Jacques Tortoroli: It’s a great question, Scott. Look, typically, these shift from direct customer sales to distributor led route to market, finding a new distributor, sometimes can take six months, if not longer before, they’re actually — you’re actually seeing product and shelf through their pipe. We’ve been able to condense that timeline for sure. The reality is, as I said earlier, we didn’t see really anything in Q3 with that with respect to the shift and route to market strategy. It’ll impact Q4 modestly, and you really start to see the benefit of these new distribution partners and these new distribution channels into retail certainly as we get into ’23 and beyond — and we’re not done, we’re continuing our discussions with a host of other potential distribution partners as well, particularly thinking about new industry verticals where we haven’t participated in yet like hospitality, like travel.
So, the NSF certification is opening up new doors and new verticals for us that we’ll see the benefit from in ’23 and beyond.
Scott Fortune : And just kind of a follow-on, Jacq. I know you did deal with MLB and you’re probably putting a lot of the marketing dollar. But how do you look at your kind of sales and marketing dollar spend to support all these new partnerships that you’re bringing on to help drive growth going forward? Obviously, the announcement of the $58 million investment here will help. But just kind of how can we look at kind of your sales and marketing spend or priority to really drive that top-line growth in support?
Jacques Tortoroli: Well, I’ve said this last time when we talked I think, and we said it, when we had the announcement with MLB, we’re very much shifting our marketing spend from what we spent it on, arguably not very efficiently or effectively to putting that money into MLB. Not only the rights fees, but as I mentioned in my remarks, local activations, radio, podcasting, but really leveraging the microphone that MLB gives us and partnering with them on a media plan to take advantage of our content throughout their platforms and then support that through local activations around games, around the jewel events that we have a right to participate in as a brand. So that’s the focus. New partnerships and distribution, that doesn’t support marketing or you don’t need marketing dollars to do that.
But what it does do is put feet on the street that they pay for to be able to merchandise when they go and call on accounts. And that’s been a big problem for us with the direct to customer way that we were doing B2B in the past is that we don’t have the seat on the street to make sure our products was showing up on shelves, showing up in the right way. And these distributor partners give us that workforce if you will, to be in stores, literally on a day to day basis to make sure our product is restocked and looks great on shelf. In addition to that, we’ll be able to do more in terms of activations, and the vial displays, POS, POP material to really prominent — more prominently put our products in front of consumers. We’re also doing a test with one of our customers to bring our products out from behind the lock in tea cabinets.
And I’m confident that you’ll what we’ll find is that velocities have improved because we’ve removed consumer friction from buying those products. And so, we’re encouraged by all of this, it’s just not showing up in our P&L yet. And over the next year and beyond, we should be seeing the benefit of that in our top line, and then our overall financial performance.
