John Fieldly: Yes, Vivien. It was — we’re still — retailers are still defining their sets for next year, but we had probably one of the most successful NACS that the company has had in history. There’s a lot of great excitement. I think when you look at what just happened currently this week, when you look at 7-Eleven taking 4 SKUs of our Celsius Essentials line, it just shows you nationwide, chain-wide. Also, if you go to a 7-Eleven right now, you’ll see signage in front of every 7-Eleven as well as gas pump activity as well. So really excited with the way the partnerships are going with our key accounts. We’ve been — we have a great key accounts team, best-in-class. We’ve had early conversations with every one of our major retailers.
So, we’re pretty excited on where we sit heading into the new year on resets. We expect to gain distribution, expanded distribution in our existing flavors as well as further expanding the new innovation we have in store for 2024. So, the team has been working really hard. We’ve been working really closely with Pepsi as well to make sure we’re going to have really — this is really heading into our first year of a strategic partnership, really launching our innovation on a nationwide basis, versus if you go back last year, keep in mind, we just started with Pepsi late in Q4. Our plans and strategies weren’t really aligned with their AOP process. We came in on the very tail end of that, so we’re really trying to make up ground all year on the innovative launches.
So, we’re looking to have strategic prioritization periods within PepsiCo focused within quarters and months. So, I think it’s going to be really successful. Time will tell. We’ll have to wait until probably about March, April to be able to start to see the additional expansion show up in the IRI scan data. But the team feels pretty excited on where we stand. And there’s a lot of great excitement being the number one driver of both dollars and units in the category is really impressive to see in a brand like Celsius.
Vivien Azer : Absolutely. Very comprehensive response. Just as a follow-up, 2023 was supposed to be back half weighted in terms of expanding your headcount. Can you just update us on the hiring? Kind of where you guys on plan in the third quarter? Should that accelerate in the fourth quarter? Any incremental detail would be helpful.
John Fieldly: Yes. We actually — we have actually our national sales and marketing conferences taking place this week in Miami. We’ll have all of our team members are currently — Jarrod and I are heading down right after our earnings call. And we have about three days of great presentation. It’s really getting all of our team members excited. Our plans and budgets for next year is to continue to bring on talented team members, really building out the breadth within our organization, within all departments, within HR, further expansion in finance, logistics, operations, sales, marketing, and really focusing and expanding upon our drill deep markets as well. I know we’ve talked about that over the years. And currently, we’re focusing on a drill deep strategy within 23 markets, and we’ll be expanding that next year to over 30.
So, we’re building out our field teams, our sales teams, and we’re seeing great results and ROI return when we place these individuals and expand these positions. So that’s another thing we’re monitoring really closely as well, as we’re applying assets, making sure we’re driving that value, that overall return. So, you’ll expect us to continue. We are hiring, and we have a lot of job postings up on LinkedIn as well, so we expect that to continue. We’re monitoring it closely, though.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Michael Lavery with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.
Michael Lavery: Good morning. Just was wondering if you could unpack some of the margin drivers. You had called out last quarter the sequential dip you were expecting from the higher promotional activity and higher marketing spending. This is EBITDA margins, obviously. But then it went up instead. You touched a little bit on some of the promotional dynamics not coming through quite as you had expected and being a minimal or not a tailwind — I mean, a headwind. But can you just help us understand some of the other factors in part just to get an idea of what is sustainable and how to think about looking ahead?
