The Vita Coco Company, Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Vitacoco Company's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. My name is Stephen. I'll be coordinating your call today. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call to your questions with instructions to be given at that time. I'd now like to hand the call over to John Mills with ICR.

Thank you and welcome to the Vitacoco Company first quarter 2024 earnings results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. With us are Mr. Mike Kerman, Executive Chairman, Martin Roper, Chief Executive Officer, and Corey Baker, Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to the company's first quarter earnings release issued earlier today. This information is available in the investor relations section of the Vitacoco Company's website at investors.thevitacococompany.com. Also, on the website, there's an accompanying presentation of our commercial and financial performance results. Certain comments made on the call include forward-looking statements, which are subject to the State Department provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs concerning future events and are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements. Please refer to today's press release and other filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made today. Also, during the call, we'll be using non-GAAP financial measures as we describe the business performance. The SEC filings, as well as the earnings press release and supplementary earnings presentation, provide reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and are available on our website as well. And with that, it is my pleasure to now turn the call over to Mike Urban, our co-founder and executive chairman.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our first quarter 2024 financial results and our commercial plans and improved performance expectations for 2024. I want to start by thanking all of our colleagues across the globe for our continued incredible performance and for their commitment to the Vida Cucu Company and to our mission of creating ethical, sustainable, better-for-you beverages that uplift our communities and do right by our planet. Our first quarter results reflect that our strategies are working and that our customer relationships are as strong as ever. Our priorities of driving growth in the coconut water category and initiatives to grow our share of the category are visible in the healthy retail scans in our major markets. In the first quarter, according to Cercana, the Vida Cucu brand grew 9% in the US, and in the UK, the Vitacoco brand grew 16%. In addition to strong branded retail growth, we're experiencing strong growth in private label coconut water volume, which validates our strategy in private label and allows us to play in the value space as well as our dominant position in premium coconut water. Our first quarter net sales were in line with our expectations. with the gap of branded shipments to scans due to the timing of promotions and cycling of opportunistic promotional activity in 2023, which Martin will comment more fully. Our priorities for 2024 remain the same as those we communicated in our year-end results. We aim for our coconut water business to grow volume in line with the category growth of mid to high single digits with the continuing transition out of a key private label oil relationship providing a headwind, offsetting expected strong coconut water growth. Our commercial initiatives around Vitacoco Multipacks, Vitacoco Farmers Organic, and Vitacoco Juice continue to perform very well, as seen in U.S. Cercana scans that we highlighted in our investor deck, which was posted to our investor relations website today. We have also invested in growing our core business in Away From Home, which is an underpenetrated channel for us. We've recently assembled a larger, more experienced food service team, which we hope will allow us to deliver greater penetration in this channel. I'm excited about the progress we're making in new areas to grow our business over the long term. We recently launched Power Lift in the New York City area and are happy to see it in our local bodegas and to be able to sample and promote it in our home market. This is back to my roots of hustling the streets, and I'm reminded of not only how hard it is, but how fun it is and how successful we have been historically with this approach. Our New York team is certainly having fun building this brand the old-fashioned way. We also very recently launched Vita Coco Treats, a delicious and refreshing beverage that is a further exploration of where our brand can go. The launch is initially exclusive to Target, and although it is too early to tell what velocity will be, we're very excited with the early scan results. While these two initiatives are not expected to be material to our 2024 results, the results to date give us confidence that our innovation approach should help us meet our long-term growth algorithm for branded net sales mid-teens percentages, building on the long-term health of the coconut water category. Our international business remains healthy, with strong performance in Europe led by the UK, offset by weaker shipments in Asia, as in-market inventory levels were drawn down. We intend to increase our investment in Europe, particularly Germany and Benelux regions, to gain share of the category there and to help expand the category growth, which is still in its early stages of development. On top of the strong business performance, we just released our third impact report, which we believe does a terrific job of laying out where we are and what we're focused on from a sustainability and social impact perspective. I'm really happy that we are maintaining our momentum And that with the creation of the Vitacoco Community Foundation announced last week, we'll be able to solicit support from our customers and suppliers to potentially further our efforts in these areas. 20 years after launching Vitacoco, coconut water remains one of the fastest growing beverage categories, both in the US and the UK. And Vitacoco is the number one brand. We are well positioned to lead and grow the category in these markets and to grow our share further. through a combination of branded and private label growth, in addition to the opportunities that we see in less developed markets that have populations that match our consumer profile. I believe that we are in a stronger position than we've ever been to accelerate our growth, and now I'll turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Martin Roper.