Again, this is something that I love to see. So we had Albertsons. We’ve been — and Albertsons has been our customer for a while on the legacy Mancini side. What I told you guys is we have customers, now let’s leverage all these Creative Salads products, all the chicken or the paninis. We got this great with DeMoulas now, getting in, again, a legacy customer. We now have paninis that are literally flying off the shelf. It’s incredible. Cub Foods, Holiday Market. So a lot of new customers, exactly to your point. And then we just spoke about AIC getting more items into the stores. And I think one thing that’s been great, and I mentioned earlier, the work that Lauren Sella is doing as our Chief Marketing Officer, we’ve been testing, right?
Test, learn, test. Testing a number of programs this past quarter. They are seeing very promising results. It’s the marketing that is going to help us from a velocity standpoint. If you’re in the — actually, if you’re anywhere on the East Coast, I don’t know if you guys know Z100, Elvis Duran and the Morning Show, I think it’s one of the most popular morning shows on the East Coast. Lauren did a program with them, actually, Dan Mancini, the two of them went to the studios, and they don’t stop talking about it. They don’t stop talking about the meatballs. So that is really starting to help move and get momentum. People are talking about it, and that’s helping with velocities. So I really would tell you it’s the trifecta. I share with you new customers.
I share with you strength in average items carried and now with the marketing driving velocity. So, I think it’s all three working together. And this is healthy growth again. This is volume-driven growth in both of our major businesses.
Eric Des Lauriers: That’s great to hear. I appreciate that color. It sounds like everything is moving in the right direction here.
Adam L. Michaels: Knock on wood.
Eric Des Lauriers: Knock on wood. Yes. My next question is on the margin impacts from CIF. If I look back, it looks like that was sort of expected to have 100 to 200 basis-point potential gross margin improvement here. And I’m just wondering how to sort of combine that information with your sort of target to keep gross margins ideally in the high-20s and sort of reinvest in trade promotion. Is this 1 to 2 percentage points incremental to that high-20s, or is this now — we’re staying at high-20s and now we essentially have another 100 to 200 basis points of surplus margin to reinvest?
Adam L. Michaels: Yes. So first, I need to apologize for overdelivering on the high-20s, I’m sorry about that. But I’ll keep disappointing. I think that there’s two or three things. So I think the first thing is the CIF acquisition has been tremendous. Ron Loeb, Jeff Siegel, the whole team, I could go through everybody, has just done an amazing job and we’re one team now. We don’t even talk about CIF anymore, we’re one team. The second thing is, yes, we absolutely see the 1 — like we said, the 1 to 2 points. Again, we have over delivered our thesis on what I brought to the board on the opportunities. I feel great about saying that. The third, I think, is even more important than numbers, the talent that we brought in, the folks.
So there are folks from CIF that had capabilities that we didn’t have before. We’re back in our freight. I’ve mentioned to you freight. When we first started 200 basis points, 280, as crazy as numbers are, we got another 50 points, 50 basis points of improvement this quarter. That’s real capabilities that Rebecca brought to the team. What we’re able to do in accounts receivables, it is — yes, it’s great that the CIF acquisition got us more sales and got us more margin, the real secret is it got us great talent and real capabilities in our business, and that’s what I’m proudest of.
Eric Des Lauriers: That’s great to hear. My last couple of questions. I guess, first is just a clarifying question. Did you say earlier — I think it was on the previous question, that you had hired a sort of a new head of the C-store channel. I just wanted to clarify that first.
Adam L. Michaels: We did. Yes. Art is just killing it, really already — and he’s only been here a month or two and already connecting with the right brokers, the right distributors. The energy that he brought to the meeting — he actually pushed me. He was yelling at me that I was calling the number too conservatively. How is that? It was like his first week here, and he’s already calling me out, which I love. So yes, we have a new guy, they’re running C-stores, e-commerce now. We are building a team that’s going to win.
Eric Des Lauriers: Yes. So, you have this new C-store hire. You press released sort of launch of direct-to-consumer e-commerce, I think you called out sort of the club opportunity in the press release and then mentioned mass market in your prepared remarks here. Just kind of help us like frame these opportunities here. I think you said C-store could even drive near-term results here. How should we think about these, I guess, one, just in terms of potential scale relative to the size of your sort of traditional grocery channel? And then perhaps in terms of whether it’s priority or just when we might be able to see some potential results here? I’m just trying to understand these opportunities as they come up. Thank you.
Adam L. Michaels: Yes. Look, I think Art puts enough pressure on himself as does everyone on the team. We’re not looking — so yes, for our fiscal ‘25 plan, we built a bottom-up model. Obviously, we won’t be sharing that bottoms up customer by customer model, but we have it. Let’s put this into perspective. We’re pretty much not in 5 of the top 10 customers. The 3 biggest customers in this country, Target, Walmart and Banner Kroger, we’re not in. So I think that should put in perspective for us the level of distribution. And again, I’m proud with over 8,000 points of distribution, very proud of that. Over $100 million business, that’s wonderful. We’re in like still probably — I don’t even think we’re in the bottom of the first.