Suja Life, Inc.

Everyone, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Social Life Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. And please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. Now it's my pleasure to hand the conference to Anna Kate Heller from Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Good afternoon and welcome to Suze Life's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call and first as a public company. With us on the call today are Maria Stipp, Chief Executive Officer, and Jess Patterson, Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to the earnings press release that was issued earlier today. It is available on the investor relations section of Visual Life's website at ir.visuallife.com. This call is also being webcast, and a replay will be available on the site shortly after this call concludes. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements reflect the company's expectations and projections with respect to its financial results, opportunities, and its perspective of the business and industry environment, and are subject to several risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forelooking statement. Please refer to today's earnings press release and the company's most recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risk factors that could impact these statements. The company assumes no obligation to update or revise forelooking statements in the future. Additionally, during the call, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a full reconciliation of these measures to their most closely comparable gap measures in our earnings press release and our SEC filing. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Maria Stipp, Chief Executive Officer of Suja Life.

Thank you, Anna Kate, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on Suja Life's first earnings call as a public company following our successful listing on the NASDAQ in May. This is a momentous occasion for our team, and I'm honored to share this milestone with all of you. Becoming a public company was a natural next step in our evolution. The public markets are expected to provide the resources and opportunity to accelerate our innovation agenda, broaden distribution, and execute strategic investments to help further our position as a leader in Better For You beverages. On this call, I will walk you through our purpose, our powerful business model, including our competitive moat, and many other growth levers that position us well to capture the vast opportunity ahead. I will hand it over to our CFO, Jeff, to detail our strong first quarter results and initial guidance for 2026. Today, Suja Life stands at the forefront of one of the most powerful consumer transformations of our time, the shift towards functional, better-for-you beverages. The average person drinks between 60 and 70 ounces of fluid a day, and increasingly, people want those beverages to do more for them. Across categories, consumers are voting with their wallets for products that are healthier, taste delicious, deliver functional benefits, and have less sugar. They're reading labels, informing themselves on ingredients, and are willing to pay for products that align with their goals. Consumer research from 2025 shows just how clear this shift is. 80% of consumers are constantly seeking beverages that are healthier. 90% want beverages that taste delicious and offer more functional benefits. 82% want beverages with less sugar, and 77% will pay more for beverages that are better for them. As a result, consumers tell us that our brands and products are what they're looking for. 91% of consumers say Suja Life brands are healthy and nutritious, and 88% say we taste great. These consumer tailwinds are reflected in our financial results as well as consumer adoption. Our household penetration has increased from 7.6% to 11.2% from the first quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2026. Our spend per buyer has increased from $24.80 to $29 over that same time period, indicating that we are not only growing our user base, but also increasing the lifetime value of existing buyers. Our results are powered by this consumer shift in a competitive mode that enables us to turn fresh organic produce from the farm into delicious juice in as few as eight days. That moat is built on a supply chain with consistent product quality, industry-leading equipment, and purpose-driven innovation. We've rapidly grown into a category-leading natural healthy beverage platform with $326.6 million in total company net sales in 2025. From 23 to 25, we achieved a 21% compounded annual growth rate in net sales. while maintaining a healthy adjusted EBITDA margin and strong cash flow generation. That momentum has flowed directly into the first quarter of 2026, where we achieved the top end of our flash preliminary results by delivering 23% net sales growth and 66% adjusted EBITDA growth year over year. And we are just getting started. Our expanding portfolio is built strategically around three brands, Suja Organic, Vive Organic, and Slight, each designed to address distinct consumer needs and goals across the health and wellness spectrum. Suja Organic is our flagship brand and the number one cold press juice brand in retail sales, according to Spence, holding a 47% market share in a category that grew 23% in 2025. This brand spans several core platforms, including Wellness Shots, which provide concentrated, on-the-go formulation to support immunity, digestion, and detox in convenient formats. Green Juices, focused on nutrient-dense, cold-pressed vegetable blends to deliver core wellness and daily nutrition to with a full serving of greens in every bottle. Boosted juices, which include functional juices with targeted wellness benefits and fruit-forward flavor profiles designed to support specific health needs. And finally, refreshers that offer superfood-infused, approachable blends crafted for broad, mainstream retail. This brand targets people striving for holistic wellness in their everyday routines. Consumers who live full lives with jobs, kids, and activities throughout the day. They don't have much time to search for the perfect product for every health need. They're looking for solutions that check boxes, multiple boxes at once. Suja Organic delivers that. The nutritional credentials to serve progressive health consumers and the case profiles to make it a part of everyday life. Vive Organic holds the number one and number two skew positions in wellness shots, according to SPIN, for 2025. Together with Suja Organic Wellness Shots, the two brands command roughly 42% market share in a category that grew more than 28% in 2025. Vive Organic, which we acquired in 2022, pioneers a functional shot category with its doctor-crafted formulations you feel in the moment. and targets the most progressive consumers on the wellness spectrum, people hyper-focused on their health that integrate proactive wellness into their daily life and seek out products that deliver immediate, tangible results. These consumers are incredibly intentional about feeling and performing better and are at the heart of Suja Life's position in a rapidly growing intersection of beverages and supplements. It's important to understand that Vive and Suja Shots only overlap 19% of consumer households as of the first quarter of 2026. They have different core target audiences and are very complementary to one another. Combined, Suja Organic and Vive Organic make up our Suja core segment, which is driving both our growth and the growth of the categories we operate in. Life, a trademark we acquired in 2024 and relaunched in 2025, make up our emerging brand segment and is our better for you soda. Originally introduced in 1984 with real fruit juice, we reimagined Life for today's wellness-minded consumer. Life delivers the experience people expect from soda with five grams of sugar or less and just 30 to 40 calories a can. With prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics, reduced sugar, and no artificial ingredients, it's the flavor and fizz people love without the trade-off. Since relaunching in January of 2025, Life has built brand awareness and become one of the fastest-growing soda brands in the U.S. and has achieved a net promoter score higher than the Better For You Soda category leaders as of September of 2025. We believe it has the potential to capture meaningful share in the growing functional soda category. Importantly, we are focusing strictly on the natural healthy beverage space with Life. It travels on the same tracks as our shots and juices, and we are working on capturing share from the legacy products in this space, particularly kombucha drinkers, making for a more straightforward consumer conversion into our functional sodas. Together, these brands position Suja Life to meet consumers where they are and support how they want to live throughout the day. This multi-brand approach creates a powerful platform for growth, truly singular in the space we operate in, with each brand playing a distinct and complementary role while contributing to Suja Life's purpose. We are operating at the intersection of health, taste, and trust. And the opportunity in front of us is significant. The $128 billion total beverage market grew only 3% in 2025, while the natural healthy beverage segment grew more than four times faster than that at 13%. We are helping spearhead that evolution with our core brands growing 26% in total dollars in 2025. This is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior, and it positions Sue to life for continued growth and sustainable long-term success. What makes this opportunity even more compelling is the white space opportunity ahead of us. While we've grown our household penetration 31% over the last year, across our core categories, our household penetration is still in the single digits. In 2025, in cold-pressed youth, we had 8% household penetration. In Wellness Shots, it's 3% for both Suja and Vive. And Slice, our Better For You Soda, is at just 1% household penetration after only one year in market. When we surveyed consumers in 2025, 44% said they're interested in cold-pressed juice, 31% in Wellness Shots, and 46% in Better For You Soda. That gap between consumer interest and market penetration alone represents significant runway for Sue July's growth. Now let me walk you through why we are better positioned to capitalize on this opportunity than others. First, we have a deeply rooted supply chain advantage that has consistently enabled us to deliver best-in-class growth and margins as we did in the first quarter. We believe we own and operate one of the largest vertically integrated cold-pressed beverages facilities in North America. A decade of focused investment has created our competitive moat, a fully integrated system at our 270,000-square-foot Oceanside, California campus, where we currently produce 100% of our cold-pressed juices and wellness shots in-house, process approximately 1 million pounds of fresh produce weekly, and moved from farm to bottle in as few as eight days. We have decades-long relationships with a diverse network of local growers, oftentimes among their largest customers, which has provided us continuous supply and priority access to premium product at scale. Our purpose-built manufacturing facility combines proprietary cold press and high-pressure processing technology or HPP, led by operators with over 20 years of specialized experience and entirely designed around speed and volume. We have built an end-to-end mastery of the refrigerated supply chain from farm to shelf and have an established coast-to-coast cold chain distribution network that transports our products nationwide. This vertically integrated model standing ingredient sourcing through distribution, has enabled us to deliver a fill rate of over 99% in 2025, which our retail partners deeply value. It positions us as a low-cost producer and creates a reinforcing flywheel in which operational efficiencies can fund continued platform investment and accelerated distribution expansion. Our advantage does not lie in the HPP machine. Any well-capitalized competitor can buy the equipment. What is difficult for them to do is replicate the integrated system we have built over a decade to run this business. We have ownership and negotiating power across the contract related to our input, materials, and logistics, which gives us the ability to effectively manage our cost structure and relationships. Unlike co-packing models, which traditionally pass through increases in input costs, we manufacture in-house across studio core business, giving us greater control over our cost structure. This supply chain edge positions us well to meet our growing long-term demand and mitigates cost headwinds, including the many inflationary headwinds that have arisen over the years. Second, one of our core advantages is our ability to build brands that truly connect with consumers. We approach brand building with discipline, with decisions across consumer insights, clear positioning, and focused go-to-market strategy. Ample white space exists across our products and categories. Enabled by our operational excellence, we are able to allocate significant resources behind each of our brands in sales and marketing, And over the past couple of years, we've strengthened our infrastructure to launch new brands, reposition legacy ones, and scale brands across channels. Our approach is full funnel, from introducing our brand to the consumer, driving initial trial, transitioning them to repeat customers, and converting them to loyal fans. And the results of these investments are visible across our portfolio. In 2025, Suja Organic held one of the highest net promoter scores in premium juice, alongside 70% aided awareness and strong brand loyalty. In wellness shots, Suja Organic and Vive Organic lead the category in both awareness and conversion and hold the top two net promoter scores, each rising more than 10 points from 2024 to 2025. And despite being very young, twice as demonstrating the strength of our playbook, with its net promoter score jumping from 39 to 55 in just three months from June to September of 2025. In 2025, we grew household penetration 31% and dollars per GDP increased by 10% for Studio Life compared to 2024. We saw significant velocity gains at retail. displaying the power of our model and placement within the store with our Suju Core brand, seeing 22% velocity growth in 2025. Third, over the years, we have built a flexible, national, omni-channel distribution network built on deep strategic relationships with many of the country's leading retailers. In an industry where suppliers typically compete for shelf space, we have been able to design the shelf itself. Our sales are balanced across the grocery, club, natural, specialty, and mass channels. And we are in more than 37,000 stores nationwide today, with nearly 400,000 points of distribution. And that number continues to grow. We act as a strategic advisor across our retail partnerships, and for many of our largest partners, we serve as category captains. When we partner with retailers, we think beyond our own brands. We look at the category as a whole to determine how it's performing, how we can serve shoppers, and where it can grow. We help retailers drive more shoppers to our category, increase their spend per trip, and their purchase frequencies. When we engage as category leaders, we bring insights, innovation, and long-term mindsets to unlock growth and create a win-win-win for the shopper, the retailer, and for Suja Life. Based on Nielsen data over the last three years, the number of stores selling our products has increased by 15% and our TDP has grown 31% from 2022 to 2025. One of our largest growth opportunities is deepening our penetration within an existing account. The beverage aisle is evolving away from outdated legacy offerings toward premium, functional offerings like our own. And we believe there is a significant opportunity for increased shelf penetration, expanding assortments, and secondary placements in alternative locations in the store, all of which can drive incremental visibility and velocity. We also see significant white space to expand in high-growth channels like convenience, e-com, and the broader away-from-home category. Our functional benefits align strongly with on-the-go consumer behaviors, and positions us to outperform in these higher-frequency, impulse-driven retail environments. Our deep retail relationships and multi-channel expertise provide a strong foundation for continued distribution growth, and we expect that, as consumers increasingly seek out better-for-you beverages, we will continue to work with our retail partners to help ensure we are positioned exactly where they're looking. Now I'll speak about innovation, which is core to how we think about growth. Since we initially disrupted the beverage space with cold-pressed juices in 2012, we've created a proven track record of transforming white space opportunities into scaled categories that have supported our continued growth. Examples of this include pioneering the wellness shot category, establishing our refreshers and boosted juices,