Westrock Coffee Company, LLC (NASDAQ:WEST) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris Pledger: Yeah. So, I mean, as we finish the year, we had $17 million in cash and we have had a completely undrawn $175 million revolver. You saw the announcement earlier this — in the first quarter where we added $50 million of incremental borrowing capacity to our delayed — in the form of delayed-draw term loan, which gives us additional excess capital. And then we are looking at ways that you can maximize working capital in order to be able to make sure that we have all liquidity we need in order to execute. So we feel really good about where we are. I mean, like Scott said, we plan the whole transaction for building out Conway and as long as we continue to stay disciplined, we continue to deliver, we have no concerns without being able to do that.

Jim Salera: Great. Thanks guys. I will pass it on.

Operator: Thank you. One moment please. We do have a follow-up question from Todd Brooks of Benchmark. Your line is open.

Todd Brooks: Hey. Thanks for giving me a couple of follow-up questions here. First, Scott, if you and this is my ignorance on the coffee market, but if you could talk about Bixby and what these influencer brands mean and what their skill set and capability really unlocks for Westrock as you fold that operation?

Scott Ford: Sure. So it’s a reasonably small business as it sits today, but they probably have the leading influencer brand market position on the West Coast. And as you go through, there was a great article, sorry, Todd. I will see if I can find it and send it back around to you. But there was a great article about, it used to be that people would say, I have a product idea, now I have a method of creating a brand and now I am going to spend money to create product awareness and brand affinity with the consumer and now I am going to actually pay people to put it on the shelf, that entire retail model has been turned upside down by the digital revolution. So you now have people that have already built brands, they might be wrestlers, boxers or makeup artists or guitarists, I don’t know.

But they built a brand where they have literally tens of millions of followers who want to be associated with these people, these influencers. So what Miles Fisher and Remington Hotchkis has done, which is a lot like what Elizabeth have also here in our group had started a small group in this kind of mind this vein. They had actually built the kitchen or a roasting facility in California where these influencers can come in and actually start to try products, create products and then we brought in the scaled manufacturing and purchasing power behind it so that these people can scale up really quickly. And we are talking about getting into as an illustration all of the Walmart, all of the Target. These are the kind of brands that are going in and they go from zero to full product arrays in less than nine months.

And so this is really a sales force and a selling site acquisition for us. We are really high on these two guys and their small team. They now work on Elizabeth’s team and we already had probably the leading influencer brand coffee launch customer already in our stable. So putting those together and having them, she’s actually out there on the West Coast right now focused on developing the full strategy to deliver not only roast and ground products, single-serve products, but you are going to see a lot of these folks have a mass following, they will get them in the ready-to-drink space. So pretty exciting just from a sales perspective.