Lancaster Colony Corporation (NASDAQ:LANC) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

But really, it’s — we’re just lapping a period of launch and now it’s just selling off of the shelf. I do think that you may see brands like Buffalo Wild Wings that you see more focus on around March Madness and football than you will and others like barbecue items, I think it will move maybe more consistent with that. Olive Garden dressing, I wouldn’t expect that to be terribly seasonal. It’s a year-round business. There’s a little bit of a spike on salads after the first of the year when everybody decides to go on a diet. But again, that’s a little bit of a one-off there that I would point to.

Todd Brooks: Okay, great. And then my follow-up is, can you Dave or Tom or Dale, can you snapshot for us? If we look at the licensed branded product portfolio, entering the end of this year versus the end of end of the last calendar year in 2022. Can we review how much broader the offerings are, whether it’s pack size flavors, but also distribution if Horse Cave’s allowed you to open up different channels of distribution? And then maybe we can segue into a discussion of growth outlook for these products across full fiscal 2024?

Dave Ciesinski: Sure. So, why don’t I try to do it. I think when you look at the business overall, the change that we’re talking about in Q1 for all of our licensing was about $26 million, about 30% of growth. So we continue to feel pretty good about the growth from the proposition overall. Now, bringing it into some of the specific products, I’ll try to work on that for you off the top of my head here. So I think if you go back into the spring period of last year, we launched actually it would have been fall of last year. We launched a 24-ounce size for Chick-fil-A and then on the heels of that, we came out with the barbecue and the Sweet & Spicy Sriracha that really started to go more broadly in distribution, not in the fall, but in the spring.

In the spring for Chick-fil-A, we also launched the salad dressings and produce that we talked about, four flavors of those. And I mentioned on the call there that we did for this quarter, $10 million of retailer sales on those items. As you go around on Buffalo Wild Wings, if my memory serves me, we launched two items, two incremental new flavors there. On Olive Garden, we launched a Caesar, which is — we’re very pleased with how it’s doing in the marketplace. And we announced the launch of Texas Roadhouse on the last call, but obviously, that’s not into the marketplace. We don’t expect that to be out until later in this fiscal year as we had showcased for you. So, you add all that together, what’s that maybe seven or eight SKUs that we brought probably the hardest driver of those SKUs is the 24-ounce where we’re seeing very nice growth.

loyal consumers are trading up to the larger size, but all of them are contributing in some measure. So hopefully, that kind of gives you an idea of what we’re doing in terms of growth we brought to the marketplace phase between the fall and the spring. In terms of capacity, I would say at this point, we have enough capacity to continue to facilitate the growth of both our own brands and bottles and licenses. So, we have no limitations there. We are limiting the number of shifts that we’re using in some of these facilities in Horse Cave. So if we saw an opportunity really to go, we would be able to add more shifts to sell.

Tom Pigott: Yes, I mean overall, we feel really good about the platform. If you go back to 2022, we generated 28% growth in terms of net sales. We generated around 30% in 2023, and we expect to continue to drive strong growth behind this platform, enabled by all those new items that Dave mentioned as well as the Horse Cave capacity expansion.

Dave Ciesinski: Yes. And as the base gets bigger, obviously, the size of the period-on-period growth numbers will get smaller. We’re not going to continue to grow at those sort of rates now that this is growing into a material piece of business for us.