Celsius Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CELH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 7 of 10

Jon Andersen : And last one for me. As you think about — you mentioned kind of the secondary placements. And I think part of that is leveraging your relationship with PepsiCo in terms of coolers, and part of it is your own effort to establish branded cooler locations. Where are you with respect to Celsius coolers this year? I know you had set a target earlier in the year. Are you on track to deliver that? And how much more opportunity is there on that front as you look ahead?

John Fieldly: Yes. No, Jon, that’s a great question and something the teams are extremely focused on, not only within our core team members but also within the PepsiCo sales organization. So, our cooler initiative and program is part of our perfect stores, our strategy. So that’s a way we KPI the team as well. So, you’re going to get warm placement, cold placement, secondary placement and could include an end cap and then most — and then also cold placement upfront as well as the perfect store has a Celsius-branded cooler. So, our goal was approximately around 15,000 to be placed this year. We’re working towards that. We’ll see if we’re going to be able to achieve it. We only have a few months left. The coolers, our biggest win we’re working on now is gaining chain-wide national authorization in front checkout coolers at major retailers, where we can really close 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 store locations.

As an example, we just entered Public Stores with expanded distribution in the front-end cap — front checkout coolers. So that was a big win. Although not a Celsius-branded cooler, we do have great placement in those checkouts, and that’s going to allow us to continue to increase our availability, increase trial, and take advantage of those impulse purchases that we know Celsius can capitalize on.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Eric Serotta with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Eric Serotta : First, a quick housekeeping question. I know you talked about selling and marketing expense as a percentage of sales being up in the fourth quarter. What about promotional allowances? Are you guys in the short term looking for any material changes in promo allowances versus where you were in the third quarter post the adjustment that you made? And then I’ll have a bigger picture question.

Jarrod Langhans: For the promos, I’d look more to the year-to-date percentage as we look to Q4. But John, do you want to jump on the sales market or you want me to jump on that one?

John Fieldly: Yes, go ahead.

Jarrod Langhans: Yes. So, sales and marketing, obviously, it’s a little trickier in October, November, December. You’ve got Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, so you have to come up with a little bit different incentives and different programs, so we’re working those through the system. And then obviously, we’re looking to hit the ground running with a number of the sponsorships that we picked up, that we press released over the last six months. So, we are looking to continue to spend into the holiday season. We found it to be very successful last year when we spent into the holiday season. Part of that was also because our ACV went from a 65 to a 90 pretty quickly. We’ve been sitting at that 90 all year so the goal is to really help build those velocities as we work our way into 2024 from a sales and marketing perspective.

John Fieldly: And especially also leaning into bio reset window.

Eric Serotta : Great. And that sort of leads into my next question, which is on velocities. I think one of the big positive surprises over the past year, certainly the past six months to nine months, has been the acceleration in velocities as you’ve rapidly expanded distribution. How are you thinking about the scope for velocity growth over the next call it, 12 months to 24 months? On the one hand, some new distribution you’re adding maybe a little bit less productive, but you are — seem to be getting some billboard effect and some broader awareness. So big picture, how are you thinking about potential for velocity over the coming year or two?

Page 7 of 10