Vital Farms at 2025 Global Consumer & Retail Conference: Strategic Growth Plans

On Wednesday, 08 October 2025, Vital Farms (NASDAQ:VITL) presented at the 2025 Global Consumer & Retail Conference, sharing insights on its strategic growth and operational challenges. CFO Thilo Wrede discussed the company’s ambitious plans to expand its supply chain and production capacity while addressing potential market hurdles.

Key Takeaways

• Vital Farms projects a 27% revenue growth in 2025, aiming for $770 million.
• Expansion includes a third production line in Springfield, Missouri, and a new facility in Seymour, Indiana.
• Organic eggs represent over a third of the company’s volume, contributing to higher revenue per unit.
• The company is offsetting tariff impacts with price increases and focusing on efficiency through accelerator farms.
• Vital Farms remains optimistic about consumer resilience despite economic uncertainties.

Financial Results

• Revenue Growth:

- The company expects at least 27% growth in 2025, reaching approximately $770 million.

- The new production line in Springfield will increase egg revenue capacity to $1.2 billion.

- A facility in Seymour, Indiana, is planned for early 2027, boosting capacity to $2.1 billion.

• Profitability:

- A profitable EBITDA of at least $110 million is projected for 2025.

- Gross margins have been healthy at around 39%, surpassing the long-term target of 35%.

• Tariffs:

- Price increases implemented in Q2 aim to offset tariff impacts on imported packaging and feed.

- The effects of tariffs are expected to be felt in the fourth quarter.

• Product Mix:

- Organic eggs, making up just over a third of volume, drive a price mix benefit due to higher revenue per unit.

- Butter accounts for about 5% of revenue, with a supply chain rebuild using Irish butter set for 2024.

Operational Updates

• Supply Chain:

- Vital Farms works with over 500 family farms, up from 300 in 2023, recruiting 30-35 farms per quarter.

- All eggs are sourced directly from contracted family farms, avoiding the open market.

• Production Capacity:

- The third production line in Springfield, Missouri, is on schedule for Q4 completion.

- A new Seymour, Indiana, facility is planned for early 2027.

• Distribution:

- The company is present in about 23,500 stores out of 32,000 in the U.S. that sell specialty eggs.

- Focus is on increasing SKUs on existing shelves and enhancing velocity rather than expanding store count.

• Accelerator Farms:

- About 15 farms are being developed for R&D and testing efficient barn configurations.

- The first accelerator farm went online in July, serving as a benchmark.

• Avian Flu:

- No impact from avian flu since 2024, despite significant bird losses in the U.S.

Future Outlook

• Strategic Plans:

- Continued recruitment of family farms to expand egg supply.

- Expanding distribution by increasing SKUs, particularly in food and mass channels.

- Utilizing promotions to enhance brand awareness and consumption.

• Potential Challenges:

- Balancing egg supply, processing capacity, and demand growth.

- Addressing butter supply chain disruptions due to international trade complexities.

- Monitoring consumer spending trends amid economic uncertainties.

• Growth Opportunities:

- Expanding organic egg offerings for higher revenue per unit.

- Reintroducing discontinued butter SKUs and expanding retail partnerships.

Q&A Highlights

• Industry State:

- Egg shelves are full, but the US laying flock is still below normal levels.

- Prices are elevated but lower than Q1 levels.

• Consumer Behavior:

- Consumer distribution remains consistent with increased household penetration.

- Consumption increases over time after initial trials of Vital Farms products.

• Economy and Consumer Spending:

- No current impact from economic headwinds; Vital Farms’ consumer base is seen as recession-resistant.

• 2026 Excitement and Concerns:

- Excited about improved supply and production capacity with new facilities.

- Concerned about harmonizing egg supply, processing capacity, and demand growth.

Vital Farms’ detailed strategies and operational updates reflect a robust plan to navigate the evolving market landscape. For more in-depth insights, refer to the full conference transcript.

Full transcript - 2025 Global Consumer & Retail Conference:

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: Great. Okay, let’s get started. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. I’m Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst at Telsey Advisory Group. It is my pleasure today to host Vital Farms at this conference. As many of you know, Vital Farms is a leader in pasture-raised eggs, and it’s also one of the fastest growing consumer brands we cover in our space. This year in 2025, we are looking at a growth of at least 27% to about $770 million from them, and a profitable EBITDA of at least about $110 million. Very strong growth. From the company today, we have CFO Thilo Wrede, and welcome to the conference here.

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Thank you.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: Great. Let me start with the big picture question. You know, we keep hearing positively about the increased need for protein, and eggs are one of the key sources for protein. On the opposite side, over the past two years, we have seen shortages in the egg industry because of the avian flu that impacted the flocks. Help us understand the current state of the industry just from a demand-supply standpoint, and where do you stand from that standpoint?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah, I would characterize it as when you go to a store today, shelves look pretty full again. You compare that to the first quarter of this year when shelves looked pretty decimated at times. The laying flock population in the U.S., which normally stands around 330 million birds, still hasn’t been fully rebuilt.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: Okay.

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: I think we’re around 290, 300 million birds right now. You don’t see it on shelf as much anymore. There’s probably some exports that are not happening right now. For the U.S. consumer, it’s less visible that the flock is not back to full strength yet. Prices still tend to be somewhat elevated, certainly below where prices were in the first quarter. We are in the process, or the industry, I should say, is in the process of rebuilding. We haven’t had any impact from avian flu since the beginning of 2024. Even though this year already 40 million birds have been killed, which is about 15-20% of the total U.S. laying flock, none of our flocks have been killed. Same thing last year, about 40 million birds were killed because of avian flu. None of our birds were killed. The industry per se is rebuilding.

We are in good shape as it is.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: That’s great. You know, Vital Farms’ story is more about the company-specific initiatives that you are rolling out, the category that you have been a leader in, than the industry, I would say. The growth that is driven by volume a lot. The underlying strength of that comes from the supply chain that you have built, which is your relationship with the family farms, the expansion of production lines that you keep doing, including the one coming up later in the year. Can you provide us an update on the recruitment efforts that are undergoing right now to build a pipeline of growth for you, as well as an update on the upcoming production facility that’s opening?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah, yeah, you touched on our supply chain, right? We source our eggs from more than 500 family farms that we work with. We have a one-to-one relationship with these farms. We commit to buy all the eggs from the farm. The farmer commits to sell us all the eggs that they’re producing. At the end of the second quarter, we were talking about working with more than 500 family farms. That’s an increase from more than 300 farms at the end of 2023. In 18 months, we recruited about 200 farms. All the indications are that we will continue to recruit at a similar pace. Let’s call it 30, 35 farms a quarter. It’s really a function of how big our recruiting team is to vet these farmers, to onboard them into our system.

The farm growth, that’s for us, it’s a leading indicator where volume growth will come from. We only sell eggs that we source from farmers that work directly with us, that we have a contract with. We don’t source any eggs on the open market. The supply that we are getting from these farms, that is really the indicator where we see volume growing. We need to be able to process all these eggs. We have currently one egg processing facility in Springfield, Missouri. We have two production lines there that are installed, that are operating. Those give us revenue capacity for about $900 million just from eggs. Sarang, you alluded to it, we are in the process of bringing a third production line online that will increase our production capacity in Springfield to about $1.2 billion. In parallel, we’re working on a second, new production facility.

This will be located in Seymour, Indiana. That facility is intended to come online at the beginning of 2027. At that point, we would have revenue capacity from eggs of about $2.1 billion. As Sarang said, our guidance for this year is revenue of $770 million. I think the capacity that we’re installing tells you a bit the confidence that we have to continue the growth of the business and our desire to fill this production capacity over time. The third production line in Springfield, what we had said publicly is that the line will come online at the beginning of Q4. We are now in Q4. I was actually in Springfield last week. The line is in good shape. We’re in the process of qualifying it. All of that capacity expansion for right now, it’s on schedule, it’s on budget, it’s how we like to operate.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: That’s great to hear. Great update. You know, the supply is coming online. You are processing it very fast. Distribution is the next question I have. You know, there are multiple opportunities on distribution, new as well as existing. Let me start with the new distribution opportunity. You know, you’re already in about 23,500 stores across the nation. How big is the runway when you think from a new distribution standpoint?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah, so, based on our math, there are about 32,000 stores in the U.S. that sell what’s called specialty eggs. Specialty eggs is, if you think about egg classification, the cheapest egg you can usually buy is an egg that comes from a caged bird. The next level up in terms of animal welfare would be a cage-free egg. The birds there don’t really have that much more space than caged birds, but at least they’re not crammed into a cage. The step above that is free-range eggs where the birds are supposed to have outdoor access and are able to go outside. The level where we are playing from an animal welfare perspective is called pasture-raised eggs. Our birds go outside every day. They have 108 square feet of space outdoors that they can access. They can express their natural behaviors. They do dust baths. They do perching outside.

So, 32,000 stores in the U.S. sell these specialty eggs: cage-free, free-range, pasture-raised. As we said, we’re in about 23,500 stores, and we think we’re in the best 23,500 stores we could be in. There is still an opportunity to expand distribution over time.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: Okay.

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Really, the focus for us, where the growth will come from, is getting more SKUs on existing shelves and increasing the velocity on the shelf. We have, in the natural channel, which is where we got our start at retail, about six SKUs on the shelf. In the food channel, we have about three SKUs on the shelf. In the mass channel, we have one, maybe two SKUs on the shelf, right? When you think about future distribution opportunities, it’s getting food channel, getting mass to something that resembles a little bit more where the natural channel is today. At Whole Foods, we have eight or nine SKUs on the shelf, right? The distribution opportunity from getting more SKUs on shelves where we are today, where we already have a relationship with the retailer, that is where we focus the distribution efforts.

In addition to that, I think we are one of the rare cases where while we are growing our presence on the shelf, we are also increasing the average velocity for the items on the shelf, right? We’re not at the point yet where the next SKU that we’re putting on the shelf is this marginal SKU that brings down the average velocity. The next SKU that we’re putting on the shelf is still incremental. With that, we are growing the velocity similar to how we’re expanding our household penetration and our buy rate at the same time, right? We’re not at the marginal consumer yet who drags the average down. As consumers try us for the first time and then buy us repeatedly, over time, they buy us more and more. With that, we’re increasing our buy rate as distribution goes up as well.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: That’s great. As the volume is picking up throughout the year, are you seeing the repeat rates go up in your surveys or checks with the retailers?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah, it’s not so much a metric that moves a whole lot month by month, right? It’s something that we track more over multi-year periods. It’s interesting when you think of our consumer distribution. We classify consumers into light, medium, heavy, ultra-heavy buyers. The distribution that we had five years ago between light, medium, heavy, ultra-heavy is the same distribution that we have today, even though we have doubled the number of households that we are in, right? A consumer who was a light buyer five years ago probably is a medium buyer today. A consumer who was a medium buyer five years ago is a heavy buyer today, and so on. As consumers try us for the first time and then they stay with us, the consumption increases over time.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: That makes sense. They’re stepping up once they use the product. Shifting gears a little bit to the product type, egg is one of your main categories. Within egg, over the past year, we were very regular eggs, but I think the mix is changing within, towards organic. Can you share where you stand now and, based on the pipelines of family farm that’s coming up, how the mix is changing in the near future?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah, you’re right. We have a mix shift towards organic eggs. Organic eggs are just over a third of our volume today. The farm recruiting that we’re doing skews more towards organic. We think that is where we have more distribution opportunities than in conventional. Aside from just getting different SKUs on the shelf with organic eggs, we also get a price mix benefit from that. Organic eggs tend to have a higher revenue per unit, and so as we’re getting the volume growth from getting these organic SKUs on the shelf, we’re getting an additional price mix benefit to the P&L.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: That’s great. On the product, I wanted to touch upon the butter segment. I feel like the relaunch has been very positive. We can see in the numbers till second quarter. Talk to us about how you feel about the product category and its growth and distribution ahead on the butter side.

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah. Yeah. So butter is a small part of our business. It’s about 5% of our revenue. We rebuilt our supply chain in butter at the beginning of 2024. We changed sourcing of our butter from U.S.-produced butter to Irish butter. With that Irish butter, we thought we were able to put different, better claims on the package. We had more supply certainty. There’s much, much higher supply of the kind of butter that we are selling where the cows are outdoors most of the year, where the cows eat grass for the majority of the year. We now have a claim on our packaging that the cows where our butter comes from are 90% grass-fed because that’s the time they spend outdoors. At the beginning of 2024, we rebuilt the supply chain.

We had simply maxed out the butter that we could get that is produced to the standards that we adhere to. We had maxed out that capacity at the end of 2023. As we rebuilt the supply chain at the beginning of last year, we lost some retailers. We were simply unable to supply them. Since 2024, beginning of 2024, we have been in a rebuilding process. I would argue we’re still in a process of stabilizing that supply chain from Ireland. Certainly everything that you read about international trade these days is not helpful when you import product from Ireland, and so there are still a few kinks that we’re working out of the system. The growth since the beginning of 2024 has been great. There are still some retailers where we want to get back on the shelf. There are SKUs that we used to have.

We had a spreadable tub butter. You could take it out of the fridge and immediately spread it on toast. That’s a product that we had discontinued that personally I would love to bring back simply as a consumer. There are opportunities to get back into retailers that discontinued us, there are opportunities to get products back into the rotation that we don’t have right now. With that, we see a very bright future for butter for us. Butter will probably always be a smaller part of the business than eggs, but it’s a very interesting opportunity for us to put the brand into another part of the store to create another opportunity for the consumer to actually see the brand. The packaging is very consistent between butter and eggs. It’s a very complementary product to the eggs that we have.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: No, that makes sense. You know, shifting gears a bit to tariffs. I know you guys are relatively less impacted by tariffs because it’s eggs and mainly U.S., but there’s still a little exposure to tariffs. Can you update us on what you are seeing from that standpoint and what are the mitigation efforts you have in place?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah. Yeah. All of our eggs are produced in the U.S., but we’re importing some of the packaging from outside the U.S. Simply, our supplier in the U.S. doesn’t have enough capacity for our growth. Some of the feed that the farmers are buying to feed the chickens is imported. The organic feed that our farmers are buying, pretty much all of that comes from outside the U.S., and some of the components of conventional feed come from outside the U.S. We do have tariff exposure. We took a price increase in the middle of the second quarter to offset those tariff impacts. That price increase, you know, given the relationships that we have with retailers, we implemented that pretty much without any major pushback from retailers. I think we’ve built relationships where retailers trust that we make decisions that consider all the stakeholders.

That’s the business model that we have. Retailers understood why we had to take pricing. The pricing showed up in theory on shelf in the middle of Q2. Retailers had already taken a lot of pricing on our eggs ahead of time, and for the consumer, it wasn’t really visible that we took pricing. With that pricing, we are offsetting the tariff impact. Given how costs flow through our P&L, we’re really only expecting to see the impact from the tariffs in the fourth quarter. We have had healthy gross margins year to date at around 39%. We have a long-term target of 35% plus for gross margin, so we’ve been a bit ahead of schedule. Third quarter, we’ll probably continue to be ahead of schedule, and in the fourth quarter, we expect to get more of this tariff impact. We are prepared to stay above that 35% target.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: That’s great. That just leads me to the margin question as well. You have managed margin very well over the past several quarters in general. What are the puts and takes we should be mindful of as we look at the fourth quarter or even like, you know, just commodity cost, promotions, any color you can share on some of those variables that impact margin?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah, commodity cost, if you look, the majority of the chicken feed is corn and soybean meals. The conventional costs there are coming down still, depending on which one you look at, slightly higher than pre the price spike that we saw when COVID happened. Organic feed, which is about a third of the feed that our farmers are buying, much harder to track. You don’t really see that in Chicago. Organic feed is still more expensive than it used to be. Commodities are a mixed picture for us. Tariffs we just talked about. The third biggest or the third component that’s really driving gross margin for us is the promotional environment. Given the egg shortages that we saw at the beginning of the year, we weren’t doing a whole lot of promoting at the beginning of the year.

Now that the shelves are fuller again, that our own supply is improving, we started promoting again in Q3. You should expect to see more of that in Q4. Promotions for us are a way to drive trial for the first time. Right? Promotions, we don’t use them to necessarily drive volume. That’s a drug that’s really easy to get addicted to and really hard to get away from again. Promotions for us are a way to create that visual disruption on the shelf when there’s a big tag for the consumer to actually try us for the first time. We want to get back to promoting again a bit in Q4 so that we can start converting some of the increased brand awareness that we have seen year to date, that we can start to convert that into trial.

As we talked about before, trial over time leads to increased consumption. With the promotions that we are starting now, that we started in Q3, frankly, that is all designed to now capture the households that are aware of us, that weren’t aware of us a year ago.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: Yeah, that makes sense. Shifting gear to accelerator farms, very exciting topic, the test going on. Can you share some color on what are some of the tests you are doing with some of these farms over there at a high level, to the extent you can share?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah, so let me explain what accelerator farms are. As I said, we work with a network of over 500 family farms that produce eggs for us. On those farms, the farmer owns the land, the barn, the chickens. They’re basically independent operators for us. We are in the process of building a few farms ourselves that we want to operate. We’ve talked about roughly 15 farms that we want to operate on our own. The intention behind these farms is that we want to do a bit of R&D, a bit of test and learn. There are different ways you can configure a barn. There is different equipment that you can put inside the barn for the chickens to roost on and to perch on. There is different technology that you can use to heat or cool the barn, right?

In the summer, we want to cool it down a bit, and whenever we need to heat it a bit. We want to experiment a bit and find more efficient ways to operate these barns. Ultimately, the goal is to produce more eggs and reduce the costs. It’s still very early days for us. So far, we have brought one of these accelerator farms online. We placed chickens there in late July. This farm will be our benchmark, basically, right? This will be the farm that we compare the other accelerator farms against. We’ll place birds on the next iterations of farms in the coming quarters. It really takes one whole flock cycle for us to really understand, at least one flock cycle for us to understand whether these different ideas that we are testing, whether they make a difference or not.

Do not expect any learnings there for the next, okay, let’s call it at least two years until we have some solid data. This is really more of a long-term idea that we want to be able to try out a few things, do a bit of R&D. Ultimately, the goal is to drive better outcomes for the farmers that we work with, right? Whatever we learn from these farms, we then want to take back to the family farmers that we are recruiting to make sure that we improve their outcomes.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: No, that makes sense. I like the test and learn approach, and that can be rolled out across the farms over time.

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Yeah.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: I know we are almost up on the time, so there are two questions we are asking every company at this conference. The first one is more a big picture question. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate the current economy and consumer spending, when it especially second half of the year?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Look, I can talk about our consumers, right? Our consumers continue to be very strong. We continue to see very strong demand. I read the same news that you read. I think there are a few, at least gray clouds on the horizon. For our business, we’re not seeing any impact on that. We like to think of our consumer as maybe being a bit more recession resistant than your average consumer in the U.S.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: Makes sense. The second question I have is when you look at 2026 next year, what are one or two things that you are excited about, and what are one or two things that you are concerned about for next year?

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: I think the part that I’m most excited about is, for the last, and I’ve been with Vital Farms for two and a half years now. For the last two and a half years, we have been either supply constrained or production capacity constrained. For 2026, I’m excited about having really improved supply, having the third production line in Springfield, having this new facility in Seymour, and being able to really demonstrate that what we are doing is not just a fluke, but that we are able to continue to drive growth. What am I concerned about? The biggest challenge in our business is to grow egg supply, processing capacity, demand, all in harmony with each other. That’s the biggest challenge for us every quarter, every year. That won’t change next year. That’s what we’ll keep keeping an eye on.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: That’s cool. Thank you so much. Thank you, Thilo. Thank you, everyone on the webcast and in person here. Thank you.

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Thanks for having us.

Sarang Vora, Consumer Research Analyst, Telsey Advisory Group: Take care.

Thilo Wrede, CFO, Vital Farms: Thank you.

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