Our customers are global food producers, as I mentioned, and our sales and marketing approaches are key to that and focused to the, the fact that these companies produce feed for multi-species and have multiple end markets that they serve. We’re currently in field testing with some of the largest producers in North America. We’ve completed a number of trials. We’re seeing good adoption, and we’re seeing growth in our business as a result. The growth will be rapid. It’ll be stair step and volatile over the first year or two because some of these customers are extraordinarily large. And as they come online, we’ll see dramatic step ups in the volume that we sell into this market. We’ve also, on the marketing side, done a great job with the team that we have.
We’ve launched a new global website that will provide support for our products internationally, but also with a new focus in North America. And we have filled that website with a lot of information our customers can utilize from research articles to blogs and expert advice, not only on the use of our products, but addressing the reason why our products are necessary, the underlying situations or conditions that producers deal with every day and we’re providing information to support our customers in targeting those elements. We have our upcoming IPPE Convention here in January in Atlanta. It is the launching pad as I mentioned a moment ago for our North American portfolio a year ago. And it’s a conference that attracts people from all around the world.
So we’re excited to be demoing there again at IPPE with both presentations as well as a booth to service our customers. And then lastly, coming up in March the VIV in Bangkok is one of the largest international shows. Amlan will be there again with a booth, again with a full compliment of staff to support our customers, to meet with new customers that are interested in our products and really help drive the growth of our business. So with that, I’ll conclude my remarks and I’ll hand it back over to Dan for Q&A.
Daniel Jaffee: Wade, thank you very, very much. Thank you to the whole Oil-Dri team. As I opened up an investment in Oil-Dri’s and investment in our people, and I’m sure you are as impressed with our team as I am, and so that we have a lot of momentum heading into the next quarters and the next fiscal years. We’re going to open up the floor for questions. People who are submitting their questions, using the Ask a Question field on the webcast, questions or remarks obviously must be relevant to the meeting and pertinent to the matters brought before the meeting. Leslie will read the questions and then I will either answer it directly or direct it to a specific Oil-Dri teammate to field the question. So Leslie, number one?
Q – :
A – Leslie Garber: Okay, the first one in the queue is, can you please address the implications of the Albertsons Kroger merger on Oil-Dri specifically, and the branded private label cat little market more broadly? As I recall, Nestle has a plant in California that is dedicated to supplying Kroger’s private label that may or may not still be the case.
Daniel Jaffee: Great, thank you. Chris?
Christopher Lamson: Yes, thanks, Leslie. We and Dan, we do business with both customers today. We see the — I think we see the impending merger as having both some potential for real upside candidly, and I think, probably others across CPG that’s selling to selling into one or both like we do would say there’s a little bit of, a little bit of risk as well. I think most importantly, our existing business with them is in the litter €“ in the lightweight segment of litter with our existing business within the context of both where, and hopefully took this from the last presentation or from my presentation, we have significant advantage probably as evidenced by our private label market share being north of 70% our private label market share with lightweight.
So that gives us confidence. I’d also say the question alluded to California in terms of a private label producer of lightweight, but even of course, I put our footprint up against really against anybody we compete with. We have a great footprint, which is particularly important given the freight cost driver that we talked about before. And specifically we too have a manufacturing facility that’s vertically integrated like all of ours in California.
Leslie Garber: Great. Thank you.
Daniel Jaffee: Thank you.
