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

William Bennett : Yes. You hit the nail on the head. The struggle with this part of the business is while the restaurant is the ultimate customer, our — the customer we do — we connect with is the broadliner, right? And so without the — we have the information, the contact information of the restaurants, but it’s not how we’ve historically done business with those restaurants, right? So we can’t really do an end around, I guess, you can say, right? We need to work through the broadliner to build back that business. And that’s what’s caused the headwind there. And you’re absolutely right. It is a pure technological challenge. It’s unfortunate that it had such a big impact on us. But I’ll just reiterate that the team we work with over there has been great in helping us to look for new growth opportunities.

It’s just, in the B2B space, everything takes time. Everything is contractual and relationships they’re trying to build, and restaurants don’t make decisions overnight to change the products they’re sourcing. So that’s absolutely the focus of the team and why we expect to get back to sales growth again next year. Does that answer your question, Brian?

Unidentified Analyst : Yes, that’s great color.

William Bennett : All right. Nice and quiet. I don’t even have any anonymous questions today just to fill the airwaves. So we’ll give it one more second here.

Ronit Wallerstein : Thank you for your questions. I’ll turn the call back to Bill to wrap up.

William Bennett : Great. Actually, just saw one come through the chat. Let me handle that real quick. Do you have any timing on potential sale of real estate? So great question. The two properties I mentioned, Florida and Pennsylvania, are just getting listed as we speak, so of course, will depend highly on the amount of traffic those listings get and how that process proceeds. We are bullish, I would say, on the timing. Both of those real estate markets are strong for the types of properties that we’ll be marketing. And so we expect the process to move quickly, but we’ll definitely keep the group updated through press releases as we get to kind of the binding offer stage. Great. Thank you to all of you for joining today. Thanks, Ronit, for moderating.

Appreciate everyone’s attendance and engagement in the call today. It really is inspiring to see a level of interest in IVFH. As always, I’m happy to make myself and my leadership team available to connect with investors who have further questions about publicly available data. Please reach out to Richard Tang, whose contact info is included in our press release, if you’d like to schedule a touch base. Take care, and we look forward to continuing to update you on the progress of our strategy at our Q4 update this spring. Thanks all, and have a great day.