J&J Snack Foods Corp. (NASDAQ:JJSF) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jon Anderson: That’s helpful, thank you. Organic growth in the first quarter was about 6%. Can you help us kind of gauge how much of that the 6% organic growth was volume based and how much was price? And then you kind of laid out a lot of very interesting demand generation initiatives that are kind of kicking in through the year, the cross-selling opportunities the new account, new channel opportunities that seem to be kind of lining up? How – should we kind of think about organic growth accelerating through the balance of the year or kind of maintaining that level in this mid-single-digit range? I know it’s a difficult question, but just trying to get a sense for your confidence in some of the initiatives that you have lined up and what that might do to the organic growth profile of the company during coming quarters?

Dan Fachner: I’m going to let Ken talk a little bit about the numbers, if he can. But I just want to say this about our sales teams. We talked about it for two or three quarters now about cross-selling and getting people engaged in the different companies on selling the products across channels and across customers. And I couldn’t be more proud of the way that they’re responding to that, that is happening more and more. And I get to see it firsthand, and that will be helpful. It’s certainly helpful as we’re starting to look at the Dippin’ Dots business, being able to leverage our relationships and our customer contacts that we have to accelerate that growth and so, just really pleased with the progress that is happening on that side, led by our sales teams, really happy with that. Ken, I don’t know if you have some number, if you could help them with that.

Ken Plunk: Well, I would just add so Jon, I’m glad you picked up on it. But we were very intentional to really go maybe even a little bit deeper on highlighting what we see is a lot of growth opportunity when we sprinkled an examples, but it was some Dippin’ Dots to SuperPretzel to frozen novelties to churros. So yes, we still remain very, very confident in our ability in the next three quarters to grow the organic side of our business, if you just take out Dippin’ Dots for a second. Like every other company out there, I mean, we’re watching things like GDP and data on consumption and you see a little bit of that being dialed back, you see savings rates going up. So there’s, some consumer things that we’re watching, which obviously impacts our business as consumers pullback.

But aside from that, I don’t know a time at of J&J, where we haven’t felt more confident about what we’re doing in innovation with our brands and cross-selling. So we remain very confident in what we’re going to be able to do for the rest of the year.

Jon Anderson: Okay, that’s helpful. One more it’s kind of a similar question, but more from an earnings perspective. When I look at EBITDA or adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter, and even adjust, I guess, for a bit of the impact of Dippin’ Dots, the deleverage. It looks like EBITDA came in around 15% or so of what the street anticipates full year EBITDA to be? And then if I kind of look back pre-pandemic to some more typical years, it looks like first quarter EBITDA might have trended more in the 20% to 22% of the year range. So just kind of optically, it would look like maybe you’re starting the year a little bit slower this year from an EBITDA perspective, at least relative to what the street is modeling for the full year?

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