Innovative Food Holdings, Inc. (PNK:IVFH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

We are investing in technology like a new customer relationship management platform and a new app we recently launched for our artisan business in Chicago. We also plan to revamp our entire drop ship vendor base, cutting out middlemen, reducing prices, increasing freshness and sourcing closer to the farm, ranch, boats or manufacturer. We will continue to share more details of our core business growth plan over time. Okay. That’s for business growth. Now that we’ve talked about capital reallocation and driving for business growth, hopefully, you’re understanding a bit more about where Phase 2 will take us. These actions will have a significant positive impact on revenue, SG&A and adjusted EBITDA. Remember, our Phase 2 near-term goal is to get to 100/10 or $100 million in revenue and $10 million in adjusted EBITDA.

And as a reminder, this is just the first milestone on our way to becoming a $1 billion revenue company. With that said, I’ve talked a lot, and we’re happy to take some Q&A. So I’ll turn it back to Ronit to moderate the Q&A for us.

A – Ronit Wallerstein: [Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming in from [Brian Harper].

Unidentified Analyst : Thanks, everybody. Great to see the renewed strategic direction and improvement in gross margins and a lot of decisions being made. I missed the first like 1.5 minutes, 2 minutes of the call, but I wanted to — this is the first I’ve heard of the change with the key customer, and I was wondering if you can elaborate on those changes in terms of whether they’re taking more stuff in-house, more kind of broad line stuff or what’s going on there.

William Bennett : Sure. Thanks, [Brian]. Appreciate your question. We’ve actually used a very similar language to what we used last quarter. And you’re welcome to take a look at what we said back on as well, but I’m happy to reiterate some of that. The change in technology platform, really what happened with this customer is that we lost — I shouldn’t say lost. They had a change in the item numbers for a portion of the assortment that we have for them. What that does is we lost the entire sales history for all the customers buying those items. And so if you know anything about foodservice, you that most chefs order from an order guide every week, right, which is really just a list of items they’ve ordered historically. And so essentially, years and years of order history we had with these restaurants was lost overnight when these item — product numbers changed.

So anyway, we have a great partnership with this customer. They’re moving forward. It’s not a change that they’re going to unwind, which is why we keep messaging that, unfortunately, these headwinds are going to be with us for the year, and we’re going to need to rebuild that portion of the business, and we don’t think that happens overnight. But I want to be clear that the relationship we have with this customer remains extremely strong. And in fact, we continue to pursue new growth opportunities together. But unfortunately, this part of the business has been impacted, and we’ll begin lapping that in Q1. Pretty quiet. Brian, did you have a second question? I see your hand up again.

Unidentified Analyst : Yes. It sounds like it’s almost like — that was almost more of a technical issue. Is that — are you guys going to — are you making any changes to where we are going to track customer history differently in the future in case something like this were to happen in the future? Or are some of these customers lost? Or I mean, I guess, I know we don’t have — with this side, we don’t have as much of a direct connection with the customer, but yes, if you could address that.