Laird Superfood, Inc. (AMEX:LSF) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Bobby Burleson: Okay. Great. And then just a quick follow-on. It sounds like you’re pulling back on the elevated trade spend in Q4 should help with gross margins and the burn is going to slow, I guess, from what it did in Q3. But you talked about a cash flow positive goal of 12 to 18 months from, I guess, is that from October? And then what swings you to either end of that range? Are there particular things you’re watching that you think could really affect how soon that outcome is reached?

Jason Vieth: Yeah. Good question. I tell you, Bobby, our gross margin — as we had planned at the beginning of the year, gross margin exceeded 30%. We have lacked — we have to add on 5-plus points to the course of the next year. And as we do that, obviously, we’ll start to close in towards the breakeven profit that we mentioned. The big driver — on top of that, the big driver for us as we go forward, there are really two. One is the continued skin of our G&A. We’ve made a number of moves that are only now starting to trickle into the G&A line that we’ll get the full benefit of over the course of the next year. And then similarly, on the marketing side, I mentioned the strategy that we’ve moved to. And as part of that move, we are compressing marketing spend down towards a more traditional CPG model.

So you’ll see marketing come down next year and obviously, making a few bets on that with regards to our ability to market better and more efficiently, but we have a great team here that I think has generated some insights that will allow us to do that. So it’s really the combination of that increased gross margin and that the lower G&A and marketing costs, coupled with what we believe will become an increasingly positive story on topline because for the last two years, we have had a bigger online business declining faster than we were able to grow our smaller wholesale business. And that is just about flipped. As we mentioned, it’s about a 50-50 business now, wholesale to online. And our wholesale business is currently growing faster than our online business is declining.

And so that, obviously, becomes a flywheel that starts to work in our favor. We’re really excited about what that can mean for us next year.

Anya Hamil: And I just want to add one more thing to that. Hi, Bobby, this is Anya, CFO. Our working capital is another driver and continue optimizing our working capital, especially as we grow and expand the business. We think that we still have room to improve in terms of our inventory efficiencies. That’s another area where we’re looking to free up our cash.

Bobby Burleson: Okay. Great. Thank you for that additional point and congratulations.

Anya Hamil: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question is from Alex Fuhrman with Craig-Hallum. Your line is now open.

Alex Fuhrman: Hey guys, thanks very much for taking my question. Wondering if you can talk about what you’re seeing here in Q4 from Amazon? And when would you really expect your business through that important channel to be more or less what you would have expected to be full strength following the coconut milk powder issue that you had?

Jason Vieth: Yes. I’ll start that and Anya can jump in if she has anything to add afterwards. But I just tell you the way we’re looking at Amazon right now is we’re about a year behind where we had planned to be. And so we were coming in, as you guys maybe recall from Q3 and Q4 last year. We had heavied up our spend. We had built cohorts, and we really felt like we had Amazon in position to be able to drive growth for the next year. Lo and behold, the quality issue, Q1, Q2 basically knocked us straight back to where we had been a year before. And that’s what we’re just coming through now We’re getting back to where we were a year ago. We’re rebuilding those cohorts, I would say we’re also marketing much more efficiently than we were at the time.