Freshpet, Inc. (NASDAQ:FRPT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Billy Cyr: I’ll give a thought and Scott can add to it. We’ve seen a little bit of an erosion last year on the media effectiveness, but we attributed most of that to the out of stocks that we were seeing. So consumers are seeing the ad, but they couldn’t find the product. Then as you got later in the year, as you know, we were basically off there in the fourth quarter. So your ability to track the two in concert was eliminated. But over a long period of time, the correlation has remained very, very strong, and we expect it to continue to remain strong. With all the pricing that we’ve had to take, you can also see periods behind every price increase where there is a debt. The consumers have a little bit of a shelf shock that they see the new higher prices.

They kind of wait out the next purchase or two, and then they start coming back to their purchase behavior. So we have to be mindful of that. But overall, we continue to believe the advertiser is the right long-term driver. In terms of how we get comfortable with the 9%, recall, when we were running closer to 12, we were running growth rates in the mid-30s and higher. When we were running closer to 9% of growth rates, we’re in the mid to upper 20s. So there’s actually a decent history of us demonstrating the kind of long-term growth that we’ve seen at 9% of sales, and that’s how we got comfortable with that number.

Scott Morris: Yes. So we really – we basically have planned this year to be slightly more conservative on the productivity of the advertising. We also know that as we add a lot more fridges, and we add good innovation, that helps with the productivity. So there’s a bunch of these puts and takes that are going on. We’ve got pricing. Last year, we had – out of stock. This year, we’ve got a lot of fridges coming and we have really strong innovation. And that typically helps with the productivity of advertising. But we also know that the pricing coming in couldn’t basically impact that. So there is a lot of puts and takes. Overall, I think to the key point of your question, we have not seen any significant change in the long term correlation in advertising, productivity and sales growth.

Anoori Naughton: Great. Thank you. That’s really helpful. And as a follow-up, you’re talking about some incremental innovation for the year. So if there’s any color on what we can expect there the cadence of when we could potentially see some of these new items come to market? Any color you take if there would be great. Thank you.

Billy Cyr: Yes. So we actually shared a bit and I know we share a lot. We shared a bit at ICR. We talked about some products in our Vital line called Vital Benefits. We are expanding our home style 1product line, Spring and Sprout, which is kind of our plant-based proteins. We think there’s opportunity there over time and also really a leadership positioning there. And then probably most significantly for us this year is what we’re talking about from an e-commerce standpoint and expanding kind of our presence in e-commerce and are offering their kind of a product that we’re coming with at the end of this very end of this quarter and the beginning of next quarter, you’ll start to see that kind of come out to the market. And we think it will be – everything we’ve seen testing line it shows that it’s a really kind of incremental and differentiated offering than what we have today.

And we’re kind of very enthusiastic and excited about that. It’s going to be smaller this year, but we think long term, it can have a significant – be a significant contributor to the growth.

Anoori Naughton: Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Billy Cyr: Thanks, Anoori.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Holland with Cowen & Company. Please proceed with your question.

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