Laird Superfood, Inc. (AMEX:LSF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

We still do have some things that we’re going to lap out that are — the long term contracts that will expire here as we go through the balance of 2023. That I think we’ll see continued efficiency gains on our overall marketing spend. But yes tremendous progress made by the team in Q4 without a doubt.

Jason Vieth: Hi, Alex, let me add one thing to that — Alex, I’ll add 1 thing to that. I think Andy is very humble in this space. And I just want to say that in the last year really, there have been two big pushes that you’ve been leading. One is to shift non-working media over to media. And so you saw in Q4 with media down 52% the channel still performing as it was. So he’s been able to take out a lot of cost and still hold up the channel performance pretty much where it was. So really great job there. But then secondarily, he’s been moving “working media to be truly working”. So we had a number of programs, marketing programs that really were not effective and Andy has been doing a great job with his team of weeding those out. And so what we expect this year is A, to be able to spend less, but B, to be able to spend it more efficiently even where we are still spending. So it really does bode well for the next year and beyond.

Alex Fuhrman: Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you all and Jason and your whole team. I hope you all feel better soon.

Andrew Judd: Thanks Alex.

Jason Vieth: Thanks Alex.

Operator: Thank you, Mr. Fuhrman. The next question is from the line of Bobby Burleson with Canaccord. You may proceed.

Bobby Burleson: Hi, Jason and Anya, sorry for the background noise. So just curious on a couple of things. Congratulations on that gross margin outlook well over 30% exiting this year. I’m curious does that include any benefit from the potential reimbursement or would that be an addition?

Jason Vieth: Yes. Hi, Bobby. Thanks for that question. I think it’s as we think about the margin going through this year, I would tell you that we ought to be over 30% regardless certainly with — at this point, that would be included in there. But we expect that in either condition we would be able to exceed 30% over the course of this year. This is really, I mean, as we’ve talked about in the past, we needed to make this move in order to really be able to reset our margin profile and in doing so would just put ourselves into a very different manufacturing position, not only in terms of the cost, but I want to mention too, just this asset light model and the flexibility that it presents in a business that’s still very young and as a result has some erratic swings in sales from month to month.

So this really allows us to produce not only more cost effectively in general, but really as the revenue is swinging in any given month can match up our supply to our demand much better and really help our inventory carrying costs and our labor costs as well. So it’s a really big transformational change for our business.

Bobby Burleson: Great. And then in terms of the net sales growth, high single digit, curious what’s happening on a segment level there. That sounds like DTC is on track and there’s still some big changes coming to wholesale. So curious kind of order of magnitude, where the contribution is coming from the top line growth from your segments?