1/30/2025

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Flow Beverage Corp's Fiscal Q4 2024 and Operational Update Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded on January 30, 2025. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for research analysts to queue up for questions. For those participating by webcast, You may enter your questions you have for management anytime. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events to differ materially from current expectations and may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. The forward-looking statements are based upon and include the company's current internal estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, targets, guidance, or other statements that are not statements of fact. Any statements contained herein or discussed during today's session that are not statements of historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. A number of factors could cause actual events, performance, or results to differ materially, from what is projected in the forward-looking statements. A more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing the company appear in the company's Annual Information Form, dated January 29, 2025, and the company's management discussion and analysis for the year ended October 31, 2024, which are available under the company's profile on CEDAR+. You are cautioned not to place any reliance on these forward-looking statements. which only speak to the date of this presentation. The company disclaims any intention or obligation except to the extent required by law to update or revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events or for any reason. Any forward-looking statements contained herein or discussed during today's session is expressly qualified in its entirety by the above cautionary statement. I will now turn the call over to Nicholas Reichenbach, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flow, Please go ahead, Nicholas.

speaker
Nicholas Reichenbach
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. I'm joined today by Trent McDonald, Flow's Chief Financial Officer and EVP of Operations. On today's call, we're going to start with an operational update, review Flow's transformation over the last two years. I will then spend some time reviewing our freshly innovative Flow brand and our strategic priorities. Then I'll pass the call over to Trent. who will take you through a detailed review of Q4 results and then share an update on our path to profitability and financial targets. After transfer marks, we'll open the call to questions from our analysts, and then we'll be taking questions from our investors that have joined our webcast. Just type your questions in, and we'll do our best to answer them all. Flo's transformation truly began in November 2022. At the time, we had $2.3 million in cash and operating expenses that greatly exceeded our gross profit. Six months prior, I came back as Chief Executive Officer at Flo. Trent came in as well as Chief Financial Officer, and we developed a plan to radically transform Flo in order to achieve long-term and sustainable profits. Our most significant steps have included selling our Virginia facility, recapitalizing our balance sheet, restructuring our corporate, IT, and financial reporting functions. We exited unprofitable retail partnerships. We outsourced logistics, distribution, and marketing functions. We consolidated production of flow and our co-packing partners to our Aurora production facility. We significantly increased the capacity of Aurora's facility and added the ability to produce alcoholic beverages. And finally, we signed over $267 million worth of co-packing contracts It took about five quarters to begin seeing our financial benefits from our operational transformation and restructuring. Beginning in Q2 2024, we started to show significant improvements in our gross margin, which has consistently been between 20 and up to 33%. We still think that there's much more we can achieve with higher margins as we continue to scale. Our adjusted EBITDA has also improved by a total of $19 million over the last three quarters compared to fiscal 2023. Again, there is still significant opportunity for us to improve here, of which we'll describe in more detail in a couple of minutes. As part of our transformation, we focused our product lineup to include our four best-selling flavors, and we exited vitamin-infused water. Including our newly launched Flow sparkling mineral water, we now have 11 SKUs. For those joining us today by webcast, our SKU assortment is on the screen. You can see our newly branded new packaging has a clean, refreshed look and feel. Our brand innovation was designed in the premium water consumer in mind. specifically those with active lifestyles. If you look closely at our SKU assortment, you may notice a new product, FLOW sparkling mineral water in a 750 ml glass bottle. We are launching this new premium bottle in the second half of 2025, focused first on our strategic food service partners and premium grocery stores across North America. An important strategic shift we have made recently is highlighting our mineral and electrolytes in flow branded water. We have a unique competitive advantage with our water in both Canada and the United States as it's sourced from a naturally occurring mineral spring. The slides on the screen highlight our functional value proposition to our consumer. What we haven't included on this slide, but we do include in our presentations to our new partners, is FLOW's superior mineral count and hydration levels compared to the other premium waters sold in North America. For example, our mineral count is 319 milligrams per liter, exceeds Fiji, Avion, Liquidex, and Smartwater, and our electrolyte content is up to three times those of the premium water category. These attributes make up the vast majority of why consumers buy premium water. Additionally, our pH at 8.1 is also higher than the four same brands. pH is important to our consumer because of its alkalinity that provides superior hydration compared to purified water. Flo has maintained leadership in our ESG, which is a very important value proposition to our organization and our consumers. In 2024, we renewed our B Corp certification, publishing one of the highest ESG rating of all beverages companies in the world. B Corp is a rigorous test for all aspects of ESG, and the results are independently audited. Some more recent milestones of FLOW include adding purchase orders and listings in agreement with our hospitality, grocery, and national food channels partners for FLOW's new sparkling mineral water. We are very pleased to report that Whole Foods Global will be listing our latest innovation, and they have been a phenomenal partner for the last 10 years. The Flo brand is also making good progress in getting listings in conventional food aisles in some of Canada's leading grocery chains like Loblaws. Moving to conventional aisle is a pretty important move for us as we have a significant improvement in our velocity of sales where consumers can now choose Flo against the mainstream water brands. In the last few months, We've expanded two co-packing agreements and we signed a new co-packing agreement as well. Today, our take or pay manufacturing agreements total 267 million. And the best part of these agreements are, the best part is these agreements are as profitable as the flow branded margin.

speaker
Investor Relations
Flow Beverage Corp Investor Relations

Sequentially to year end, we have,

speaker
Nicholas Reichenbach
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

the pleasure of welcoming Joe Memrant to our board of directors. Joe is an accomplished brand builder entrepreneur who has been instrumental in developing beloved brands like Club Monaco and Joe Fresh. Most recently, we announced the closing of the first tranche of our private placement of convertible debentures. This private placement is still ongoing and we expect to close in February. The use of these proceeds will for this fresh capital injection is to fund our working capital as we scale our production to meet our co-packing demand as well as our continued growth in the flow-branded products. Before I pass the call to Trent, I'll review our strategic growth priorities over the coming year. We expect a return to flow-branded growth in Q1 2025. We have seen a decline in the flow brand over the period of our transformation as we exited unprofitable channels and partnerships. In fiscal 2025, most of the impact is behind us, and we see the benefit of gradually moving to conventional growth routes, initiating sales of flow sparkling, and continuing to build the success of our profitable channels and partners. Our fourth production line took some time to get up to full capacity, especially with producing a new product like alcohol beverages, which has been a new process for us to learn. We added some experienced talent to our production team, and we are ready to continue to scale. We funded line five and six and look forward to commissioning those expansions in the coming months. Most of you have seen from our press release this morning that we are expecting to earn an adjusted EBITDA between six and 11 million in this fiscal period 2025. Achieving profitability is expected to be gradual over the course of the year and should accelerate with the commissioning of line five and six in the second half of 2025. We feel these targets are achievable given our operating model that we've implemented over the last couple years. Of course, there are some risks in the forecast. Please refer to our press release in MDNA for greater details in the assumption and the underlying forecast. This concludes my prepared remarks. I'll now pass it over to Trent.

speaker
Investor Relations
Flow Beverage Corp Investor Relations

Thank you, Nicholas. Very much appreciate it.

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

jump into our q4 results consolidated net revenue increased 22 percent in q4 2024 which was driven by a 115 percent increase in copac revenue of course offset by an 11 percent decrease in flow brand never flow brand revenue as we've spoken about several times now flow brand is grow is actually growing in profitable channels such as natural fruit and retail However, Q4 was impacted on a comparative basis by our decision to exit certain channels and partnerships that were simply not profitable. In Q4, gross margin increased to 21% from 9% in Q4 2023. This increase reflects many initiatives that we undertook as part of our operational transformation, such as the consolidation of production into our Aurora production facility, the profitability of our co-pack business and focus on higher profitability channels for the Flo brand. Given Flo's success in signing over $267 million of co-packing take-or-pay manufacturing agreements and the growth Flo has been experiencing for our brand, it was absolutely necessary to expand our operating capacity. As such, throughout Q2 to Q4 of fiscal year 2024, FLOW added a fourth line. It added alcohol production capabilities and a second complete set of processing equipment, including batching and sterilization, which provided us needed flexibility in how we use our four lines. This meant that over a very short timeframe, FLOW went from three lines operating at low capacity utilization to four lines requiring us to run at 100 percent capacity utilization to meet our production demand. In doing so, we encountered several challenges throughout Q3 and well into Q4, leading to significant downtime and an inability to achieve our production goals. As a result, we weren't able to produce as much as we would have liked for our COPAC partners, and we weren't able to meet all of the demand for our flow brand customers. This impacted both our net revenue and gross margins. In Q4 and throughout Q1 FY25, we've been tremendously focused on production improvement. We brought in several subject matter experts, hired leaders rooted in lean manufacturing practices, and redesigned and implemented standard operating procedures that align with our new production requirements. Today, we believe we are well positioned to accelerate growth in our COPAC operation, and to ensure we have the inventory to meet the growing demand for Flo branded products. Even with these production challenges, there have been material improvements as a result of our restructuring efforts. As we've spoken about in past, our restructuring took several quarters and most notably the restructuring costs and related negative results of operations can be seen in our Q3 and Q4 of fiscal year 2023 and then again in Q1 of fiscal year 2024. As such, the most recent three quarters of fiscal year 2024, those being Q2, Q3, and recently Q4, represent a post-restructuring operating environment, even though we are still clearly focused on improvements in our production plant. Throughout the past three quarters, in total, we've had 27.2% gross margins, versus 11.5% in the same period last year. And this is despite the challenges in production. So it still represents a very vast improvement. When you really see the improvements coming from our restructuring, where you really see the improvements coming from our restructuring is in our selling general and administrative expenses plus salary. These three combined over the past three quarters were $19.9 million. If you compare that to the fiscal year 2022, not 2023, but 2022, which was the last full operating year before we began our comprehensive restructuring efforts, we are down $11.6 million over those three quarters. That year, 2022, the company spent $31.5 million on SG&A and salaries over its final three quarters, representing 89.4% of net revenue over that time versus our most recent three quarters where these expenses represented 52.9%. The fiscal 2022 operating model, of course, was completely unsustainable and led to the complete restructuring efforts that we continue to talk about. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $2.6 million in the quarter. compared to a $10.5 million loss in Q4 2023. That's a $7.9 million improvement year over year. Even still, it wasn't where we want it to be. That said, our adjusted EBITDA was negative $8.1 million over the final three quarters of fiscal 2024 in total. That compares to negative $24 million over the final three quarters of fiscal 2022. Again, what we call the base year before our restructuring. With all of the improvements in SG&A, our focus on production improvement and the growth in both flow branded products and co-packing revenues, we are now introducing the following financial targets for fiscal 2022, as mentioned by Nicholas earlier. Net revenue between $72 and $82 million. for the whole year, gross margin between 38 and 48%, and adjusted EBITDA positive between $6 and $11 million. These financial targets reflect a new era for flow in our post-restructuring world. In Q1 2025, we expect the flow brand to again close the gap to prior year with Q1 of fiscal being the final quarter of selling into the channels and partnerships we exited shortly thereafter. With our growth in natural grocery and other channels, including what Nicholas mentioned earlier, where we're getting more traction in the conventional grocery aisles, we expect Q2 to see positive growth in flow brand. Our co-pack business is expected to realize even higher growth, especially with lines 5 and 6, as previously announced, coming online in the coming months. Lines 5 and 6 are already fully funded so we're just in execution mode to bring them up to full capacity and they will be operating at full capacity upon being put into place and into production. We expect a step change improvement to gross margin as we increase utilization leading to lower fully absorbed cost per unit of production. And again, we have approached pricing of flow brand products and COPAC production with similar discipline, which should continue to result in improved profitability. With our forecast increase to gross profit, we expect significant operating leverage over our much leaner overhead structure. Now, let's talk about our valuation, which we tend to always talk about on these calls. Flow is right now trading at zero point times forward revenue, which compares to our publicly traded beverage peers trading at a four times revenue on a weighted average basis. Throughout the next year, we believe that our return to growth, both of the Flow brand and on a consolidated basis, which we've already returned to growth on, And a proven transition to profitability should help re-rate our stock to get closer to our peer group. That said, the burden is on us to demonstrate our ability to consistently deliver on the expected results one quarter at a time. In the meantime, we do appreciate all of your support. And with that, operator, please open the line for questions.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press the star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press the star followed by the number two. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press the star one. Your first question comes from the line of Martin Landry with Stipple. Please go ahead.

speaker
Martin Landry
Analyst, Stipple

Good morning, Martin. Hi, good morning, Trent. Good morning, Nick. Good to hear your voices. So my first question would be on your guidance. You know, it would result in a significant turnaround in revenue growth and profitability. So I understand it sounds like there's going to be an inflection a little later this year when Line 5 and 6 will be implemented. So what does H1 look like? Is there anything you can tell us? Are you right now producing at 100% capacity and the big inflection is just in the second half? It's not clear for me, so just maybe a little bit more color on H1 would be great.

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

Absolutely. Absolutely, Maren. And good insight there. Yes, the second half is definitely going to have an inflection point for sure, and we're going to clearly be more profitable in the second half as a result of being able to produce more within the production environment without obviously raising a lot of our fixed costs, so there's going to be better absorption. But that said, we in Q3 and then specifically Q4, we were not running anywhere near the capacity that we had expected. Forget 100% capacity. we weren't running anywhere close to what we had expected. And we were very late in getting that production up and running. When I say production, like the processing equipment that we had so vitally needed. The line was up, but the processing equipment wasn't. So what we're looking at for Q1 and into Q2 is really the results of that focus that we've been, you know, really building towards better capacity utilization, much better efficiency within that production environment on four lines. And so given that we didn't get to where we needed to be in Q4, and that resulted in a lot of issues with regards to our ability to fulfill our obligations under COPAC, but specifically with Flow Branded products, to get them out the door and recognize those sales. Q1 and Q2 are going to be very, very, very much improved. And so our expectation is that you're going to see much higher margins, especially in Q2 because Q1, we've been working on it throughout Q1, but in Q2, we're getting a lot closer for Q2. So you're going to see better, better margins and improved EBITDA. And we have ourselves getting there on a positive basis in Q2. So we think we can get to a decent positive EBITDA in Q2, but again, to your point, second half will be even better again.

speaker
Nicholas Reichenbach
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, and Martin, also looking at it very, you know, kind of a simple look at it, is that in Q1, November, we turned on line four, which gave us 25% more volume and capacity at the facility, and all of our contract revenue has been booked now for the next three years. And those are all 100% utilization on line four, but also moving into 100% utilization on line five and six, which will increase the plant's capacity again by 33%.

speaker
Investor Relations
Flow Beverage Corp Investor Relations

Okay, that's helpful.

speaker
Martin Landry
Analyst, Stipple

And I'd like to just touch a little bit on on what you would expect in terms of free cash flow. There's, you know, your debt level have increased a lot in Q4 and will continue to increase with the new financing. That's going to probably translate into a higher interest burden. So, you know, when we take your adjusted bid guidance of $6 to $11 million, How does that convert into free cash flow post your interest payments? Are you going to be in the positive territory or perhaps break even or negative for the full year?

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

No, we're going to continue to be in negative operational cash flow after interest and debt servicing for the first half of the year. There's no doubt about that. But our cash deficit has diminished quite a bit operationally over the last few quarters. And so we're definitely moving in the right direction. But we really believe that by sometime near the end of Q3, we will in fact be fully cash flow positive. And that's when we start filling in that. that working capital deficit that we created for ourselves over time. So there's light at the end of this tunnel and we can see it. And so to your point, we are bridging and we're looking at doing different things and we're very creative and we have a lot of support from insiders, stakeholders, our secured lender and others. So we've been able to do this. And so we continue to do it and we expect that we're going to and we'll get the cash flow positive in the, like I said, near the end of Q3.

speaker
Investor Relations
Flow Beverage Corp Investor Relations

Okay, that's helpful. Best of luck. Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Sean McCown with Roth. Please go ahead.

speaker
Sean McCown
Analyst, Roth

Morning, Sean. Thank you. Good morning, guys. How are you? Yeah, following up on Martin's question, can you give us a little sense of the cadence of the branded products revenue as the year goes on. I thought I heard you say earlier in the call, Nick, that flow would be up in Q1. Is that, or did I mishear that?

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

Yeah, I know that, you know, we had originally, I mean, it may or may not be is the real answer here. It's going to be close. It's going to be close. We are still overlapping last year. We're still overlapping last year, which is the final quarter, because in Q1 of last year, We actually had the dollar channel in those results. We had NCL in those results and others that we exited shortly after or at the very end of Q1. And so we're still overlapping that, even though there's been a lot of growth in the flow brand and other channels, it's going to be close for Q1. And then we had the production challenges that they didn't get fixed on day one of Q1. But we've been working on it very diligently with a lot of sense of urgency over Q1. And so we believe, you know, to the degree that we don't have positive growth, it'll be close. And then you'll definitely see Q2 with positive growth.

speaker
Nicholas Reichenbach
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, Sean, you know, Q1, we definitely see an increased demand for flow-branded products. across the board on all SKUs, both Canada and the United States, which is a very positive sign for the year ahead. And then in Q2, we are launching the sparkling innovation. And as I mentioned, Whole Foods Global has already accepted that that will launch at the end of Q2 and goes forth in the summer with all of our other leading retailers in Canada and the United States accepting the launch of sparkling. So that will bring the Flow Branded products into growth mode across the rest of the quarters. Okay.

speaker
Sean McCown
Analyst, Roth

And Trent, did the production challenges affect the revenue of Flow Branded or just the co-packing?

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

Both. Both? Okay. With regards to, I mean, you can sort of draw the line, you can read between the lines of what we're saying, you know, When you're having production challenges, how does it affect flow brand? Because flow brand is based on inventory, but that's the whole problem, isn't it? We drew our inventory down. You can see our inventory on the balance sheet. It's the lowest it's ever been, which is really problematic. We weren't able to fulfill certain sales orders that were in the quarter, and that's been a problem through Q1, just being very honest about it. and so you know we're getting there we're getting there with haste because as nick said um you know we as part of the restructuring we brought in and they're probably listening to this but we brought in the crackerjack us sales team that are very very focused and very very familiar with our consumer base and they've been doing a tremendous job the issue we have and that goes with our canadian canadian team who have always been doing a great job building the brand in canada so You look at that combination and we're just on the cusp of being able to fulfill these orders that are coming in because there's so many that we just can't even produce into it. And so we need to work on the production facility. And look, it's not a bad problem to have, having more orders than you can possibly fulfill, both with Copac and Flow Brand, but it was problematic. throughout Q4 and into Q1. But we're getting very close to fixing all of those issues and unlocking what is the true potential for flow.

speaker
Sean McCown
Analyst, Roth

Okay. My last question is on the gross margin outlook. It's a pretty wide range. Could you give us some help with what would affect that? What would make it come in at the bottom end? Is it mixed? Is it Fixing the production problems? Is it, you know, why such a wide range and what will make it be whatever it is?

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

Yeah, you know, look, I mean, there's a couple things, to be honest. There's a couple things, very specific things that could cause us to have missed our margin targets. You know, the big one being the delay, any delay in lines five and six and getting them up and running and commissioned. Clearly, that's going to have an impact because that leads to absorption going up tremendously, which helps our margins. Then there's the production challenges we have. If we don't fix those, and we have been by the way, but if we don't get comfortable in stock positions in all of our SKUs, that could have an issue. But those are really the two biggest ones. You know, our logistics, which are part of the cost of goods, has come down tremendously. Like, we've done a really good job at managing that side of cost of goods and, of course, SG&A. So it's really around those two buckets. But, you know, look, the range, we're getting... Look, just being honest to everybody's listening, like we're getting sort of sick and tired of setting out expectations and not being able to meet them too. So we want to give ourselves a little flexibility because at the lower end of that range, while there is a range, the lower end is still pretty darn good from a historical perspective. And so, you know, we really want to finally, you know, over exceed because you look at our SG&A and where we are. I get questions from prior investors and current investors coming to me in my own personal email at work here and saying, when are you going to get your costs under control, right? And I'm looking at this SG&A and I'm saying, what are you talking about? Like, we set forth for our board and internally a target which was tremendously aggressive on SG&A for the fiscal 2024 year, and we beat it. Like, that is one of the highlights of what we've been able to do. And that is a big, big area of focus for any company. You need to get your SG&A in order. And we've done it. It's just right now, and net revenue, we're all over that. We signed the $267 million of co-packing. Flow is like we have more demand for it than we can possibly meet. So it really comes down to one thing now, one thing only, the production facility. We need to get the capacity up, the efficiencies up. We need to get line five and six in, and we need to focus, focus, focus on being the best producers we could possibly be, and everything else is going to take care of itself.

speaker
Investor Relations
Flow Beverage Corp Investor Relations

Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks, Sean.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. And once again, if you would like to ask a question, simply press the star button. Your next question comes from the line of Najeeb Islam with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

speaker
Najeeb Islam
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Thanks. Just building off the last question. So is the gross margin target for 2025 achievable with the current channel mix you have, or do you need a bit more penetration into higher margin channels?

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

No, it's 100% achievable because we've already done that. That's in the past. We are now absolutely focused on higher margin channels, and that's where we're operating. And we're going to continue to expand in those channels, like natural food, especially in the United States with grocery, natural food, and others. We're even looking at club down there. There's some inns there that we're looking at that could really unlock even more for us. So, you know, and C-Store, convenience, both here in Canada and the United States. So we're already focused on those channels. And then our food service, the food service we've stuck with actually produces profit. And within those food service, we're looking at, you know, skew mix and the kind of offering we have and looking at creative ways of getting even more margin out of those channels while actually building volume and turns in stores, inventory turns in stores. So like velocity. So we're really focused on that. I don't think we need much more of a mix. I think we got that covered.

speaker
Najeeb Islam
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Sure. Got it. Thanks. And I was also curious about, uh, what percentage of copack volumes go, go to the U S and are there any like concerns from your partners about potential us tariffs there?

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

That's a great question. You know, the, I, I, we thought we would get this at some point, but, um, yeah, some, some of our co-packing partners are us based, um, for sure. And it sends the us, but that doesn't affect the tariff. Like the tariffs, uh, won't affect, won't be in effect there. We're not selling, We're filling, we're not selling into the United States that way. It's really around flow brand where there's more risk, but we have a great mitigation plan in the event that any of this comes to pass in that we still own our spring in Virginia. We've never given that up. We own it holistically. If the need rises, we can pivot fairly quickly to using that water and having co-packing manufacturing services agreements with other providers of co-pack service with whom we have good relationships. So we can, in fact, produce US-based product in the United States and de-risk ourselves of that tariff risk. Margins are going to be a little less because of the co-packing versus producing in our own environment. But given the 10 or 25% tariff and maybe the effect on demand, it's a much better strategy than living with the tariff.

speaker
Najeeb Islam
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Sure. Got it. Thanks.

speaker
Investor Relations
Flow Beverage Corp Investor Relations

That's all from my end. Thank you.

speaker
Nicholas Reichenbach
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, now we can go to some of the questions that some of our shareholders have asked.

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

Okay. Okay. So let me start with one question that says, for the two additional production lines, will Flo need to raise additional capital or finance from Q1 and Q2 cash flows? Great question. The answer to that is really no. We have agreements on the financing already. That financing agreement, which is a tri-party agreement, is sort of complex. But we managed to get that nailed down and agreed upon in late April of last year. And now the project is well underway. There will be other potential needs, but we have all that sort of lined up already.

speaker
Nicholas Reichenbach
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Excellent. The next question I'll take, which is I'm curious about the rationale for the refresh of the brand given Our cash flow position of the company and the cost of it. It's a it's a great question. The cost of the rebrand was negligible. We do consumer insight once a year against the purchasers of flow and we uncovered in 2023 consumer insight that there was a much larger base of growth in flow branded products in a. category called the active lifestyle. So we did consumer insight against that category and designed our package for a higher purchase intent against that consumer, which we believe to estimate to be about 10 to 15% more pull off retail shelf in the future. And we're starting to see that in live action since Q4 and now Q1. where we're getting a higher demand and a higher pull-off of all of our retail shelves as a result of that rebrand moving forward. And we did not do what's called a hard push of the new brand. What we did is we sold all of our existing brand and all of the inventory of that and then replenished that with the new branded products So we didn't really have to write off any inventory. We sold through all of our inventory with no discounting that's above average and pushed the new brand in. And now across all retail shelves, you're starting to see our flavor rebrand come in as well as the new sparkling innovation in Q2.

speaker
Trent McDonald
Chief Financial Officer & EVP of Operations

Great. There's another question here. It says, 200 million plus in co-packing. Are we a co-packer for others or are we a branded business focused on flow? What is the strategy? That is a great question. We get that quite a bit, actually. You know, who are you and what are you trying to be? Let us clarify, okay? We are flow. We're a branded company and we sell flow. But we also own our own means of production. And not all beverage companies, food companies, CPG companies own the means of production, but we do. And so, when you think about owning the means of production, a production facility, what draws costs down is utilization of that facility and the production equipment within that facility. And Flow is a growing brand, but we're not a multi-hundred million dollar brand yet. We're getting there. We're hoping to get there and we're building towards that. That's not where we are. And so if we were to run our production facility for just Flow, our absorption would be very low. Our overhead would be very high. Our rent stays the same, whether we're producing just for ourselves on two lines. producing ourselves and Copac on six lines in total our rents the same a lot of our fixed costs are the same so you what you want to do is get your get your cost per unit produced way down and that's what Copac does for us it does two things one the more we utilize that capacity in our plant by using it for co packing and each unit that we produce for somebody else is carrying the burden of some of those overhead costs that would have been burdened onto the flow-branded product. So now our flow-branded product, from a standard overhead perspective, is much lower in terms of its cost, and we can get better margins on flow because of COPAC. And the more COPAC you put through, the bigger the effect it has on flow-branded margins. Second thing, is that it actually truly is a great revenue stream from which we can get cash. And we're working towards getting working capital positive. And so this is a big lever for us because it does add to our margin. It's very margin accretive. And again, when you put more COPAC in, you're not increasing the cost of many of those fixed costs. Like again, the rent or, you know, to a large part utilities or indirect overhead and labor salaries. They all sort of stay the same. And so it's just accretive cash flow. So it does a couple things for us, and we're going to continue to focus on that. And we have great partners. So as long as that remains the way that it is, where it's accretive to cash and accretive to revenue and, of course, accretive to our cost base, then we have every reason to expand on that revenue stream by adding more lines and more lines. until such time as we sort of max out our capacity.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, that ends our question and answer session. This now concludes the conference. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

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