The house is on fire. I think it’s important to know there’s a good solid base here with good free cash flow, with great businesses. And — in an acquisition within the consumer package space last — this week. I think as other consumer companies look for growth, they’re going to look for businesses with good opportunity. I think what’s unique and Jeff identified it is the opportunities with our licorice ingredient business and every product has ingredients to have the final product, and there’s a lot of good opportunities from licorice coming out there. The other thing today is there’s lots of noise out there with regards to sweeteners — and artificial sweeteners. But the good news is we have artificial sweeteners, and we have natural sugars.
So we have the whole game circuit covered here. We got a great international business with Canderel that has tremendous, tremendous brand, equity and brand recognition but it’s only sold in 3 or 4 countries today, so there’s lots of expansion. So with that, as we go through the review, I think the board, the special committee will look at what’s the opportunities here and where are the strategic opportunities and make sure that we’re looking at it for shareholders.
Scott Mushkin: Perfect. Then I have 1 housekeeping item. What was the price realization in CPG this quarter? I don’t know if I saw it, and then [indiscernible].
Irwin Simon: Bernardo.
Bernardo Fiaux: Yes. So on the supplement that we have on Page 4, you can see the breakdown of price and volume for both businesses. For Branded CPG segment for the second quarter, it was 4.8 percentage points. .
Irwin Simon: Scott, let me just add 1 other thing. I think the other thing is just a tad in place what we have here in the management team. On the consumer side, with Rajnish and Nigel, between both in their 60 years and Jeff with 30 years, and bringing Bernardo in with his fresh eyes and Brian Litman, there’s an incredible team in here for a company that does $0.5 billion in size that’s running us today. And I think that that’s a key and that’s what gets myself and to give shareholders [indiscernible], there’s great adults in here running this business.
Operator: Our next question comes from Ryan Meyers with Lake Street Capital.
Ryan Meyers: First one for me, the guidance implies improved growth in the second half of the year, obviously. Just wondering what your guys’ level of confidence is in that? And what sort of assumptions you guys are baking in? .
Irwin Simon: Bernardo, do you want to take that?
Bernardo Fiaux: Yes, perfect. Thank you for the question. And first — we are very pleased with our performance in June year-to-date. The $18.2 million of adjusted EBITDA delivered in Q2 a significant step-up versus Q1, driven by margin expansion, right? Like the impact of cost inflation has flattened and the impact from both supply chain innovation restructuring programs is based upon the results. As you heard last quarter and again today, margin improvements in recovery is our top priority, we are pleased to deliver against that. In terms of revenue, there’s still a lot of time left in the year and the seasonality will help in that regard. But we need to stay focused on our operational execution and maintaining excellent service levels as we continue to demonstrate this sales performance to improve.
Irwin Simon: And I think just to add on to that, as Bernardo said, we’re in early stages with regards to moving all our production to our third-party co-pack in Houston and Mexico and taking those costs out there, and we have definitely not recognized all those. And I think as I sat with the team last week is looking at the growth opportunities. And listen, there were some bumps along the way in regards to the comments that came out around aspartame and all stuff like that, but we’ve seen some great recoveries. And I think the other thing that we’ve mentioned here, we did not sell as much sugar as we could have as we did not want to pay the higher tariffs and those sales will ultimately come. So listen, I think the big thing also is we go back in other years where we didn’t have product and we didn’t have service levels, getting our service levels in the high 90s is the most important thing, and that’s what one of the big focuses of the team.
