fund this expansion with discipline. Let me start with what's working. In our core nutritional business, we generated improved operating profitability through lower event and compensation expenses. Part of that is a favorable comparison against a compensation plan in last year's quarter that did not repeat, but the cost base is in better shape, and that gives us a stronger foundation to invest from. We also saw real improvement in Southeast Asia Pacific regions. Net sales grew 2% year-over-year after declining 13% last quarter. Active customers grew 3% sequentially, and engagement among our field leaders has increased. It's one region and still early, but it's the improvement we're working on to generate elsewhere.
At Hiya, after a difficult year for digital advertising, results began to improve. The team has been diversifying how it reaches customers beyond a single advertising platform, building creator and affiliate programs, and more recently, launching TikTok Shop. As customer acquisition costs came down from the first half of the year, we intentionally invested in digital marketing to drive customer acquisition. Active Monthly Subscribers grew 18% sequentially, adding about 29,500 net subscribers, and net sales returned to year-over-year growth. Target and Amazon net sales combined more than doubled from the second quarter, albeit from a small base. Back-to-school seasonality helped, and the added marketing investment pressured near-term margins. We're staying measured, but the early results are encouraging.
Hiya has historically seen strong retention and lifetime value, so the customers we add today should contribute for many quarters to come, which is why our focus is now on engaging and retaining them. Reflecting this progress, we raised our Hiya net sales outlook to $130 million. There's still plenty of work ahead, and I'll take a few more minutes to share my thoughts on where we need to do better. First, core nutrition. We're tracking inside the range we expected for the year, but it isn't where we want to be, and the clearest example is active customers, which are down 8% year-over-year. Greater China, our largest market, accounted for most of the sequential decline in net sales and active customers. On lighter incentive and promotional activity during the third quarter, and outside of Southeast Asia Pacific, every region declined in constant currency.
Growing our active customer base remains our top priority. Our brand investment, product innovation that we plan to begin introducing in 2027, and the incentive plan refinements are all aimed at growth in active customers, and we expect the benefits to build gradually. Second, we're not satisfied with Rise Wellness' results, and we're lowering our outlook again. Last year's third quarter included a large club order for Rise Bar that did not repeat, and club orders again came in below our expectations. Club channel sales are inherently lumpy and reflecting in part order timing that we do not control. Improving gross margin remains a priority. Protein Pop is still a young brand. We launched Protein Pop Balance in Target in September, as we said we would, and our goal is to broaden distribution beyond the club channel and turn this effort into more consistent results. Third, Hiya.
The work ahead is retention, building retail, and improving profitability. While there's plenty of opportunity for improvement in all our brands, we're making progress, and I'm encouraged by what we're seeing come to fruition. These early results reinforce my confidence in our strategy and in the actions we're taking. With that, I'll ask Doug to walk through the correction to our second quarter non-GAAP figures and add some color on the outlook.
Thanks, Kevin. I'll briefly cover our updated outlook and our cash position and then turn it back to Kevin. With the third quarter in the books, we now expect net sales approaching $900 million and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $77 million, compared with our prior outlook of $80.5 million. The change reflects softer sales at Rise, our decision to invest at Hiya, which is partially offset by stronger profitability in the core nutritional segment. With about two months left in the year, we anticipate Hiya will build on momentum for the third quarter, with sequential growth in net sales and adjusted EBITDA as the subscribers we add in the third quarter contribute for a full quarter, and retail and Amazon keep building.
For core nutritional, we're assuming net sales of roughly $740 million, within the range we provided at the beginning of the year, and $10 million below our most recent outlook, reflecting fewer active customers. For Rise, our outlook assumes certain retail orders currently scheduled for the fourth quarter to ship as planned. At the time that those orders shift into the first quarter, our 2026 results could be modestly below the outlook, though we would expect any changes in net sales and earnings to be realized in 2027. Finally, cash. Cash from operations totaled $45 million year-to-date, up from $26 million last year, and free cash flow was $36 million, more than double last year. Inventory being down 13% from the end of the year was also a positive.
We ended the quarter with $179 million in cash and no debt, which gives us the flexibility to continue investing in our strategy and drive future growth. With that, I'll turn it back to Kevin.
Thanks, Doug. To close, we still have plenty of opportunity for improvement, but I repeat, we are making progress. Our priorities are clear: grow customer acquisition and loyalty in core nutrition, engage and retain Hiya's new subscribers, and improve margins at Rise. We have a strategy we believe in and the teams who are executing it. Thank you for joining us. Operator, please open the line for questions.
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. One moment while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question, we will hear from Anthony Lebiedzinski with Sidoti. Please go ahead with your question.
Good morning, everyone, and thanks for taking the questions. First, on the core nutritional side, it was good to see some pockets of growth, as you called out, the Southeast Asia Pacific. I guess it is a multi-part question here. Are you doing anything meaningfully different there versus the other regions? And I guess the second part of that question, as you look to evolve your Brand Partner incentive plan, can you give more specifics as far as what changes do you expect to achieve from this? What is the timeframe as to when we could see some improvements in the customer count and also the segment revenue as well?
Those are excellent questions. We have some really strong leadership around the world, and we are seeing some things work in Southeast Asia that we are expanding to other markets around the world. I would love to have Brent Neidig, our Chief Commercial Officer, who deals directly with those markets, also respond to that question.
Thanks, Kevin, and good morning, Anthony, and thank you for the question. Yeah, it was great to see the results from Southeast Asia. I think it is a combination of many things. Southeast Asia has been in a rebuild for the last many quarters and couple of years, actually. We have changed leadership in several markets, and that is producing fruit. In the quarter specifically, we had an incentive program that ran, which was quite successful, and we are going to build on that into the fourth quarter. But I think where the real magic came together was that we have seen a great deal of re-engagement from our top Brand Partner leaders in many of those core markets, specifically in Australia, Malaysia, even in Korea, the Philippines.
That combination of re-engagement from our Brand Partners who are driving the growth, combined with the incentive program that we ran, is really delivering the results that we are seeing. I would not necessarily call it a new trend line, but we are very optimistic to see those results continue to build in some of those core markets. Remind me the second part of that question, Anthony.
Sure, yeah. So, as far as the comment about evolving your Brand Partner incentive plan, if you could just comment on what types of changes you expect to achieve from these incentive plan changes and kind of the timeframe as to when we could see some tangible results from that.
Yeah, sure. We have talked about this many times. Our major evolution to the plan took place last year, in July, is when the first parts of that rolled out. What that was designed to do was to bring some more money from the back end of the plan to the front end to encourage increased acquisition and help people see success as soon as they come in the door. That has been successful. We have seen increased Brand Partner engagement, and when you look at the numbers, our Brand Partner decline is less than our Preferred Customer decline. So we think that the acquisition engine is still intact and still working.
Where we really see an opportunity going forward is in consumer loyalty, and Kevin addressed that in his prepared remarks. But the consumer loyalty piece, that is where we see an opportunity to make some slight adjustments to the current plan. Nothing major, but some adjustments to qualification criteria and timing of payout of certain incentives, which we believe will drive increased retention and loyalty, ultimately driving LTV. That is the program that we have queued up, and we expect that to roll out throughout 2027, so it is going to be a phased-in approach.
Got it. Thanks, Brent. As far as the comment on the new product introduction, can you speak to the pipeline of new products that you have for next year? Also, it looks like you are going to be a bit more aggressive with digital marketing. How do we think about the impact that may have on your costs?
Well, those are great questions. Meeting people where they are at is a key part of our strategy, also speaking to them effectively where they are at, and relevant communications is a big part of that as we think about our product launch and expansion and growth. We have actually done a couple test markets here in the U.S. that are reaping positive results that we are very optimistic around the consumer-driven product base offerings. I would like to ask Kathryn Armstrong, Dr. Armstrong is our Chief Scientific Officer, would you comment on his question?
Hi, Anthony. This is Kathryn. Thanks, Kevin.
Good morning.
Morning. When we talk about our new product launches, to Kevin's point, it's really about the holistic approach of how do we bring these to market. We're focusing a lot on women's and kids' initiatives. To Kevin's point, we have a lot of experience in those areas, and we've been testing out new ideas, both through our core brand as well as through our extended set of brands, in terms of how we can leverage product execution to drive customer loyalty. You can expect to see those coming to fruition in 2027 with launches.
Mm-hmm. Okay, great. Thank you. With respect to Hiya, how do we think about the balance between marketing spending and profitability for the brand? I guess, as you look to scale Hiya across the core subscription business and add more retail, as you look at building this brand over the course of the next few years, how do we think about gross margins, operating margins for Hiya, where they could be?
When we first acquired Hiya, the thing that got me really excited, most excited about Hiya was the competency of their team and how proactive and how effective they were at building a national brand, and how focused they were. It's great to see them expand and grow inside their channel and their product base. I'd like to ask Walter, who's coordinating from our home office with the Hiya leadership team on the go-forward and execution.
Yeah, think about it this way, Anthony. When a customer first buys from Hiya, first order is half price, and the first order comes with a nice bottle, and it's got a really nice box, and it's an expensive presentation that gets sent to that customer. Hiya invests in that new customer, and we have a really high LTV, and it's very predictable. It's been predictable since the beginning. We've actually seen it gone up over the last year. With Hiya, you'll see months like September, especially September, but even this last quarter, where CAC went down a little bit, and so it gave us the opportunity to go out and acquire more customers, and you saw a net gain of about 30,000 new customers that came in. Those customers are going to stay for a long time.
What happens in first month is you'll see lower EBITDA, lower margins, and then you'll start seeing us reset, just like Doug said. So in Q4, you'll start seeing margins going up quite substantially. Same thing that'll probably happen in Q1 of next year. You'll see a lot more acquisition because beginning of the year, we'll acquire a bunch more customers, and then throughout the year, we'll start benefiting from that. On the retail space, we have a much higher margin on the retail space. So we're in Target right now. That's getting us good margins, and that's growing fairly quickly. Then we're going into club at the beginning of next year, early Q1.
You'll see, as time goes on, I think we'll build a nice base with DTC, especially with Hiya's business, the kind of the way it's set up with that first order being half price. That creates some inconsistency in EBITDA. But over time, as we start adding retail, that will start to change.
Okay. That's very helpful context there. Thanks, Walter. Then kind of, I guess, a similar question on Rise Wellness. It does appear that it's a bit more lumpy than expected. However, as you look to diversify your retail distribution, how do we think about sales and profitability for the brand, and whether that includes any new additional products that you're thinking of, as far as potentially announcing next year, or just how do we think about the trajectory for Rise Wellness?
With Rise, like you said, it has been lumpy, especially because of club stores. Even though we still are, it is very promising. Club stores are still very interested in the brand and what we are doing with them. It is just that they do a lot of testing with us, and they will order on a regional basis rather than a national basis at times. We are going kind of back and forth, but we have not just conversations, but we have got orders coming in, and we think it is going to be positive long term. In the meantime, we have had to start building a base, because if you think about it, Protein Pop was a brand new brand last year. This is September last year we launched at Target. It is a new brand we have to build up.
We have gone. By the end of this year, we will have in the retail space, not club, but this is grocery and Target and grocery, we will have 4,100 stores that we will be in, which is a huge amount of growth that has all happened this year. That will build a base for us and allow us to, especially in grocery, there is a better profitability margin for us. I think that you will see, obviously, we did not do well this year, especially because of club and because of some of the lumpiness of that business. This next year and the rest of this year, we will start having more business going through those retail channels. Protein Pop is the units per store and dollars per store is the number one clear protein product in the U.S. That is a product that started in September last year.
There is a huge opportunity for us still in the grocery space and in the club space. We have just launched a new product in Protein Pop that is called Protein Pop Balance. It is a prebiotic, a fiber, and a protein, and it is a lower amount of protein, so it competes in the grocery aisle, or sorry, in the soda aisle. Because of that, we think we will get more units per user, per customer. We think it will consume more. We also think that being in the soda aisle, we will get a lot more sales per store per week. That has really been our focus. I think for the next year, I mean, we definitely have new products we will be launching, but I think Protein Pop Balance is probably our focus for the next year.
Thank you. I guess my last question is probably for Doug. The tax rate has been a headwind. Just wondering if there are any things you can try to do to minimize the tax impact, anything structurally that you could perhaps do differently, or as far as the tax impact, and how do we think about the tax rate beyond 2026?
Yeah, I think everything that we just talked about with Hiya, Rise, and even Kevin's strategic comments on the core all feed into that. I think we have had a little bit of a drag on our venture companies, which I think there is so much positive information there, but as you see that, you just do not get the benefit from a tax standpoint, I think particularly with the amortization of intangibles at Hiya. So that really is a headwind. So one of the things we look at is the absolute tax amount, and the rate is not something, believe me, we sit through board meetings, and it is a common every board meeting, and it is an interesting navigation. I think there are opportunities to shift some of the spend closer to consumers in different markets, and there is some opportunity there.
I think any of those considerations, we want to be very thoughtful and very intentional about something that is going to be additive to the business. But I think just generally getting traction in the businesses and executing on the plans that we have with our venture companies are the best opportunity.
All right. Well, thank you very much, and best of luck.
Thanks, Anthony.
There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back to Andrew Masuda for closing remarks.
Thank you, Rochelle, and thanks for your questions and participation on today's conference call. If you have any remaining questions, please feel free to contact investor relations at 801-954-7210.
Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.