Laird Superfood, Inc.

acquisition and gains in winning the buy box for our core products. I am also pleased to report that net sales from our wholesale business increased in Q3 by nearly 13% year over year. In the natural channel, as measured by spins, our growth rate for the 12 weeks ending October 6, 2024, was 27%, driven by double-digit top-line growth in all of the products that we measure, including powder creamers, liquid creamers, coffee, and instant lattes. This growth was driven by a nearly equal split of distribution gains and increases in our sales velocity. In MULO, we grew even faster, up by 40% in the same 12-week period, ending October 6, 2024. And while we remain strategically cautious in expanding to the conventional grocery channel, I'm going to tell you that you'll soon be able to find more of our products in new stores in several retailers across the country, including Kroger, Albertson Safeway, Wegmans, and more. Moving into operations, our supply chain team continues to do a solid job of supporting our growing business. During Q3, we expanded our gross margin to 43%, which represents a 12-point increase versus the third quarter of 2023, and marks the fourth straight quarter that we have achieved at least a 40% gross margin. This improvement was driven in large part by the strategic sourcing of our top ingredients, where we will continue to focus during 2025. Our biggest operational challenge in the third quarter, and frankly, throughout 2024, has been in keeping product on retailer shelves and available to our e-commerce consumers. Because we have consistently exceeded our growth targets during the last few quarters, our supply chain has been in a perpetual chase throughout the year. The team has done an admirable job of juggling ingredient supply and manufacturing availability, essentially playing a game of whack-a-mole as they've moved from issue to issue. And while there have been some minor out-of-stocks during 2024, we remain in a strong inventory position and expect to be back fully in stock for the important Black Friday events and holiday buying seasons. I also want to share some of the progress that we have been making in building a more environmentally sustainable business. During the past year, we have been able to introduce 30% or more post-consumer recycled material into all of our Gusseted creamer pouches, as well as our nutrition and protein bars. Impressively, we have done this without any significant incremental cost to our business. This is a meaningful ambition for our team and to our consumers. And we're in the process of outlining additional goals and creating a multi-year sustainability program. Many of you were with us during the turnaround that we executed over the past couple of years. And I'm pleased to be able to assert that we are now solidly into the transformation of Laird Superfood into a high growth premium branded business with strong gross margin. But rather than asking you to take my word for it, I want to take a moment to dimensionalize it a bit so that you can internalize it. Thus far in 2024, our net sales have grown by nearly 27%. At the same time, we've been able to increase our gross margin by 15.3 points, going from 26.4% gross margin to 41.7%, which is well ahead of our financial goal to maintain gross margin in the high 30s. Our net loss for the three quarters of this year has been shaved to less than $1.5 million. which is nearly a $9 million improvement versus the same time period last year. And during the last 12 months, our cash balance actually increased by $776,000 from $7.4 million to more than $8.2 million as of September 30th, 2024. And while Q3 and the entire 2024 financial performance has been a tremendous improvement, versus our historical performance at Laird Superfood, we are even more excited about the future opportunities for our brand and business. As we have shared before, we still have a tremendous amount of white space to expand distribution and drive sales velocity growth within the natural channel. And we have not really even begun to expand into the conventional grocery channel or into the massive on-premise channel for food consumption. We remain confident that we can continue to build our e-commerce business behind relevance and engaging content from our founders and other influencers within health, wellness, nutrition, and fitness. And as consumers increasingly seek out healthier and more natural foods, our Laird Superfood portfolio is perfectly positioned to fuel them in their journey. With that, I will now turn it over to Anya to discuss our third quarter results in more detail.

Thank you, Jason, and good afternoon, everyone. As Jason noted, in the third quarter, we have continued to make progress, executing the strategy we articulated earlier in the year, which is to return the business to growth while improving profitability. I am pleased to share with you that our third quarter results were strong on every key metric, building on the first half of the year momentum and delivering significant improvements versus the same period prior year. Net sales grew 28% to a record $11.8 million compared to $9.2 million in the prior year period and were up by $1.8 million sequentially versus the second quarter of 2024. Our e-commerce channel led the company's growth, increasing by 42% year-over-year and accounting for 58% of our total net sales. Sales on the Amazon platform had by far the best quarter in the company's history, delivering an impressive 133% growth, driven by outstanding commercial execution and a better in-stock inventory position. Director-consumer platform also grew 10%, driven by a steady increase in subscribers and repeat orders, higher order value, and lower discount rates due to strategic shift in promotional spend. Wholesale net sales increased by 13% year-over-year and contributed 42% of total net sales, driven by 36% growth in retail channel from new distribution and velocity acceleration, as well as more efficient promotional spend. This was partially offset by timing of club channel orders. Gross margin for the third quarter came in at 43%, reaching a new high and expanding 12 points versus last year. This margin expansion was driven by supply chain cost savings initiatives, specifically from a strategic shift to direct procurement of key raw materials, settlement with a supplier to recover costs previously incurred in connection with the quality event experienced in 2023, as well as reduction in inefficient trade promotion spend. I am pleased to highlight that this is the fourth consecutive quarter where we have achieved gross margins at or above the 40% threshold. These results further support our expectations for sustainably achieving gross margins in at least the high 30s in the coming quarters. Operating expenses decreased $0.3 million in the third quarter compared to the third quarter last year, driven by lower sales and marketing costs, as we improved the efficiency of our marketing programs. This was in part offset by higher general and administrative expenses, driven by higher professional fees and stock-based compensation, which is a non-cash expense. Operating expenses as a percentage of net sales were lower by 16 points compared to the prior year quarter, as we focused on ongoing expense management in order to improve our bottom line. Net loss for the third quarter was $0.2 million, which is $2.5 million better than during the prior year period. Turning to our balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $8.2 million in cash, and I am particularly pleased to report that for the second quarter in a row, we have delivered a positive quarterly cash flow, which was $374,000 in Q3 and totaled $495,000 for the first nine months of the year, reflecting our improved performance and disciplined management of our working capital, which decreased year-over-year excluding cash, while driving year-to-date revenue growth of 27%. We also have no debt outstanding and no expected need to draw on our line of credit. We continue to project that we have enough cash to fund our operations as we grow our business and make operating improvements that drive us towards break-even and profitability. Overall, we're still confident about the remainder of 2024. We expect continued growth in our core business segments as we remain focused on executing our strategic priorities. As such, we're increasing our full-year guidance on both net sales and gross margin. We now expect net sales to be in the range of $43 to $44 million for the full year 2024, which represents 26 to 29% growth versus prior year. And gross margin is expected to expand to approximately 41 to 42%, representing 11 to 12 point improvement versus 2023. Looking ahead to 2025, we made a decision to strategically focus on growth. And in doing so, we expect to achieve 20 to 25% top line growth and to manage our P&L to positive cash flow and EBITDA. And now I will turn the discussion back over to Jason for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Anya. And thank you once again to all of you who are supporting our journey at Laird Superfood. Our last four quarters demonstrate an incredible turnaround in our business, one where we not only have shored up our finances, but have also returned our business to best-in-class growth rates in the industry. Operator, this concludes our prepared remarks. And we are now ready to open the call to questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to remove that question, press star followed by 2. And if you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before asking your question. Our first question of the day comes from Alex Furman with Craig Hallam. Your line is now open.

Hey, guys. Thanks very much for taking my question, and congratulations on a really strong quarter. Nice to see a really strong initial outlook for 2025. Wanted to ask a little bit more about where that growth is going to come from. I think, Jason, you mentioned in your prepared remarks that we're likely to see a number of other retail doors coming. You named some impressive national accounts coming. Is that really going to be the biggest driver of your growth? Obviously, this year, it's been more driven by the online business. Curious how you get to that 20%, 25% growth next year, if that maybe looks a little bit different.

Hey, Alex, how you doing? It's good to hear you here again today. Good, Jason.

Good to hear from you as well.

Yeah, thank you. It's a great question and one that we've been pressing the team on. The reality is on this, Alex, is we had a great year this year in the online business, the e-commerce business, a bit unexpectedly. We had pulled a lot of spend out and we knew that we were getting to better marketing tactics, but we were really pleasantly surprised with the performance this year. And the great thing about it is we've got quite a number of our purchases to repeat purchasers and our repeat purchasers to subscribers. And as a result, we have very sticky revenues are going to next year. And so we still feel really great about our ability to grow DTC. And at the same time, Amazon has been on fire, as you saw. And we know that we still have a lot of latent growth in Amazon, just executing the playbook that we've been running. So we think that that e-com business is going to continue to do really well. Probably, though, we would expect even more growth next year as we look at the wholesale business. We did pick up a number of accounts, as I just mentioned, and You know, we're being very strategic and selective with the retailers that we're working with. I think I had mentioned previously that we've been entering in with Target into a couple of categories and the performance looks good there. And same thing with these other retailers that I mentioned. But the reality behind that, too, is our natural channel sales have been on fire. And it's been a combination of additional distribution, including a lot that we've gained this year, as well as a lot of gains. And it's been fairly equal, as I had mentioned. the velocity and the distribution gains that we've had this year. So it's really a case where everything's kind of hitting at the same point. I'm sorry, that everything is really kind of hitting at the same time. And that's the point that Anya was making with regards to next year and how to think about our business. We're going to invest into growth. We have a lot of opportunities in front of us right now with consumers online, as well as retailers and their consumers and guests where they're shopping out in physical stores And we want to make sure that we have sharp prices on promotion with extra display as much as we can, and that we're marketing behind the brand and really getting to new consumers, but also leveraging the database, the very strong database that we have. We have an incredible database with, as we've mentioned, over half a million consumers that are very loyal to our brand. And we have the ability to launch new products into those channels. So you're going to see strong growth across all of these channels next year, Alex, and you're going to see it come across, frankly, across all of our categories. We are winning in all of our categories. When I go look at the spins report, everything is green right now. Everything is lighting up green and it's been that way this year. And it's the same thing on the e-com platforms of Amazon and DTC. So we're going to just use, we're going to use 25, just reinvest and grow and build this business, you know, very carefully. So, you know, as you know, we've been very good stewards, with marketing dollars. And we really watch the ROAS and ROIs very carefully, but we're in a position right now where we can spend effectively. And so we're going to do that. And you're going to see really great growth across all these channels as we go forward in our opinion.

that's really helpful jason um thank you and then and then you know if i could just follow up as as you you know think about your expansion into more mainstream grocery and big box type retailers um as well as the success you're having in your more long-standing uh natural foods partners you know which which products have have those two categories of retailers really been gravitating as you move towards uh you know some of these more mainstream you know bigger retailers are they opting for your core powder creamer skus or just any color on which products have been resonating uh as you open more doors would be helpful yeah you know it's it's uh our legacy is the powder creamers and we continue to grow those and they continue to do really well um

But that's a space, you know, that dry shelf is a space that'll never be as productive as the liquid creamers. And so from a sales velocity per point of distribution, the liquid creamers are markedly stronger. But we're doing well in both of those. You know, when we go measure ourselves and analyze what we call a quintile performance assessment, where we go look at all the products that are on shelf and break it into five quintiles and look at where we stand We're typically always in that top quintile or somewhere between Q1, Q2, or maybe into Q3. A couple of stragglers, but by and large, we're at the top of these performance metrics that we look at. And so we look really good in both of those. The powder creamers had a rough year two years ago, but they've had a really good year this year. And we've seen nice distribution growth as well as velocity growth. And we're flipping that liquid creamer over to a large size, which is going to be a 50% upsizing, a 50% up pricing. There's a little bit more value to the consumer, but really what it is, it's just a convenience play to give them more creamer so they don't have to buy as often and run out at home. And there's incremental consumption whenever you do that. So we're really excited about liquid creamer as we go into next year. We've had some great distribution wins on that also. So both of those categories, Alex, look great. And then the real surprise to me versus where when I came in about two and a half years ago, the coffee and the instant latte products have just been on fire this year. They've driven a lot of our growth out in grocery. They're doing great online. And so we're going to continue. We're launching new SKUs in both of those new items in both of those categories. And we're seeing a lot of success. We launched a protein creamer. that we've sold out of a couple of times this year and, you know, we just blew past our expectations and are now running bigger batches off of that. We have a new maca creamer that's coming out in the, I'm sorry, maca instant latte, rather, that's coming out in that instant latte space. And then we've launched a couple of new coffee products and are continuing to bring more functionality, specifically through the adaptogenic functional mushrooms And retailers and consumers are really gravitating to those SKUs. So I think those are the four product areas that you're going to see really exploding as we go into next year, in addition to greens, which has been on fire all year for us.

Great. That's really helpful, Jason. Thanks very much.

You bet, Alex.

Our next question comes from JP Woolman with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is now open.

Hi, Anya. Hi, Jason. Thanks for taking the question. If I could just start maybe kind of touching in on growth a little bit more. And I want to specifically go to kind of the discounts and promotional activity. You know, it sounds like it's going to be kind of a continued focus next year with the prepared remark about investing some of that margin. And so I was hoping you could kind of just talk about know where you're seeing the most success what kind of promotions you are uh finding really resonate and just kind of how you're thinking about next year in terms of discounting and promotional activity yeah hey jp uh thanks for that question and uh and i'll jump in and on you if you want to give your vocal cords a workout you can jump in as well uh so

You know, it's really interesting, JP. A year ago, you probably recall we overspent on the trade line and we really invested too much into pricing. We felt the consumer was a little bit shaky last year and we were trying to entice them to purchases, especially first-time consumers and their purchases. And what we found is we gave too much away. And in doing that, we were really giving away our brand equity as well. So we made a strategic pivot at the end of last year, really, in Q4, that we've carried forward this year to do a lot less pricing promotion. And it's been very effective. As you can see from the net sales increases that we've had this year, selling at full price has worked out a lot better for us. And what that's done is it's really let us keep up the premium cache of the brand. We heard from our consumers specifically that we are a premium brand, and they're surprised to see us on sale as often as we were last year. What we do now is we run fewer, deeper sales online. So we leveraged Amazon Prime Days. We leveraged Black Friday internally on DTC. And then we have one other big sale on the DTC business. And then by and large, we really don't run a lot of promotions, almost none, in fact. And that's working out really well for us because the consumers that are buying Laird at this point are really, they're believers in what the brand benefits are giving them, the functionality of the food. they're willing to pay for it uh at the price that it's at without the need for promotion so we've really backed away from that pricing promotion and that extends into the grocery as well uh we pulled back gosh on you would we pull back probably 10 points or so of of uh trade over the course of the year 11 points yeah yeah and so you know that that's really a very a quality uh promotion so we call quality merchants And that's a function of getting a secondary display or getting into the circulars at grocers and what's called feature and display. And so that's really where you'll see us focusing next year. We have a couple of big planned or committed promotions where we'll pick up that secondary display. And that's just a tremendous way to introduce your products to a lot of new consumers in a tight timeframe. And so that's really going to be where our focus is next year. But I would just think about it as more of the same in terms of the pricing promotion that we're going to do. There will be more concerted marketing efforts to really build the brand and drive awareness and pick up more consumers. We've found a number of marketing tactics that have worked really well over the last 12 months, especially those that leverage our founders and share the functionality of the food and general health, wellness, fitness, and nutrition tips. And so across the various social media platforms, where we've continued to invest and grow our subscribership, you'll see us making a much more or a bigger and more concerted effort to drive awareness and build those consumer bases.

Great. That's very helpful. And then maybe just, you know, I think, Jason, you actually kind of touched on it a little bit there, but if we just kind of step out and think about the customer base now, You know, how are you guys thinking about the customer and kind of whether you've extended, whether you've made that kind of next jump into sort of a new set of customers, maybe a little bit beyond some of the very strict health and wellness focused customers? Like, could you just kind of give us, you know, with another year of projected strong growth, like, Have you made that kind of next jump into a new customer set or how are you thinking about where you kind of are versus a year ago there?

Yeah, well, that's a great question, and that's one that, you know, the smaller company without as much data as some of us are used to having, it's one that we extrapolate some of the data against quite often. So so look, I tell you, when I first got here a couple of years ago, we were largely really what we had. Our consumer set was and I think of this in kind of you know, an expanding circle, uh, diagram. So at the core, we really were, what we had were Laird and Gabby's friends and family. And we've been launched essentially into groups that Laird and Gabby knew whether through, um, Instagram or just leverage, you know, in some of the followership we're able to establish there off of, off of their, uh, uh, own, uh, accounts, or if it was just leveraging Laird and Gabby and who they were to people. And so, you know, up and down the West coast, uh, in the Surfer community, and then into some of the health and wellness circles. That's really who our consumer was at that point, with one exception. And one exception was we had done, and this was a few years ago, but we had done some executions specifically with some influencer shoppers that would go up and down the aisles and throw product in. And what we found is that was great for one-time hits whenever you can launch it, but it was extremely expensive and those weren't the right consumers. So those folks largely fell away. And ultimately we were left with Laird and Gabby's friends and followers. In that next 18 months or so when I got here, we really focused on getting to the health and wellness diehards. Specifically, kind of think about it in that West Coast area, some of the enclaves, health and wellness enclaves like Colorado, parts of Texas, Austin, Dallas specifically, Minneapolis, Chicago. You have some folks that are really focused on health and wellness, and we really focused I would say targeted that core and didn't really geographically make it to the East coast. And there are a lot of reasons for that, including just a little bit of a lower Q score or awareness score of Laird and Gabby, the Hamiltons. And in the last year, I would tell you, we've pushed that next in that next concentric circle where, you know, now we're pushing out from the diehard, what I call the health and wellness diehards into the kind of health and wellness aware, you know, people that know they need to, eat better that they're that are hearing about functional foods that are trying new foods and that's why we're so careful you know as we as we're spending our marketing dollars and watching our row as we're being very careful because once you start moving to a group that that doesn't know you as well or isn't as aligned to those interests you can start spending uh very inefficiently and that's where i'd say we've done in our marketing team spend just an incredible job of holding on to those returns and carefully putting their toes into pools of a couple of people. And we've had very, I'd say in the last year to your question specifically, we've had really great success in finding and tapping into new consumer sets. And so we're watching our geography expand. We're watching our consumer set expand. And now because of the push into the conventional channel, I think we're finding now we're going to find another set of consumers altogether. So yes, the answer is yes, we are expanding, but we are, we're certainly doing it with modest spend and very carefully.

Great. Yeah, certainly a high-level question there. If I could sneak just one last one in, I just want to maybe talk, you know, I think this goes a little bit to sort of maybe the out-of-stocks or the inventory balance. And you guys have done a great job managing a really tight operation there. And I want to just kind of get a sense of how you're thinking about cash and your current liquidity position. Just given sort of this return to growth and just want to know, you know, how you feel given maybe a need to at times have a little bit more inventory or maybe if you're wishing to have a little bit more inventory, can you just kind of talk about liquidity, please?

Hi, JP. This is Anya. Thank you for that question. Yeah, so as you know, we put an ABL in place. It's a line of credit. We'll put it in place in Q2. We have not drawn on it, but we do have it available if we need to finance our working capital extension. So far, we have been able to manage it efficiently, really balancing our AR, AP, and inventory, perfecting our sales and operations forecasting. refining that in order to really efficiently manage our working capital. But if we need it for growth next year and we have this EBL available, should we need to draw upon it?

Yeah. And so JP, let me add a little bit more to that. So we're in a position, as you're astutely pointing out, where we're going to need to invest into additional inventory. We've been running very tight all year. Uh, and so we're probably a little bit under, uh, inventoried right now as well versus where we'd like to be. We're also a very lean team and we've got a team that's really learning how to operate at just in time, uh, type of, um, of supply chain. So I don't anticipate that we'll have. A very big inventory need as Anya was mentioning. Uh, we do have a backstop in that ABL. Uh, we don't plan to use it. Uh, it's, it's something that we put in places we mentioned previously, just as, um, a little bit of extra cushion because we could. But we're still sitting here. I mean, we've increased cash, as you know, in the last year. And we're up, what is it, Anya, almost a half million dollars or right around a half million dollars year over year. And we expect to be able to continue to generate cash. You know, next year, I mentioned we'll continue to, in fact, increase our investment into growth next year. But at the same time, we're not looking to shrink our cash balance at all. So there will be that normal fluctuation from quarter to quarter. But I would anticipate that a year from now, we're coming back to you guys and talking about how we, once again, increased our cash balances in 2025, just as we have done now in 2024. So we don't want to take, we don't anticipate taking cash to operate our business. We don't see any reason to, uh, we, we believe that we have, um, as far as we can see, we have a very solid P and L now. Um, and for us, you know, that the only reason we'd raise cash now is if we found that, uh, you know, just that incredible investment opportunity in a new product. Or if we saw an amazing acquisition that fit our business incredibly well, and it felt like, you know, it really changed the nature of our business. Maybe then we'd feel differently, but we have the cash. We need to operate this business. We're confident of that right now. And so as we go forward, we just, we anticipate we have, we're just in a great place to be able to continue doing what we're doing.

Great. Well, thank you for taking my questions and best of luck going forward.

Yeah, thank you much. Appreciate it.

Thank you all for your questions. There are no longer questions in queue, so I'll pass the conference back to the management team for any further or closing remarks.

Yeah, I'll just close. I think you guys have heard enough from me today, but I'll just close by saying that we couldn't be more excited about where we are. And hopefully you all agree, we've had a great year at Laird Superfood. We're in a very different position than we've been at any point while I've been here. At the same time, we couldn't be more excited about where we are for the balance of this year and in general for our future. We've got, as Anya pointed out previously in this call, we're in a great position for 2025, expecting to grow 20% or more next year and continuing to add to our cash balance on the balance sheet. So I'll thank you all for joining today. Look forward to getting back in front of you with another quarter that hopefully looks a lot like this one.

That will conclude today's conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.