And we’ve seen that come through as we’ve been able to increase our distribution. On the marketing front, we talked a little bit about this last quarter. We’re going to continue to ensure that we are maximizing our efficiency of marketing spend. So again, we would be spending against the entire marketing funnel. But when you start to talk about brand awareness, that’s top of funnel awareness. And we’ll ensure that we’re generating as much awareness in the right ways, again, bringing the Black Rifle brand to life as we can. And so we’ve been able to do a lot of that in the last quarter and increasing our efficiency numbers. That’s part of what’s leading to some of the increases you’re seeing in the last quarter. As we’re gaining those learnings, we really look forward to being able to ‘double down’ on that as we go into ‘24.
Again, we’re not going to reveal any specific numbers around that, but suffice to say, we’re looking forward to being able to spend at a bit of a higher level now that we have those learnings.
Jon Andersen: Makes sense, thanks. With your largest FDM customer that you’ve now been in market with for a year or so, can you talk about any learnings you’ve had there around the incrementality of the brand? I think for that partner, how they view it? Obviously, your ability to add new items in year two and build your presence in more segments of their coffee aisle suggest it’s been kind of a win-win. But if you could talk a little bit more about that and kind of the prospects for these newer items going forward, that would be helpful. Thanks.
Chris Mondzelewski: Yeah, sure. I think, look, I’m not going to represent the view of any of our customers. But that being said, have we been able to grow the category? Yes, we have. I think you can see that in the category trends. If you pull those up in the IRR or the Nielsen data, a lot of the partners, the main partner that we have worked with has actually been able to grow their category significantly over the last year. I think as we look at our business, that is a key component as to what we do with our customers. That is a role that we play as their partner, is to be able to grow their coffee category. So that’s actually one of the key KPIs that we measure ourselves against with any of our retail partners, is the growth that we are generating for them creating that category incrementality.
So again, while I don’t want to mention any specifics about what a customer might or might not feel about us. I will say that any success that we have with a customer and the ability to put additional items on the shelf is generally going to be related to our ability to be able to grow category with them.
Jon Andersen: Makes sense. Last question for me. I guess I wanted to — I know it’s smaller in terms of focus right now but on outpost I guess why is that still important, you know, to Black Rifle and to the brand? Why not focus all of your resources to drive, you know, FDM, RTD, DTC, where it seems like you have higher kind of ROI opportunities in those business areas?
Evan Hafer: Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a couple reasons why it’s so important to us. And again, I’ll reiterate what I said earlier. We are right now at a bit of a tactical pause. So obviously we’re resourcing the stores we have in place. But we have limited the spending for exactly the reason you talked about. We want to make sure we’re spending our money where we are getting the best overall return for shareholders and in generating our brand awareness, which we believe is critical to our long-term mission. The reasons why Outpost, we believe, is still quite important to us are twofold. One, we’re all about premium coffee. And when you’re about premium coffee, the ability to be able to deliver that coffee experience to consumers in as many ways possible is a very, very important part of that element of our business.
And so obviously, at-home consumption is an area that we’re going to continue to press on and resource as we have been, everything we’ve discussed up to now. That ability to deliver that out of home is something that, again, based on our learnings, we believe we can do very efficiently as well. The second element is just as important, which is around our mission. Our mission is around veterans and first responders. And as you know, we do that in many ways. We do that in the money that we give back philanthropically to many different organizations. But we also do that in how we are able to bring employment opportunities to veterans and first responders. And we’re very proud of the fact that 50% of our workforce is veteran first responder. The ability to drive that into out-of-home consumption allows us to double down on that element of our mission as well.
We made a statement at one point that we’re going to employ 10,000 veterans and first responders. And that is a vision for us, but that vision drives us in every decision that we make. So again, coffee, veterans, those are the simple mantras for us. And each one of those is quite important when you think about that out-of-home consumption.
Jon Andersen: Really helpful. Thanks so much.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Matt McGinley with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question.
Matt McGinley: Thank you. On the FDM retailers that you hope to add in next year, do you already have visibility into adding those new FDM retailers or are those discussions more ongoing? Is there any seasonality around the shelf resets in the coffee aisle and that if you’re not on target by a certain date for selling, you might not get that distro until later in the year?
Evan Hafer: Yeah, that’s a great question. So we — it’s kind of both. We have a lot of those locked up at this point. And we have some ongoing conversations going on with other retailers. As far as coffee obviously does have seasonality, we’re actually moving into kind of the core seasonality of the coffee category itself as we move into the colder months. As far as the retailers, it really depends on their operational schedules. So we’re having very transparent conversations with any of those potential partners. And we will make sure that we can adjust our business around their need to hit those schedules. I will say that even in the retailers that we have moved into most recently, we’ve begun to have conversations of further accelerating reset timelines on different segments of their business.
