John B Sanfilippo & Son at 15th East Coast IDEAS: Strategic Growth Unveiled

On Thursday, 12 June 2025, John B Sanfilippo & Son (NASDAQ:JBSS) presented at the 15th Annual East Coast IDEAS Conference, outlining a robust fiscal year 2024 performance and ambitious growth strategies. The company highlighted its strategic acquisition, expansion into new product categories, and investments in technology, while also addressing competitive pressures and market challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Fiscal year 2024 sales neared $1.1 billion, with a 4% CAGR in sales volume over the last decade.
• A $59 million acquisition of a snack bar manufacturer is expected to significantly boost revenue.
• The company plans to invest $90 million to expand bar production capacity.
• John B Sanfilippo & Son aims for $300 million to $500 million in bar category revenue in 3-5 years.
• Anticipated gross margin improvement in the Nut and Trail business from 18.6% to 19-20%.

Financial Results

John B Sanfilippo & Son reported strong financial metrics for fiscal year 2024:

• Sales reached nearly $1.1 billion, with a 4% CAGR in sales volume over the past ten years.
• Diluted EPS grew at an 8.1% CAGR over the last decade.
• Operating income remained steady at approximately 8%.
• The company recorded $100 million in EBITDA annually over the past three years.
• An annual dividend has consistently increased, supplemented by special dividends.
• Capital expenditures totaled $28 million last fiscal year, with over $37 million invested in the current fiscal year.

Operational Updates

Significant investments and expansions are underway:

• $90 million is allocated for expanding bar production capacity, with equipment sourced from Europe.
• The company is leveraging AI to enhance efficiencies, particularly in HR and consumer insights.
• Vertical integration efforts include shelling operations for pecans, peanuts, and walnuts, offering cost advantages.

Future Outlook

John B Sanfilippo & Son’s strategic growth pillars include:

• Expanding consumer reach via e-commerce and club channels.
• Diversifying the product portfolio, focusing on the bar category with a revenue target of $300 million to $500 million.
• Exploring new snacking categories such as cookies, crackers, and pretzels.
• Investing in brands like Fisher Recipe and Orchard Valley Harvest to enhance market presence.

Q&A Highlights

Key insights from the Q&A session included:

• The nut and trail category experienced a decline due to economic factors, but growth is expected to resume.
• Competitive pressures from brands like Planters and Blue Diamond are noted, with a focus on maintaining a price gap.
• The company’s vertical integration strategy does not include land ownership but involves contracting with growers.

In conclusion, John B Sanfilippo & Son’s presentation at the 15th Annual East Coast IDEAS Conference showcased its strategic initiatives and financial resilience. For a deeper dive into the company’s plans, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - The 15th Annual East Coast IDEAS Conference:

Operator: Good afternoon. Our next presenting company is John B Sanfilippo and Son, trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol j b s s, a hundred and two year old company with a generation of family management. If you’ve bought any kind of good value or great value or good and gathered brand in a Walmart or Target that is involves a nut or now a bar, there’s a very good chance that you’re having the product that these guys make. Here today to start off the presentation is Mike Finn, the company’s controller.

And with him here as well is Jeffrey Sanfilippo, the company’s CEO. Mike?

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me alright? Alright. Thank you.

So, yes, my name is Mike Finn. I’m the corporate controller, and I’m gonna talk you through the for fiscal twenty four results, and then we’ll give a recap for for through q three this year. So just real quick, we may make some forward looking statements today. These represent our current expectations and beliefs considering future events and are not guarantees. So real quick is a is an overview.

We’re almost $1,100,000,000 company. We have what we believe is the largest nut processing nut processing facilities in the world. With our September acquisition of 2023, we’re also a snack bar manufacturer. We operate in three distribution channels, the consumer channel, which is about about 82% of our business, the commercial ingredients channel, and the contract manufacturing channel, each approximately 10%. We’re vertically integrated in three nut types, pecans, walnuts, and peanuts.

Commodity procurement expertise is critical since there’s no futures or hedges for these commodities. And as John noted, this is a generation family managed company. So moving on, let’s take a look at our sales by product type. So nut and trail mixes, snack and trail mixes make up approximately 25% of our portfolio. With our recent snack bar acquisition, those represent approximately 11% of our gross sales last year, but this year they’re up to at least about 14%.

Our business model provides us the up competitive competitive advantage and, foundation to deliver consistent results. So if you look in the top left there, sales volume over the last ten years has grown at almost 4% CAGR. Our diluted EPS over the last ten years has also grown at 8.1%. Our operating income is approximately 8%, and our stock price has grown at almost a 16% CAGR through fiscal twenty four. Now we currently have experienced a decrease in price due to margin and volume challenges, but we’re still at approximate 9% CAGR.

So how does this translate to profitability? So you can see we’ve consistently grown our volume over the last ten years. The net sales price is dependent on the underlying commodity, which will cause volatility. So, translating to profitability, our EBITDA dollars have increased since fiscal twenty four. And in the last three years, we’ve generated a $100,000,000 of EBITDA in each year.

You can also see a similar trend in EBITDA per pound sold. So profitability growth is one of our main objectives, but we are also just as focused on returning value to our shareholders and investing back into the business. So eight years ago, we started a dividend policy and paid our annual dividend of 50¢ per share. We’ve increased that annual dividend each subsequent year. We’ve also consistently supplemented that annual dividend with a special dividend that’s ranged from $2 to $4.80 per share.

So the management team continues to focus on returning profits to our shareholders. In addition, we continue to invest in the business, spending over $28,000,000 in CapEx last fiscal year. Through three quarters of this fiscal year, we’ve invested over $37,000,000 in the business. So we’ve created a strong foundation for our future profitable growth. We have a very strong balance sheet.

We’ve decreased our debt to equity and debt to EBITDA to near record low levels. So as I mentioned earlier, we made a street strategic acquisition to increase our snack bar capabilities. Purchase price was about $59,000,000 and more than half of which was inventory. We got a great deal on this acquisition and actually recorded a $2,000,000 bargain purchase gain, whereas most acquisitions might generate, you know, tens of millions of dollars of goodwill. So this helped accelerate our product diversification and allows us to offer a full full line of snack bars to our private label customers.

Fiscal twenty four sales of this acquisition were about 120,000,000, and that was just in three quarters. This year, it should be about 150,000,000. Regarding net net sales by distribution channel, you can see that our consumer channel has grown significantly in the last ten years to 82% of our portfolio. This is a deliberate change in our business strategy to shift to the more value added channels. So let’s review distribution, sales by distribution channel.

So our consumer channel is about 82%, and in ’24, it went up 11 in sales. This was driven by private label growth as well as our snack bar acquisition, ecommerce growth, and some growth into the club channel as well. Commercial ingredients on the other hand decreased 10% to about 110,000,000 in sales. So this was largely driven by competitive pricing issues. And then our shift away from industrial customers is is really just a risk strategy and part of our business business priorities.

And finally, our contract manufacturing channel was about 84,000,000 in sales, again, also a decrease from the previous year. Unfavorable pricing drove volume down and then our largest customer in this channel canceled the new product launch. So I apologize for the eye chart here, but I can help explain this. So the vertical bars represent our gross margin percentage every quarter for the last ten years. And the horizontal lines are the cost of our major commodities with pecans, cashews and almonds being the top three from a cost perspective.

So as you can see, the nut prices are volatile, but we’re still able to deliver a consistent gross margin. So let’s quickly review the retail nut category. So you can see that the price per pound has increased since fiscal twenty, which has negatively impacted the category volume and the dollar share. We believe as retail prices as retail prices start to decrease, this trend will reverse. Consumers value the health benefits of nuts and will increase their consumption as retail selling prices decrease.

Now in the current fiscal year, we’ve seen the opposite occur. So prices are still going up. Retailer or consumers are either buying cheaper snacks or they’re leaving a snack channel entirely, and the nut channel is flat to down a percent or two in sales volume. I will now turn it over to Jeffrey. Thanks, Mike.

Thanks, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here. So every big corporation has a mission. So our mission is we’re nuts about creating real food that brings joy, nourishes people, and protects the planet. We have three specific growth pillars that I’ll cover.

So expand consumer reach. Today, we have a very low penetration of where you can find our products. Our branded products, very low ACV, so our focus is to find where consumers are shopping or buying snacks and making sure that our products are available for them. E commerce is an area where we continue to see people growing and buying snack items online. So we’re focused on building out our e commerce platform, both with Amazon, with walmart.com, kroger.com, and Target.

So a big focus on expanding where consumers can find our products. Create value with key customers. Private label is the biggest piece of our business today. Walmart is our largest customer as they are many CPG companies. Target is number two.

Trader Joe’s has just moved into the position. And then Frito Lay, which is part of our co manufacturing division, is number four. So we are focused on creating value for them. We invest heavily in consumer insights to make sure that we’re bringing new products to market that consumers are looking for, and really understanding consumption trends within the snacking category. Now, bar opportunity.

So we’ve been a nut and trail company for one hundred years, and we decided to look at alternative categories to invest and diversify our product portfolio. Bars made sense to us. They use a lot of nuts and nut butters in different snack bars, so it was an easy transition. It also is a much faster growing category than nut and trail. And private label penetration is much smaller in the bar category.

So you can see it’s a $9,600,000,000 category today. The left pie chart is nutrition bars, so think of Cliff Bar, Quest Bar, any energy bar. That’s part of the nutrition bar category. Breakfast bar is typically your fruit and grain bars, so think of Nutrigrain bar. And then granola and all other is really the chewy granola type of bars.

And so today our biggest focus is on nutrition. That’s the biggest part of the categories we’re investing in building out our nutrition bar platform. But the volume today is mainly made up of chewy granola and fruit and grain bars. And what’s exciting is if you look at the private label nut and trail business, even though the volume is down, Mike touched on kind of price inflation and commodity costs, there’s no futures trading in the nut industry. So we have to be experts at procurement, and we have to make sure that we have good access to what’s happening buyers out there watching the walnut crop, the peanut crop, pecan crop, so we know what’s happening both from a supply standpoint and from a quality standpoint.

So although we’ve seen declines in the category today, we started to see it stabilize over the last couple of periods, and our hope is that as we get better commodity prices for this next year crop, we can look at promotional pricing to get lower retail prices. We’re also focused on price pack architecture. We’re making smaller bags to get that price point on the shelf down for consumers to be able to afford to purchase. But this is not just specific to the nut category. If you looked at the entire snack category today, whether it’s Hormel or Frito or Kraft Heinz, really food stocks in general are struggling because of different consumption and increasing costs.

Goods today. So a much higher concentration in nut and snacks. We see this as a great opportunity because we already supply a lot of the major retailers with their nut and trail mix program. So we have a really good relationship, leverage foundation with our key retail partners. In comparison, when you look at the barbed category, it’s only 7% private label.

The reason for that is twofold. Number one, there’s not a lot of capacity in the bar category today. Extremely expensive investments in bar manufacturing equipment. The turnaround time is one to two years to get that equipment in once you do order it. Majority is manufactured in Europe, in Switzerland, in Germany, and Italy.

So a lot of lead time plus investment. So there’s not enough capacity today in the bar category. In addition, it’s such a small piece of private label at 7%. So we’re investing in the category. We believe over the next three to five years, it will go from what is $150,000,000 piece of business for JBSS today to 300,000,000 to $500,000,000 Those are our expectations for the bar category for private label.

And the investments we’re making are not only to reduce our costs, investing in higher operational machinery. For example, today our equipment can do 600 to 800 bars a minute. The investments we’re making in those lines will do 2,500 bars a minute. So triple, quadruple the amount of volume that we can do in capacity and also drive costs out of the per unit price. So really excited about the bar category.

A lot of companies and retailers want to expand their bar portfolio. We are providing an opportunity for them to do that. Now I’ll take a quick look at our brands. So our brands are 15% of our sales today. So not huge, but still important to us because it is a high margin piece of business for JBSS.

So our brands make up 15%, as I said. Fisher recipe, it is the number one category leader in recipe nuts today. It’s 59% of our total volume in retail brand. And then Fisher snack is a bit smaller than that. And then 27% is Orchard Valley Harvest.

And then a small percent, 14%, is some of our other smaller brands. We invested in a brand or on QVC, really indulgent chocolate coated items, that’s our Squirrel brand today. So the investment is, I mentioned e commerce. You know, we’re in a lot of brick and mortar stores today, but we want to be more cognizant of where we are investing in trade and marketing. E commerce is a perfect area for that.

But also there’s retailers where we don’t have distribution today. We do not have much distribution in the club channel, extremely important channel between Costco and Sam’s and BJ’s, so an area of focus for us for growth opportunities in the future. Just some of the accomplishments, really focused on building out our brand portfolio, expanding our programs, using our consumer insights team to create items that consumers are looking for, innovative items. So that’s been important for us as well to build out our brands. And then for Fisher recipe, it’s educating consumers on how to use nuts as an ingredient.

Millennial generation, Gen A, Gen Z, not really good, I shouldn’t say good cookers, but it’s not top of mind for them. They use nuts and eat nuts in a ton of snacks that they have in breakfast cereals, but they don’t think of nuts when they’re cooking necessarily. So we want to educate younger consumers on how to use nuts, what they can use them for with different savory dishes or sweets and baking items. So our recipe brand, we had some distribution declines this past year, although we’ve really gained new distribution going into fiscal twenty twenty five into 2026. We think it’s still an important category.

It’s one of the most profitable brands that we have. Because we’re vertically integrated and we shell our own pecans, our peanuts, and walnuts, we have a really good cost management with our supply chain, which allows us to be very competitive and profitable in the recipe nut category. And ACV is about 47% for our brand today. Orchard Valley Harvest, really opportunities to expand that portfolio. Really look at health and wellness, all natural ingredients.

I think with the new administration coming in with focus on ultra processed foods, seed oils, this brand gives us an opportunity to support those changing dynamics from food consumption and from messaging as well. So we’re excited about where we can grow with this brand. And then our other snack portfolio, it’s more of a stabilize, these brands. We’re not really investing a lot in growing them. We think there’s an opportunity to manage them in some retailers, but it’s not a huge investment or main focus.

We’re looking at other areas of the business to expand on. And I touched on consumer insights. So when you’re a private label manufacturer, very few of our competitors really invest heavily in consumer insights. Our team, we’ve got a whole division that focuses We have our own custom database with Nielsen Surcana now that monitors the snack category, the trail mix category, and the bar category.

So we invested in this originally to build out our brands, to understand consumer dynamics and trends. What we realized is that same information we receive from our insights, we could apply to Walmart and to Trader Joe’s and to Whole Foods. So we take all those consumer insights, which very few private label manufacturers do, and apply those insights to what we develop and offer to Walmart or to Trader Joe’s or to Target. Really helps us provide more value for those retailers, but also it helps bring the right items to market and not just throw a bunch of items in product development against a wall and see what sticks. So we are tracking conversations online.

Every time there’s a mention of an almond or a walnut or a flavor trend, our teams are managing what you see out there online, and we can take those insights and say, Okay, these are the right flavors that we should be looking at for fiscal ’twenty six and beyond. So extremely important differentiation for our company. Then our innovation process follows that. So we’ve invested heavily in research and development. We’ve got a strong team in our headquarters in Chicago that really monitor flavor trends and are really bringing really innovative new items to market.

There’s also a lot of new technology and adhesions to be able to create flavorful nuts that don’t have as many ingredients or adhesives to keep the flavor tied to the nut. And so that’s going to help us bring even more healthier products to market with less type of ingredients. Then from a long term strategy, so we are focused on our private brand program. It is the biggest piece of our business today. We’re going to continue to work with Walmart and Target and Whole Foods, all the big retailers.

Kroger is one where we do very little business with today, but they are now starting to purchase snack and energy bars from us. So that’s a brand new business that we’re building out with Kroger. Club channel, I touched on Costco and Sands. We do very little business today. With the new manufacturing that we’re putting in with these bar investments, we’ll be able to supply club channel with competitive bars for their product line because the volume is so big in the club channel.

And then transform our brands. We’re on our brands. Even though small piece of our business, it’s still important from a margin perspective. And then expand, diversify our portfolio. So bars was our investment to diversify out of the snack and trail mix category, but there are other categories that we’ll look at down the road.

Cookie category, the cracker category in private label, we’re looking at popcorn. Pretzels would be one that would make sense for us because we already use millions of pounds of pretzels in our snack mixes to be vertically integrated in pretzel manufacturing would be a key to growth in the future. So with that, do you have any questions for the team? Yes? So that investment is going

Unidentified speaker: be about $90,000,000 Okay, half of which we spent in current fiscal year,

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: the other half we’ll spend in next fiscal year.

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Yeah, typically we’re about 28 to 30,000,000 CapEx a year. So it’s a 90,000,000 investment split over two years. Sorry, machinery? Oh gosh, so Buehler, who else? It’s Switzerland, Italy, and Germany are the three main countries.

Yeah, Synagogne is one of the big ones. Packaging, I’m not sure who, which one that is. But that’s where the best equipment is made right now. Right, no, it’s total category. That includes inorganic.

Yes. Mhmm. So I would say on the nut in trail, it’s relatively flat. Consumers, well, reasons. One, the difference between organic nuts and nonorganic.

Oh, okay.

Unidentified speaker: I exclude your acquisition. What is

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: the Organic, not organic foods, okay, got it. Yep, got it.

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: For growth without acquisitions. Yeah, I think it’s still the same answer. It’s probably a slight increase year over year.

Unidentified speaker: Does that mean it’s trending roughly population growth?

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Yeah, I would say.

Unidentified speaker: Nuts per person is low.

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Would say it’s level. We’ve seen one to 3% kind of category growth. If you looked at the last three to five years, it has been growing, the nut and trail category specifically, total category. So 1% to 3% CAGR has been kind of the historic level. We saw a decline this past year, I think partly because of the economy, inflation, just consumption in general.

Now flattened out. We’re not seeing any declines in the category. I would expect with pricing to come back down again, you’ll see that growth get back to that 1% to 3% CAGR.

Unidentified speaker: So it’s not like nut consumption per person isn’t some kind of secular decline?

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: No. No. It’s fairly flat. Yep. Competitive pricing.

So on the branded side. Sure. So that. Sure. So on the price and the branded side, Planters, which is Ornod by Hormel, that’s the biggest brand share in the branded category for Snack and Trail.

So their competitor, you have Blue Diamond, West Coast.

Unidentified speaker: Are these the people who are causing the illusion to fall? Because they’re coming under you on price.

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Yeah, planners would be one. So Hormel, once they bought the brand from Kraft Heinz years ago, it was already a declining brand when they bought it. They’ve invested so much in trade support to try to regain some of that market share. So at some points they’ve been cheaper than the private label that we supply in some of those retailers. So that’s been part of the demand declines as a result of Hormelo spending a lot of money on the brand.

And then you’ve got other Blue Diamond is another one that spend really heavily on building their ACV, in some cases cheaper than the private label. But that’s cyclical. They can’t continue that. It’s really just maintaining and trying to gain whatever market share they can. So brands have done it.

But then we have private label competitors, of course, as well. We’ve got some pretty significant competitors there too. But with our scale and with what I believe is kind of the differentiation, the consumer insights, the vertical integration, the control of the quality from the field to the shelf, it doesn’t insulate us, but it just creates much better relationships with key retailers where we feel like we’ve got still opportunities to sustain and grow with them. So pricing between brand and private label? Oh, oh, sure.

Oh, Yeah. So typically for private label, there should be a 10% to 15% price gap between the brand leader and private label offering. It depends on the retailer. Some retailers are 20%, 25% below the brand leader. Typically planners is 15, yeah, 10% to 15%.

So when drop 15%, 20%, where they’re actually cheaper than private label, that’s where it becomes a problem. That’s right, go ahead. We have nine minutes.

Unidentified speaker: You said you’re vertically integrated and this is my introduction to the

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: company. Okay. Oh,

Unidentified speaker: thank you. From a sourcing perspective, vertically integrated, you own the land.

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: No, so we don’t own the farms or the land. We have maybe 30 acres of trees, but it’s really, nah, it’s nothing. So we’re a 102 old business, so we contract with growers. We bring their in shell into our facilities. So vertical integration is walnuts, for example.

We have a facility in Gustine, California, right in the Central Valley Of California where walnuts are grown almonds, pistachios. So we buy them from the walnut growers. Every year we have contracts with a majority or a big group of walnut processors, buy their in shell, bring it to our facility, we keep it in cold storage. And then as we need the walnuts for orders, we crack them, clean them, sort them, package them, and then ship them. So that’s the vertical integration where most companies in the nut industry don’t do that.

They buy from companies like us that shell walnuts, and then they bring them in and package them. So what that allows us to do, of all, it’s a huge investment. So when we went public in 1991, the reason we did it initially was to become vertically integrated. So invested in walnut shelling. We invested in pecan shelling in Texas, invested in expanding our peanut processing because we wanted to control the supply chain from the farmer because there were years where there was peanuts, for example.

They had a huge drought in the late ’80s in Georgia and the Southeast. We couldn’t get access to peanuts. So we wanted to make sure that we protected our supply chain so that vertical integration was our way of doing that. So huge investment, but it allows us to control quality in the supply chain. Plus we have really good visibility on what’s happening with the crops because our field buyers are in the market all the time.

We’ve got really good relationships with our farmers. And so it’s been an important part, something that people don’t realize how important that differentiation is and that kind of competitive advantage. They take it for granted. Sure. So the capacity utilization in our shelling plants is very low.

We’ve got a lot of available capacity for our pecan facility in Texas. We’ve got, we’re probably only at maybe 60% utilization. So a lot of opportunities for growth there. Walnuts, same thing. Peanuts, it’s a little less capacity because we also make peanut butter in that facility.

So a lot of the peanuts that we buy and use go into dry roast peanuts, but they also go into peanut butter for Trader Joe’s for example. So that’s probably 80% utilized at this point. But the bars is all, that’s relatively new for us. Especially as we make this investment. Sure.

Unidentified speaker: It’s not at all.

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: It’s a few percent during the shelling process. Yeah.

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: So when we the pecans is a good example. When we buy from pecan growers, bring them in, they’re in shelling the pecans, go into cold storage. Our waste our yield is about less than 4% loss on that whole process. So it’s pretty sophisticated. The cracking equipment, the technology for sorting is very sophisticated in the nut industry.

So yields are really, the waste is not very high. So it depends on how much you paid for the machine. Depends on the investment, depends on the margin. Nut and Trail is higher margin than bars today. So our Nut and Trail business is anywhere from, to this year it’s about 18.6% gross margin, we should be more at 19% to 20% margin on Nut and Trail.

The bar margin today is about 14% to 15%. And that’s where we are investing in this new operation to be able to reduce our cost in order to margin up there. Yep. Oh, so about the return on that investment? The return on investment.

Ah, okay. Like the timing of it.

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: I mean we have a minimum of we want to get at least ten percent and two to three year payback. That’s the minimum hurdle.

Unidentified speaker: A minimum is 10. What’s a great project? What makes you jump out of your share?

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Well, the acquisition in Lakeville, Minnesota was that one was we bought it less than book value. So that was that’s the kind of deal we wanna get. Where it expands your capacity, creates opportunities for you to grow that business, margin up, and not have to pay a lot for it.

Unidentified speaker: Are there a lot of smaller failing people that you can roll up?

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: I think you’re going to see some of that this year, especially in the nut and trail category. I think with the economics, the dynamics of supply chain, the uncertainty in markets today, we’ve seen rumblings of companies that are smaller competitors that are looking to either sell or do something with their business. So I expect we should see that in the coming year. Yeah?

Unidentified speaker: Generationally or the coming year?

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Yeah, so I’ve been CEO since 02/2007. One of my brothers is five years younger, so he would probably be next in line. And then the generation is, let’s see, they’re young, 30 year old, 26 or 28. So there’s a generation. Yeah, there’s some lineage there.

We’ve brought in a lot of key talent from outside the company and outside the family, which is extremely important for us.

Unidentified speaker: Which one? Oh. Shelved? No. The new product was supposed to be into the shelf.

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Oh. That was probably a Frito launch. So that

Unidentified speaker: was our contract manufacturing channel.

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: So we had volume that we expected that didn’t pan out. They they they canceled that project.

Unidentified speaker: It was one of ours.

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Do you guys own food stocks now? Who owns food stocks here? You have a couple, which ones? Unilever, okay, alright. Good company.

We do, yeah. We do sprouts with some branded items. Our Orchard Valley Harvest, we have a couple distribution. No private label for sprouts, but some other branded items. Yeah, they’re a good retailer.

Oh sure. You have a connection? Okay, there you go. Next earnings call, you can mention it. Yeah, they’re a good company, good business.

Yes? Wanna cover that?

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Yeah, I mean it’s really

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: The more the better, that’s how I say it. Once

Unidentified speaker: we meet our crop acquisition needs for the year, we finance our, we usually self finance our own CapEx for

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: the year. Any M and A

Unidentified speaker: activity if that happens to be in that year,

Mike Finn, Corporate Controller, John B Sanfilippo and Son: any remainder would be then considered for this special dividend. And usually that’s declared towards the end of our fiscal year, so we’ve already got the next fiscal year’s

Unidentified speaker: plan in place.

Jeffrey Sanfilippo, CEO, John B Sanfilippo and Son: Our biggest cash flow is on the commodity purchases. So depending on what the pecan price for the crop is or the walnut or almond crop, that kind of dictates sometimes what the cash flow looks like and that will dictate what the extra dividend is. Sorry? We are starting to use it now. So we’re going to have our chatbot in our HR department.

That’s the place where we’ll use AI. Our consumer insights teams uses it already with some of the algorithms that they’re doing. I know we’ve got a whole training program with AI. We’re a Microsoft Copilot company, so we’re trying to manage kind of what people do with AI within our four walls. So we’ve got a lot of training courses where they’re using Copilot for a lot of different functions.

But definitely it is part of our future, our enabler AI technology, because we see there’s a lot of value there to not only drive costs out but also increase our efficiencies going forward. Robotics is a big investment. So during the pandemic, when labor was so short, the return on investment for a robot that could eliminate two or three positions was within a year. So we invested a lot during the pandemic in robotics. So if you were to go in our facility in Chicago today, you would see almost nobody that’s physically putting a bag in a box or a box on a pallet.

It’s all robotics today. That’s the type of automation and investments that we’re making on the manufacturing. So that’s where the Orchard Valley Harvest brand will come in. Yeah, no preservatives, no artificial ingredients. I think we’re out time.

I’m seeing a red button blink. But thank you everyone. Appreciate

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