Jason Vieth: Yes. That’s a great follow-on question. The way that we’re looking at this — the way we’ve been looking at this strategically is conventional as kind of our last destination because we really — it’s expensive to play. Your turns need to come quickly. There’s a lot of competition and there obviously are margin challenges for smaller companies. So we’ve tiptoed into that space over the last couple of years, Bobby. As you know, the natural channel has been very good to us. Our consumers identify us quickly and shop. That space with the kind of attributes that we have as a product in mind. And so, you’re exactly right. What you’re seeing is tremendous growth on Amazon. DTC has put up a couple of really nice quarters and really turned — strategically, turned that corner with the initiatives that was implemented there.
The natural channel is still doing incredibly well for us and expanding rapidly. And we do recognize the big piece of the pie sitting out there in the conventional space. But I’d say we’re still a year away from really being ready to go and if not even full throttle, at least at an increased throttle in that space because we do want to let consumers catch up to us a little bit on that exact trend you asked about in your last question. We want to allow more of those mainstream consumers to begin to identify the food as medicine type of mentality that you asked about and come to us there. So I would say we’re still a year out from really starting to make major headway in that particular channel.
Operator: The next question comes from the line of George Kelly with ROTH Capital Partners.
George Kelly: Congrats on another really nice quarter. So maybe if we could start, I’m still a little confused on Amazon. I was curious if you could just maybe expand a bit on what’s been driving growth there? And has inventory fill been a component of that really rapid growth that you just reported in 1Q?
Jason Vieth: Yes. George, thanks for the question. It’s good to hear from you. Yes, we’re really excited about Amazon. We expected to have strong growth in Amazon. Honestly, we planned it at about half of this growth rate. And we knew that there was an opportunity in the channel for the first half of the year relative to the quality event that we had last year, where we had to pull inventory. And I know you all know we talked about that at nausea [ph] last year. So I won’t into so much detail but we ended up having to pull our inventory out as a slow pull on the creamer products, only creamer products. So we knew there was an opportunity as we lapped it this year but we are well in excess of our expectations on that platform in this quarter.
We — what we saw is really strong growth across a number of different segments. So not only the creamer products that did really well but our coffee, our performance mushrooms, our Greens, our bars, everything is really doing well on Amazon right now. And a couple of things happened. One was we got inventory back into place just as you asked about. So we’ve done — I would say our team has done an exceptional job of reselling and managing, especially in light of the surging demand because there’s a little bit of a lag to restock into their micro DCs. Team has done an excellent job in that space. But they’ve also gone out and won back to buy box for our products where we had resellers. You’re always fighting resellers. It’s a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole, honestly, as one — you knock one down and then another one pops up with your product at a discounted price where they happen to pick up 2 or 3 products at their local grocery on sale.
So we’ve been doing a really nice job of knocking that down. We’ve hired an agency to help with some of that. And we — I would say that we’ve just been executing that channel really well operationally. And at the same time, we did invest, we found — we’ve got some really strong returns on some of the ads that we’ve created and the search that we’ve been able to execute. And so, we’ve had really great commercial and operational execution there for the last quarter.
George Kelly: That’s helpful. And then next question, I wanted to ask about your hydration business grew a lot year-over-year. My sense is, maybe that’s driven from the Greens product. Correct me if I’m wrong. If that’s the case, I’m just — I’m wondering how you’re going to keep sort of pushing — like what’s the plan behind your expectation to continue growing that product? And like how are you going to continue to kind of broaden it? So anything there would be helpful.
Jason Vieth: Yes. Your intuition is exactly right, George. It is largely the Greens product that has been providing that growth. And I would say the Greens and the reds, we launched a sister product to our Greens, called the Daily Reds which is a kind of a heart health ancillary product. And similar to the Greens, each of the — both of those are made exclusively from fruits and vegetables. They are the cleanest products on the market. We’re marketing them as such. And what we’re finding is that, there has been — there’s a significant market that’s been created in the country for Daily Greens product. And I’ll just stay with that for a moment because that’s the 95 to the 5 probably of the category, if not more. And what we’re finding is that, based on our cost structure, we can have the best tasting, best efficacy product on the market at a lower cost than — or lower price than some of our competitors.
And that’s turning out to be a tremendous opportunity for us. And I think we’re just getting started in this space. We have some really strong marketing that’s coming behind it, some really great activations that we’re doing. And what we’re finding is that, once consumers flip over to become subscribers on that product, they really stick with us on a daily basis that turns into a great long-term relationship with them.
George Kelly: And is that product sold exclusively online?
Jason Vieth: It’s not. It’s where we started. We launched and it’s — I would say this is generally our launch pattern is to launch first on our own website, our Laird Superfood DTC website. We take all the learnings behind that and use that also as a way by offering those early exclusivities to consumers as a reward for shopping on our site. But then we broaden it from there. So we’ve launched it into Amazon. And in fact, we have it out now in a number of retailers, growing number of retailers in the natural food space.
