Westrock Coffee Company

Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call

3/14/2023

speaker
Operator
Hello, and welcome to the West Rock Cafe Company's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Valerie. I will be your conference coordinator today. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions with instructions to be given at that time. I will now hand the call over to Clay Crumbless of ICR. Please begin.
speaker
Valerie
Thank you, and welcome to West Rock Coffee Company's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. With us are Mr. Scott Ford, co-founder and chief executive officer, and Mr. Chris Pledger, chief financial officer. By now, everyone should have access to the company's fourth quarter earnings release issued earlier today. This information is available on the investor relations section of Westrock Coffee Company's website at investors.westrockcoffee.com. Certain comments made on this call include forward-looking statements which are subject to the safe harbor 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, discussions during the call will use some non-GAAP financial measures as we describe business performance. The SEC filings, as well as the earnings press release, provide reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. And with that, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Scott Ford, our co-founder and chief executive officer.
speaker
Scott Ford
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you, Clay. I'm delighted to be here with you as we report our fourth quarter and full year 22 financial results. As noted in the headlines of our release, our year-over-year adjusted EBITDA growth was 23% for the fourth quarter and 27% for fiscal year 2022. These are fabulous results, and I am grateful to the entire Westrock Coffee team who worked tirelessly all year to deliver them. Ask anyone on the team and they can tell you 22 was a year of unbelievable accomplishments amid staggering challenges. We became a public company during a very difficult time for the public equity markets. and have been one of the best performing new issues of 22. This transaction allowed us to deliver our balance sheet and provided us access to enough capital to build out not only the first, but also the second phase of our new Conway Arkansas extract and ready to drink facility. With well over half of the capacity of this combined facility already under sales contracts with leading RTD coffee brands, we are excited to be positioned to enter a completely new era of EBITDA creation over the next two to three years. And while we plan for the future, we operate in the here and now. In 2022, we encountered a significant number of operational level challenges. We began 22 with the onset of the Omicron COVID variant, which delayed an expected economic recovery, and then faced a surge of inflation and gasoline price hikes through the summer, all of which negatively impacted our business. Our year ended with the late arrival of significant production equipment for our single serve and extract units, which created customer delivery issues and negatively impacted our costs and margins. Our team had to fight for every inch of progress in every season of what could have otherwise been a fairly impressive and reasonably easy year. Yet through all the good and the bad of 2022, our team worked tirelessly to deliver record adjusted EBITDA, up 20%, while also making significant advances on integrating and improving our internal operations, sales, and support functions. These advances, coupled with the recent arrival and onboarding of our long-delayed manufacturing equipment, have set us up for another record year in 2023, even as we continue to spend as needed to build the scaled platform necessary to monetize the value of our new Conway extracts and RTD plants. which when fully online is set to expand our EBITDA, not by percentage factors, but quite possibly by multiples. Before I turn the call over to Chris Pledger, our CFO, let me say a word about two acquisitions we made over the past few months. In November, we closed on the acquisition of Kohana Coffee, an extract and RTD business in Richmond, California. This acquisition was important for us in that it allowed us to add several new customers on our beverage solutions platform And more importantly, it allowed us to accelerate the development, production, and distribution of RTD products in cans and multi-serve bottles for key existing customers. Similarly, the acquisition of Bixby Roasting in February allowed us to expand our growing influencer-led sales channel and add two outstanding sales executives to our team. Miles Fisher and Remington Hotchkiss are going to be impact players for Westrock Coffee over time. These kind of incremental gains expand our platform and help drive growth as we build for our future. They are exactly the kind of acquisition opportunities we remain focused on today. With that, I'll turn the call over to Chris, who will walk you through our recent financial performance.
speaker
Clay
Thanks, Scott, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll begin my remarks with an overview of our fourth quarter and our full year 2022 results, and then I'll provide some commentary on our outlook for 2023. Total company net sales for the fourth quarter increased 20% year-over-year to $227.7 million, while gross profit, excluding the impact of mark-to-market adjustment, decreased $1 million to $37 million. Our sales growth was driven by a 57% increase in single-serve cup volumes and increased pricing from the pass-through of higher underlying green coffee prices per quarter. This growth was partially offset by a 6% decrease in roast and ground coffee volumes. The year-over-year decrease in gross profit was driven by higher material and production labor costs due to inflation, in-period and out-of-period inventory adjustment, and our continued efforts to absorb the 57% growth year-over-year in single-serve cut volume. Despite these headwinds, our consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was 17.5 million, an increase of approximately 23% compared to the fourth quarter of 2021, driven by reductions in SG&A primarily related to personnel cost savings. For the full year 2022, net sales were $867.9 million, while gross profit, excluding the impact of mark-to-market adjustments, was $156.3 million, an increase of 10% compared to full year 2021. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA for 2022 grew 27% to $60.1 million, coming in at the low end of our guided range. As we outlined in our third quarter call, our 2022 financial results were impacted by three main factors. First, the Omicron COVID variant in the first quarter, followed by rapidly rising inflation through the middle part of the year, had a significant negative impact on U.S. consumer spending. This impacted our business in the form of lower product sales in our away-from-home channels, particularly in restaurants and convenience stores, and inflation impacted labor costs, freight, and material costs across all of our products. Second, it took longer and cost more in terms of equipment, labor and materials to absorb the 50% year over year growth in our single serve cup orders. As Scott mentioned, we have put additional manufacturing equipment into service in the first quarter of 2023, which is leveling out these service issues. And we have additional equipment coming online in the second quarter, which will free up additional capacity. As we continue to grow our single serve platform, we feel very good about our ability to more efficiently monetize these increased product volumes. Finally, our team has performed really well in 2022, staying disciplined and focusing on the levers we have to pull in order to respond to these significant macroeconomic and operational challenges. On a segment basis, our beverage solution segment contributed 192.6 million in net sales for the fourth quarter of 2022, which represents year-over-year growth of 28%. Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2022 with 15.2 million, increasing 31% compared to the prior year fourth quarter. For the full year, our beverage solution segment generated 54 million adjusted , a 30% increase over 2021, driven by 50% growth in our single serve cup volumes and 8% growth in our flavors, extracts, and ingredients products, which were partially offset by a 7% decrease in roast and ground coffee volumes. As we've said before, an important part of our growth algorithm is the mix shift over time into our higher margin single serve and flavors, extracts, and ingredient products. We continue to see that shift in customer demand, and our 2022 results validate this continuing trend. Turning towards our sustainable sourcing and traceability segment, or SF&T, sales net of intersegment revenues were 35.1 million during the fourth quarter of 2022, a decrease of 12% compared to the fourth quarter of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA was 2.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to 2.7 million in the prior year fourth quarter. The decrease is primarily attributable to decreased volumes in the quarter. For the full year, our SS&T segment contributed sales net of intersegment revenues of 182.6 million and adjusted EBITDA of 6.1 million, growing 24% and 7% respectively compared to 2021. These increases are driven by a higher average sales price per pound for green coffee, which grew 35% year over year, as sales volume decreased approximately 9% from 2021 levels. The increase in average sales price per pound is directly correlated to global commodity prices. During the year, the volume of green coffee from our SSP segment that is utilized by our beverage solution segment grew 173%, which is important in that it keeps margin within the system and it expands the coverage of our traceable and transparent supply chains. With respect to our capital expenditures, during the fourth quarter, we incurred approximately 40 million of CapEx, 30 million of which was growth capital related to our extract and RTD facility in Conway, Arkansas. These expenditures primarily consisted of infrastructure spending and equipment deposits for our glass and can lines. In addition, we encourage 5 million of growth CapEx tied to the continued single serve capacity expansion in our Little Rock, Arkansas facility. This single serve CapEx is already having a benefit in 2023 as new machines are allowing us to increase production to align with customer demand and to improve the overall efficiency of our single serve cup operation. On a project basis, we continue to anticipate that the total CapEx cost of phases one and two of our Conway Extract and RTD facility will be 275 million, and that once it's fully online, we will generate approximately 100 million in EBITDA per year. As Scott mentioned, this project remains on time and on budget, and we look forward to the first product being produced in Conway in the first quarter of 2024. At quarter end, we had approximately 192 million of consolidated unrestricted cash in undrawn revolving credit commitments. Our consolidated net leverage ratio at December 31st was 2.9 times based on fourth quarter annualized adjusted EBITDA. We believe we have ample access to liquidity to achieve our near-term growth target and capital expenditure needs. As we look ahead to 2023, we expected adjusted EBITDA to grow between 10% and 25%, which translates to a range of 66 to 75 million in adjusted EBITDA. This guidance represents our current expectations regarding the performance of the business However, actual results may differ materially from these estimates. We expect our 2023 financial performance to be driven by several significant new customer and product wins that will come online in 2023. Growth in our extract volume as our expansion project in Concord, North Carolina is complete in May, and we benefit from the volume growth that expansion allows. Growth in single serve cup volumes as we get the full year benefit of the increased single serve volume we experienced in the second half of 2022. Growth in RTD can fail as we continue to scale our operations in Richmond, California, and operational improvements we are putting in place to more efficiently monetize all of these opportunities. We will continue to closely manage costs in our existing business while we continue to invest in the equipment and, more importantly, in the team that will deliver the growth to come from our Conway extract and RTD facility in 2024. With that, I'll hand the call back over to the operator for questions.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star 11 on your phone. Again, to ask a question, please press star 11. One moment, please. Our first question comes from the line of Todd Brooks of Benchmark. Your line is open.
speaker
Todd Brooks of Benchmark
Hey, thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. A couple questions for you. One, just looping back to the equipment delay that you talked about later in Q4 that's kind of slid into Q1, is there any way to size the impact so that we can think about what type of drag that was on Q4 results?
speaker
Scott Ford
Yeah. This is Scott. Hey, Todd. Well, frankly, you would get a debate. The reality is those are the main line that was late, was due in October, and is now coming in in May. It was coming out of Europe where everybody was kind of slow to get back going. we were able to fill part of that gap by going to Israel and getting a couple of machines that could alleviate, I would say, most of the burden of being caught short. And if you look at the aggregate picture, absent that, I think it probably cost us a few million bucks. There were people that would say, well, on a net-net basis, because orders came in in this sequence instead of that one, it might not have cost us quite that much. I think it probably cost us a few million dollars in EBITDA and it was a major pain in the neck with our customers. So it was a really nasty spell. I'd say the good news that came out of that is when we look at all of the things that are going on in Conway, we changed all of our program management and we now put every call, every vendor on the phone every week and we are doing site visits to actually see it. Don't tell me that it's being done. we're going to send somebody our head of engineering's in Europe for the next three weeks right now of walking through and laying eyes on exactly the machine that's coming our way. And we've changed some of the payment terms so that we kind of get some of that level back out. So there's a multitude of factors there. Almost all of them are bad and almost all of them are now behind.
speaker
Todd Brooks of Benchmark
Great. Thanks Scott. And then I think what do you, when you were talking about 50% of the capacity, under contract at Conway, you're now talking about the blended capacity between phase one and phase two, correct? So you've actually filled some more of that incremental capacity with the two new phases during the course of this quarter?
speaker
Scott Ford
Yeah, so you're right. We are referencing not only phase one, but phase two. And the thing that I would say that is most important to take away from the Conway expansion is that as we accelerated liquid extract into that facility, which we used to do in North Carolina, and we were playing around with when and if to bring that into Conway. Bringing liquid extract in at the scale we are bringing it in will support our customers' other bottling facilities where they desperately need help. It will help support our operations on the West Coast and the East Coast, and it is engendering a number of conversations about products, SKUs, and customer relationships that quite frankly were never on our list of I would say benefits that came out of accelerating the liquid extract phase. So 50% is a rough number for the whole combined series of packaging lines that are going in, but the acceleration of the extract manufacturing is what is really starting to change the conversation with our customers The need for these, it's really hard to explain the depth of the need that is in the market for these products right now.
speaker
Todd Brooks of Benchmark
That's great. Thanks, Scott. One more for Chris, and then I'll hop back in queue. Chris, when you look at the forward guidance for EBITDA growth of 10% to 25%, as you're looking at variables that drive you to one end of that spectrum or the other, can you highlight two or three that would unlock where you land in that guidance range? Thank you.
speaker
Clay
yeah i think i think it's a couple of things i think as we looked at it this year we weren't going to make any predictions about what what was going to happen with inflation we just took the year as it is um and just assumed that it would continue the way that it is so you know bad things could happen and it could continue to impact customer customer demand um and that would negatively impact our ability to hit the higher end of that range that would put you to the lower end of the range the other thing that i'm excited about this year is that we've got we've got a number of new customer and new product wins and the lion's share of those wins are in our single serve and our extracts side of the business which we talked about our growth algorithm and being able to move to the higher margin part of the business being able to accelerate that into 2023 recognizing that that's going to be a huge part of the story in 2024 is a huge plus and I guess tailwind for the business So being able to deliver those customers, we don't always control exactly the timing of when those customer contracts will come online, but having those customers come online when we expect them to with the volume that we expect to have them is something that would plus or minus provide some sort of benefit to us being towards the higher range of the guidance. Okay, great. Thanks to you both.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. Again, to ask a question, please press star 1-1. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Serene Bora of Telsey Group. Your line is open.
speaker
Serene Bora
Hi. Good afternoon, guys. You know, just staying on the guidance, the prior question on the guidance, how do you, you know, the beverage solution is the main segment over here, it seems like. you know, sales were stronger in the fourth quarter. It seems like new customers are onboarding, you know, as you look out at 23. So help us understand if you can provide any sales outlook or a range or color on how we should think about sales in 23, especially, you know, beverage solutions versus SSNT. It seems like SSNT is primarily impacted by lower coffee prices, but it's just a forward future business versus
speaker
Clay
core business which is beverage solutions so can you help us understand uh any color on the sales uh for 23 like how we should think between the segments thank you we thought we talked a lot about this and whether or not it was whether or not it was really valuable to put uh to put sales guidance out um in addition to e-stock guidance and recognize that we had done that as part of the d-spac transaction but when you look at we talked about this on on prior calls, and I know we've had these conversations around the impact of the commodity price on our sales. Because we don't know what that's going to be, it's hard to put guidance on where the C price is. If you think about last year, we sort of planned for the C price to be around 220 for the year. And if you look at where it is now, it'd be below that as you embark into 2023. But the reality is that we don't know where that's going to stay for the year, whether it's going to go up or down. And given the pass-through nature of coffee in our net sales, it's something that we decided not to provide guidance on. I think when you see the growth in the customers and the new products, net sales is clearly going to go up from where it is now, but a lower commodity price is going to offset the sales, which is why we continue to focus everybody on our EBITDA generation.
speaker
Serene Bora
That's cool. And, you know, I just have a quick follow-up on the Conway. It seems like demand trends for the Conway facility are very strong. Can you provide any color on, you know, customer profile that's getting attracted or type of product, like, you know, cans, as well as any milestones, like, you know, we should track for the year, saying equipment delays or talent acquisitions. Like, how are you planning the rollout till, like, 24th? for the Conway facility. Any milestones you can share with your monitor? Thank you.
speaker
Scott Ford
Yeah, all good questions. Sounds like you've been sitting in on our daily meetings on the Conway project. So the team has come together very nicely. We probably have a dozen people that are leading experts in their field from an engineering perspective, from a plant general manager perspective, from a quality insurance perspective. from a financial expert that had multiple plants reporting up to her. We have put together a – really, it's impressive. And we just took our board through it the other day, and we've got a very seasoned – I think we have a Fortune 500 board. And they were absolutely blown away with the talent and the individual backgrounds of the people that we have brought on to run this cognitive project. So we're feeling super about the people. You then get down to being on time, on budget. On time, we are on time. We're actually slightly ahead, maybe up to 30 to 60 days on some of the first phases of the general contracting work. Then you get down to on budget. On budget, we are so far actually slightly ahead of budget. So we won't keep those advantages, but we're out of the blocks and around the first lap in good positions. We've got a good crew. We're on time. We're on budget. And then on the other side of it is the customer reaction to being willing to put in pieces of equipment. This is a little bit why you go back to Todd's question a moment ago. Well, how are you counting phase one and phase two? Well, they are morphing because as customers come in and say, hold on, I need you to put in this piece of kind of equipment. I need you to put in a small can line. I need you to put in a large can line. I need you to put in a glass bottle, and I need a multi-serve bottle with the following characteristics versus one with another set of characteristics. As we've been working with our customers, and these are the major coffee brands in the world, both at the startup level, whether you're a West Coast startup phenomenon, an influencer-led brand, or you're one of the staple coffee brands in the country, the chances are very likely you're going to end up being a customer of this facility. And we are doing, not to steal too many algebraic alliterations, but we are doing the algebra of what takes care of the most customers to maximize our EBITDA in that facility and meet their needs so that we remain their primary first solution. And that's not an untricky, that is a fairly tricky proposition, but we are making great progress on it. Salesforce is going back out here in the next month with all new sales literature, all new capacities, and frankly, if half to two-thirds of the people that tell us what they want actually come through and go all the way through the contracting, we're oversold by a large amount. So we are over-indexed on demand for any of our capacity, and several of the lines are already 100% full.
speaker
Serene Bora
That's great. Thank you so much. I'll pass it on to others.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. One moment, please. Our next question comes from the line of Ben Benvenu of Stevens. Your line is open.
speaker
Ben Benvenu
Hey, guys. Jim Solera on for Ben. I wanted to ask on the competitive landscape and how that looks today. Is the launch of the Conway facility, and as you guys ramp up, kind of making waves, or is it not going noticed by your competitors?
speaker
Scott Ford
No, everybody in the industry knows about it. It's a fairly small industry. People smaller than us are trying to figure out how they can actually do handoffs up to the scale impact that we bring to their product line. People that compete with us are ratcheting down and fighting harder, and people that are bigger than us are absolutely, they seem to be absolutely enthralled by what we've done and how that fits in their view of the world long term. All of that's going on. Okay, great.
speaker
Ben Benvenu
And maybe a follow-up on the last question. Overall kind of macro factors, I mean, you guys have seen really strong demand thus far. Is there any risk that if the economy worsens or, you know, the consumer ends up in a tougher position, that some of that demand rolls off?
speaker
Scott Ford
Yeah, sure. There is, obviously. A lot of our products are not particularly, you know, that sensitive to macroeconomics, but, you know, a lot of, you know, like hot black coffee at C stations and C stores, it is. And so when you go back to Chris's point about where are we in the 10 to 25% uh growth in evita where are where do we land a lot of it depends on kind of the assumption you make around that because we're assuming that it what is today is all through the year and that's a little bit of a break from where we were last year when we were trying to guess when people were coming back to the office when covid was going to abate and people were going to start traveling again we actually built some guesses like that into our numbers this year we said we know we don't know Just build it, if they're here today and buying that volume, carry it forward, add the new wins, and just build it that way, and don't guess. So that's how we did it, but Jim, you come all the way back around to, if we're half right on this, we're not coming back to the equity market to get any more money from this market anytime in the foreseeable future, because if we can get to these kinds of EBITDA numbers Our ability to carry the financing through the expanded credit facilities that Chris and his team have brought in. All this, hey, now that you've done an offering, you've got to come back and do another offering and put out a bunch of stock. It is not likely to happen if we get anywhere close to these numbers. And so that's kind of the other side of the loop, which our board is a shareholder-owning board, and they have zero interest in selling equity anywhere near these prices. And so we went out and structured the whole D-SPAC and credit arrangement where if we can hit numbers like what Chris has laid out in our guidance, we never have to go back to the equity one. And so that's, you can pretty well assure us the largest single shareholder. I'm really hard bent on that one. And I've got everybody's attention around here on a daily basis to deliver against that.
speaker
Ben Benvenu
Great. And then maybe one last question if I can sneak in for Chris. Just kind of segueing off that answer, can you maybe just talk a little bit about your capital position today and kind of where the balance sheet positions you to check off all the boxes in your growth plans?
speaker
Clay
Yeah, so, I mean, as we finished the year, we had $17 million in cash, and we had a completely undrawn $175 million revolver. You saw the announcement earlier in the first quarter where we added the $50 million of incremental revenue. borrowing capacity to our delays in the form of a delayed draw term loan, which gives us additional access to capital. And then we're looking at ways that you can maximize working capital in order to be able to make sure that we have all the liquidity we need in order to execute. So we feel really good about where we are. I mean, like Scott said, we plan the whole transaction for building out Conway. And as long as we continue to stay disciplined, we continue to deliver, we have no concerns about being able to do that. Great. Thanks, guys. I'll pass it on.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. One moment, please. We do have a follow-up question from Todd Brooks of Benchmark. Your line is open.
speaker
Todd Brooks of Benchmark
Hey, thanks for giving me a couple follow-up questions here. First, Scott, if you, and this is my ignorance on the coffee market, but if you could talk about Bixby and what these influencer brands mean and what their skill set and capability really unlocks for WestRock as you pulled that operation in?
speaker
Scott Ford
Sure. So it's a reasonably small business as it sits today, but they probably have the leading influencer brand market position on the West Coast. And as you go through, there was a great article, and I'm sorry, Todd, I'll see if I can find it and send it back around to you, but there was a great article about it used to be that people would say, I have a product idea. Now I have a method of creating a brand. And now I'm going to spend money to create product awareness and brand affinity with the consumer. And now I'm going to actually pay people to put it on the shelf. That entire retail model has been turned upside down by the digital revolution. So you now have people that have already built brands. They might be wrestlers or boxers or makeup artists or guitarists. I don't know. But they built a brand where they have literally tens of millions of followers who want to be associated with these people, these influencers. So what Miles Fisher and Remington Hotchkiss had done, which is a lot like what Elizabeth Bevolflin here in our group had started, a small group that kind of minds this vein, they had actually built a kitchen or a roasting facility in California where these influencers can come in and actually start to try products, create products, And then we've brought in the scaled manufacturing and purchasing power behind it so that these people can scale up really quickly. And we're talking about getting into, as an illustration, all of the Walmarts, all of the Targets. These are the kind of brands that are going in there, and they go from zero to full product array in less than nine months. And so this is really a sales force and a selling site acquisition for us. We're really high on these two guys and their small team. They now work on Elizabeth's team. And we already had probably the leading influencer brand coffee launch customer already in our stable. So putting those together and having them, she's actually out there on the West Coast right now, focused on developing the full strategy to deliver not only roasting ground products, single serve products, but you're going to see a lot of these folks have like have a mass following that will get them in the ready to drink space. So pretty exciting just from a sales perspective.
speaker
Todd Brooks of Benchmark
Okay. Thanks Scott. And then Chris, one follow up for you and maybe not quantifying the exact gross margin percentages in a product segment, but if you look at a May delivery of that key piece of equipment in the single serve side, if you were looking at maybe first half versus second half 23, gross margins for single-serve, just what type of basis point lift would you expect to see between the two halves once you're fully equipped to really ramp into this new business that you brought on? Thanks.
speaker
Clay
It should be somewhat significant. I think what happens when you have the necessary equipment to meet the volume that you're trying to produce and the throughput that you have, you're able to really look at your production from a portfolio basis. And so not only having the machines, but having the machines allows you to be able to do the preventative maintenance. It allows you to be able to pick and choose what you're going to turn on when in order to be able to maximize the throughput that you need. And so it's not just about volume. It's also about being able to produce more efficiently and with less waste. And so we're excited about a couple of the machines that Scott mentioned, you know, that came in in the first quarter. We've got the other machinery coming in in the second quarter. And what that really does is it gives us the flexibility and the comfort to be able to execute on the single surf cut volume in a more stable manner. And when you do that, there are benefits throughout the entire platform to being able to do that.
speaker
Todd Brooks of Benchmark
Oh, if I was kind of drawing a glide path for it, we'd see Meaningful improvement in the second half, but probably annualized that segment of resolutions getting to where you want in 24. Correct.
speaker
Clay
I think it'll be a little small improvement in the first half. I think you'll see bigger improvement in the second half.
speaker
Todd Brooks of Benchmark
Perfect. Thank you both.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions this time. Let's turn the call back over to Scott Ford, CEO, for any closing remarks.
speaker
Scott Ford
Well, thank you all for joining us. It has been in 2022. And we really are focused right now on making sure that the issues that we are dealing with from getting new equipment in the single serve and getting that to full scale is effectively and timely delivered. We are also working through a series of system conversions that we went through at the beginning of the year in North Carolina and in the traditional S&D business. We have Basically caught up with all of those issues coming out of this the other side of the system conversion we have New extract facilities that are turning on in the first half of the year this year in North Carolina That is kind of the bridge that creates the fiscal year 23 outlook and then we have Conway on time to start up in the first quarter of 24 and You know, we are simply focused on trying to put several years together in a row of growth rates like the one that you've just experienced here. This one was a little harder to make than we would have thought. I'm sure there will be new things in 2023, but the team has really started to gel. We're only doing some small acquisitions. We're not, you know, we've had people do this financing, do this big deal, do this big deal, and we're like, look, we are focusing, we are simplifying, and we are executing. And that is what 2022, and I will pause and give Jeff Fox five cents for creating that phrase because I did steal it. But that is really the sum total of what we're working on in 2023. Thank you for being with us today, and I hope you have a great evening. Thank you. Thank you.
speaker
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. You may all disconnect. Have a great day.
Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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