The Simply Good Foods Company (NASDAQ:SMPL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Geoff Tanner: Yes. I mean just a couple of builds, perhaps, I think, firstly, as advocates to weight, wellness and nutrition. I think it’s great that consumers who struggle with us have another option which is — I think it’s great. In addition, the consumers who are on the drug, Jason, needing nutritional support. I’m equally excited about the opportunity that these consumers when they come off the drugs. I think a very small portion will stay on for a long time. When consumers come off the drug, the last thing they’re going to want to do is put the weight back on, especially after experiencing the physical and mental benefits of weight loss. But we see this as an opportunity to position Atkins as a complement to help consumers while they’re on the drug and then to help them knock it back on the truck.

And lastly, with the digital tools available to us right now, we can find these consumers and we can message directly through them. And probably not a surprise but the team is on it right now. So we think this is a wave and we’re going to catch it.

Jason English: Thank you for the very thorough and thoughtful answer.

Operator: Our last question for today will come from the line of Steve Powers with Deutsche Bank.

Steve Powers: I don’t want to ruin Jason’s thunder [ph].

Joe Scalzo: That’s okay, Steve. Mark told me he was the last question.

Steve Powers: Just actually just one and relatively tactical. On the gross margin front, the overdelivery this quarter was, as you say, very welcome. As I look at the fourth quarter, I think external estimates based on commentary last quarter, we’re looking for gross margins to inflect closer to 38% in the fourth quarter. Your slide today, Slide 15 points at closer to 37%. So just wanted to maybe talk a little bit about the puts and takes there if anything’s changed? And sort of how we think about the progress quarter-over-quarter and then sort of the — what the exit rate implies for momentum into ’24.

Geoff Tanner: Yes, let me take that one. First of all, I’m not going to give you a number for Q4 but that’s okay. As we go forward, I think take a step back for a second. We overdelivered our gross margin by about 40 basis points for the quarter. Q3 it’s about $1 million, give or take. Favorability was really lower ingredient costs as we started to see that flow through a little sooner than we thought some favorability in the inbound freight. We had no change to the Q4 fiscal year if we budgeted Q4 to kind of this run rate. And so the Q3 beat really wasn’t significant enough to move the needle. We do think we’ll see sequential improvement from Q3 to Q4 for gross margin. The last point I want to make to the team here is we had some misses, obviously, in Q1 and Q2.

We put fixes in place. They’ve resulted in better communication visibility and more efficient operating effectiveness. Gives us greater confidence in our forecast as you see that with the Q3 results. So you’re going to see sequential improvement.

Operator: Thank you for joining us today. I’ll now turn the call back over to management for any final comments.