Westrock Coffee Company, LLC (NASDAQ:WEST) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott Ford: I wouldn’t want to get out — hold myself out as a professional, insightful analyst of what other people are doing. I’ve got all I can say grace over here, we’re not seeing a tremendous amount of capacity being discussed, we have customers that are already asking us to go build another facility like the one we’re building in Conway in another part of the country, I don’t have any idea if that will pan out or not. We have other projects that we’re looking at doing to diversify the physical location where we make products. We have other projects that, if you look at the ESL line that I mentioned in my comments, where we may go do that in some other form, or fashion, in addition to the Conway plant. And so we have a, I would say, corporate development effort that is busy all the time, trying to find homes for the products that people are trying to buy from us.

And it comes from, not the capacity of the can or the bottle line; Matt, this is the key thing, it comes from the extract. The extract that we make, the extracts that we match, the extracts that we can create for people is what brings the customer base through our doors. They start in our labs. They don’t start with an RFP for putting stuff in a bottle. They start in the labs and we co-develop a lot of these formulations and then as we put them in a can or a bottle, they start to then want to be able to put them in all the various form package — packaging forms, if you will, and that experience is what we never guessed we would be — that is the experience we’re having with customers that is so far out-running what we expected when we started this, that we’ve doubled the footprint.

We’re going to put a million square feet under production in less than 18 months and it’s woefully short of the products people are talking to us about making and then packaging for them.

Matt Smith: Thank you for that Scott. I appreciate the commentary. I’ll pass it on.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Sarang Vora from TAG.

Sarang Vora: Great. Good afternoon, everyone. Great on equity raise and progress on the Conway and EBITDA estimates. Just taking a step back, can you help us understand how the facility is in the construction phase right now? Are you on track in terms of getting the equipment, hiring the talent for it, because it’s a massive project for you guys? So, just curious as you have these milestones like how are you tracking in terms of milestones, anything that you are more mindful of or anything we should be worried about related to the opening?

Scott Ford: Well, we can always worry. But at this point in time, we are actually, thank the Good Lord, ahead of schedule and under budget, not on time, on budget. Now we have a long way to go but we have equipment that has already been installed, the leadership team is already in place. We have set eyes on physically 90% of the equipment that is coming into Conway in the manufacturing hub where it’s being manufactured, the last 10% will be knocked out over the next few weeks. Part of our crew has lived in an airplane around the world making sure that we physically see it and talk to the engineers that are building it after our experience in the single-serve business where it was going to be here, and then it wasn’t. So we learned a lesson from that and we’ve tried to — with recency bias, we fixed the last thing that jumped up.