Westrock Coffee Company, LLC (NASDAQ:WEST) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Sarang Vora: That’s cool. And I just have a quick follow-up on the Conway, it seems like demand trends for the Conway facility are very strong. Can you provide any color on customer profile that’s getting attracted or type of products like cans, as well as any milestones like we should track for the year, saying, equipment delays or talent acquisition, like how are you planning the rollout, like, 2024 for the Conway facility? Any milestones you can share

Scott Ford: Sure.

Sarang Vora: for us to monitor. Thank you.

Scott Ford: Yeah. Good — all good questions and also it like — sounds like you have been sitting in our daily meetings on the Conway line of project. So the team has come together very nicely. We probably have a dozen people that are leading experts in their field from an engineering perspective, from a plant general manager perspective, from a quality insurance perspective, from a financial expert that had multiple plants reporting up to. We have put together a — really it’s impressive and we just took our Board throughout the other day and we have got it very seasoned. I think we have Fortune 500 Board and they were absolutely blown away with the talent and the individual backgrounds of the people that we have brought on to run this Conway project.

We are feeling super about the people. You then get down to being on time, on budget. On time, we are on time, we are actually slightly ahead, maybe up to 30 days to 60 days on some of the first phases of the general contracting work. Then you get down to on budget. On budget, we are so far actually slightly ahead of budget. So we won’t keep those advantages but we are out of the blocks and around the first lap in good position. So we have got a good crew, we are on time, we are on budget. And then on the other side of it is the customer reaction to being willing to put in pieces of equipment, this is a little bit why you go back to Todd’s question a moment ago. Well, how are you accounting Phase 1 and Phase 2? Well, they are morphing, because as customers come in and say, hold on, I need you to put in this piece of kind of equipment and you put in a small can line and you did put in a large can line, I need to put in glass bottle and I need multi-serve bottles with the following characteristics versus one with another set of characteristics.

As we have been working with our customers and these are the major coffee brands in the world, both at the start-up level whether you are on West Coast startup phenomenon and influencer-led brand or you are one of the staple coffee brands in the country, the chances are very likely, you are going to end up being a customer to this facility. And we are doing not to steal really algebraic alliteration, but we are doing the algebra of what takes care of the most customers to maximize our EBITDA in that facility and meet their needs so that we remain their primary first solution and that’s not an untricky, instead that’s not is fairly tricky proposition. But we are making great progress on, the sales force is going back out here in the next month with all new sales literature, all new capacities, and frankly, if half the two-thirds of the people that tell us what they want, actually come through and go all the way through the contracting, we were oversold by a large amount.

So we have over — we are over indexed on demand for any of our capacity and several of the lines are already 100% full.

Sarang Vora: Great. Thank you so much. I will pass it on to others.

Operator: Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Ben Bienvenu of Stephens. Your line is open.