Cheffelo AB (publ) (CHEF) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, and welcome to today's webcast for Cheffelo, where we're presenting Q3 for 2025. Joining us are CEO, Walker Kinman; and CFO, Erik Bergman. [Operator Instructions] And with that, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning to everyone joining us. Thanks for your interest in Cheffelo, and welcome to this presentation of our third quarter results for 2025. My name is Walker Kinman. I'm the CEO, and I'm here today with Erik Bergman, our CFO. I will take a few minutes to give you a short intro on the company and then take you through some prepared remarks on the Q3 development, before Erik gives you a run-through on the financials. We will then take your questions. You can fill these out in the form located to the right of the broadcast. So let's start with a little about Cheffelo. So we're solving dinner for tens of thousands of households around Scandinavia every week with our meal kits, and our ambition is to do this better than anyone else in the market. We have been pioneers in the meal kit business for nearly 2 decades. We're profitable. We own and operate our local brands. These are Godtlevert and Adams Matkasse in Norway, Linas Matkasse in Sweden, and RetNemt in Denmark. Our service is centered around a clear value proposition, to unite families around the dinner table. We achieved this by simplifying dinner with a wide variety of inspiring, tasty and well-balanced meals that are easy to prepare and satisfy even the pickiest of palates. By removing the stress of meal planning, shopping and cooking, we help more people eat better and bring families together around the dinner table. Our meal kit business operates on a demand-driven subscription model. Because of this, we can keep inventories low and reduce food waste in our operations. One of our competitive advantages is our ability to offer significant personalization with the widest range of recipes in our markets available in portion sizes for 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 people. Each month, we offer over 200 unique recipes, including many recurring customer favorites and a constant rotation of thematic and seasonal recipes to provide renewed inspiration. As we say, it's all about personalization so smart, it feels simple. We aim to avoid overwhelming our customers with choices, and we focus on user experiences designed to ensure our customers receive what works best for their household in the easiest possible way. This personalized customer experience is powered by our in-house technology platform and deep data analytics capabilities. We use AI technology driving, for example, preselection of recipes based on preferences, purchase history and ratings and our recommendation engine. This level of personalization is further supported by the ability to produce each order individually using pick-to-light and automated production solutions in fulfillment centers we run ourselves. Our supply chain is well established, strong and scalable, enabling us to efficiently purchase and distribute our products in each country where we operate. Furthermore, we are constantly integrating our Nordic supply chain, enabling us to take advantage of sourcing opportunities across markets. Turning to Slide 6. Let's talk about some of the key figures for the quarter. We planned for strong growth in Q3, and we are happy to report that we did even better than expected, caused by acceleration in growth midway through the quarter. Growth was driven predominantly by significant increases in customer acquisitions in Norway, which increased by 124% versus Q3 last year. The general increase in customer acquisitions across Cheffelo by 64% helped push net sales up almost 27% on a local currency basis. However, because of the general strength in the Swedish krona, net sales were only up 23% compared to the 2.4% increase we saw in Q3 of last year. Norway remains a standout this year and particularly the third quarter, followed by respectable double-digit growth in Sweden. Our efforts on add-ons and groceries continue to progress and add-ons and groceries as a percent of net sales increased by 0.6 percentage points to 2.4% of net sales or roughly a 64% growth during Q3. The jump in customer acquisition also added to the active customer metric, which increased by 16% in Q3. We know that some market participants have changed their reporting or abandoned this metric. The measure can be as misleading when acquisition slows as it can be when acquisitions accelerate. Over time, it is most important that we are increasing our underlying customer base with both acquisition and retention. Given how early cohort churn looks in meal kits, do not be surprised if growth rates in active customers fluctuate with the seasonal acquisition cycle if the growth in any given period is heavily weighted toward customer acquisition, as was the case for us in Q3. We have emphasized economies of scale in the business, and this is clearly reflected in a SEK 12 million improvement in the EBIT result. While Q3 has historically not been a profitable quarter due to vacations, increased sales and marketing costs, this year's SEK 5.3 million EBIT loss puts us much closer to profitability than before, a strong sign of the leverage in our business model. Looking at the year-to-date figures, EBIT profitability for the 9 months ended in September tripled compared to last year. It's always fun to say something has tripled. And while the usual Q3 seasonal weakness does help the relative comparison, the improvement is still meaningful. Put another way, year-to-date EBIT increased by SEK 24.4 million to reach SEK 36.7 million, just SEK 5 million shy of our full year 2024 EBIT. And these figures do not contain any management adjustments. Let's turn to Slide 7 to look at how we see the meal kit market in Scandinavia. At our recent capital market event, we shared our updated perspective on the Scandinavian meal kit market, which was estimated to be a little over SEK 5 billion in 2024. We are confident that over the past several years, we have been successfully recapturing market share. During this time, there have been significant changes, particularly in investor sentiment leading to exits, consolidation and a shift in focus towards profitability by market players. Cheffelo has operated on a principle of profitable growth since 2019. This has helped build a lean foundation where today we are able to focus on top line growth rather than cost cutting and optimizing operations. Across our 3 markets for 2024, we held the strongest position in Norway with a 44% market share. The Norwegian market is the least fragmented in Scandinavia being almost a duopoly composed mostly of Cheffelo and HelloFresh. In Sweden, our estimated market share was 24%. Here, some fragmentation is present, including both pure-play meal kit providers like ourselves as well as fixed menu meal kit offerings by large traditional off-line retailers in their online e-commerce offering. Denmark presents even greater fragmentation. Competition is significant and includes established pure-play operators as well as several diversified players where meal kits are only a smaller part of a larger operation. Our meal kit market share in Denmark was estimated at 7% in 2024. Based on our estimates, Denmark is actually the largest meal kit market in Scandinavia as competition has driven category penetration the furthest. To put it into perspective, the Norwegian market would need to grow by almost 90% to be as large as the Danish market despite similar population sizes. The Swedish market, on the other hand, would need to grow by around 30% to match the Danish market size. This despite Sweden having a population which is about 1.8x the size of Denmark. These figures are looking back at 2024. So let's see how things are developing now in each market on Slide 8. As already noted, we continue to see strength in Norway and a favorable business environment with growth accelerating to 39% in local currency during Q3 versus essentially standing still in the same period last year. This growth was driven principally by a significant 124% increase in customer acquisitions versus last year. While net sales growth in Sweden was lower, it represents a level well above our long-term financial targets, reaching 18% in the quarter. Sweden has now grown during the last 9 quarters with 4 of the last 5 posting double-digit growth. Furthermore, in contrast to Norway, growth was a combination of customer acquisition and improvements in retention and order frequency. Also worth noting that in Sweden, the growth rate in our meal kit business outpaced the broader online grocery market by 10 percentage points in Q3. Both Sweden and Norway are showing a recovery in consumer confidence with most recent figures trending upward and only slightly negative. In contrast, consumer confidence in Denmark has continued to deteriorate and has only been lower once in the last 10 years, which was during inflation-induced anxiety following the pandemic. We grew by 8.6% in local currency in Denmark on slightly higher delivery volumes. This can be compared to the Danish online grocery index, which was about 7% higher during the July and August period. For the year-to-date period, net sales in Denmark have been essentially flat. While it is not encouraging that we're only maintaining our position in Denmark, while Norway and Sweden are experiencing solid growth, it also highlights the benefits of having risk spread across multiple markets. We are convinced that the Danish market remains very attractive with significant growth potential. Our near-term focus in Denmark is to increase the rate of new customer acquisition. As we move into the third quarter, we are continuing to see solid growth in Norway and Sweden and a stable business in the Danish market. Let's take a closer look on the next slide at how we are looking at long-term growth drivers. Just because we have moved the targets higher on net sales growth to 7% to 9%, this doesn't mean that the underlying organic growth drivers will change much. The left 2 components on this slide are about driving average order value. We are perhaps less concerned these days about upselling premium dishes to customers as much as we are about making sure they are getting the personalized meal kit with all the bells and whistles that fit their particular household. The predominant driver of increased average order value is to make sure we don't fall behind on inflation with a small adjustment at least once a year. Our best guess along this line is roughly 2% annually. Yes, we also plan on doing a lot more with add-ons and groceries, but even significant relative growth in the area has a limited effect on direct top line net sales. So we expect it to contribute with only about 1% a year. This makes it roughly 3 percentage points related to value growth. We do expect more growth to come from the volume side of the equation. First, for more customers by continuing to optimize volumes with high-quality cohorts and further by improving retention rates. Better retention and continuous improvements are expected to then boost order frequency. On the volume side of the equation, this is then about 4 to 6 percentage points. This approach, we feel supports the higher growth rate and also can be sustained to achieve SEK 1.5 billion by 2028. This is all well and good. However, when we look at the next slide, we can also get a sense for how bumpy growth is in reality. During Q3, average order value was up 3.3 percentage points, which includes the 64% growth in add-ons and groceries. We introduced a price increase across brands in August that was approximately 2%. A combination of growth in A&G and other factors further contributed to the increase in average order value. Basket penetration for A&G, which is the percent of orders that contain an A&G product, was up 2.8 percentage points, but still remains in the mid-teens, giving plenty of upside potential. Overall, A&G accounted for 2.4% of net sales, up from 1.8% last year. In Q3, some changes to the UX were made and new capabilities in production came online. We have more things we're working on to continue to enhance the offering. Even if this does give a direct boost to the top line, remember that our purpose with this part of the business is to drive retention and create an alternative driver of loyalty that is not based on the prevailing discount expectations in the market. The volume side is where we experienced the vast majority of growth this quarter. I've already talked a bit about how active customers were up 16% on a 64% increase in customer acquisition. Furthermore, we saw a higher onboarding retention rate in the quarter due to our acquisition partnership with SAS that was launched in the quarter. What is interesting here with this partnership is that there is a solid proof point that acquisition and loyalty can be driven by something other than discounting. We expect to extend this beyond partnerships, focusing on expanding acquisition efforts around a compelling value proposition that embraces a superior product and service offering, and we will continue to focus on driving willingness to pay by solving a clear problem for our customers. In turn, we hope this will also lead to a reduction in the general discount expectations that customers in the meal kit market have been taught to expect. Shifting to order frequency. Once again, we were quite pleased to see order frequency going up despite the sharp increase in customer acquisition. Efforts to improve the user experience, better onboarding and even a little nudge from the calendar helped increase order frequency by 5.6% during Q3. With that, let me now turn it over to Erik to take us through the financials.

Thank you, Walker, and good morning, everyone. Let's begin with our top line performance for the third quarter. We delivered another quarter of strong growth with net sales up 23% year-over-year to SEK 266 million. Growth is continually affected by negative effects from currency on our consolidated net sales. So when adjusting for currency effects, our growth was even stronger at almost 27%. And regardless if we want to adjust for currency or not, I'm very glad to say that this was the highest third quarter growth since our listing. The primary driver for this was the 64% increase in new customer acquisition, supported by a higher order frequency and a higher average order value. Average order value increased by 3.3% when adjusted for currency. This was driven by price increases and improvements within add-ons and groceries. Order frequency was up 5.6%, partly affected by calendar effects, as the third quarter this year had 1 week less within the Nordic holiday season compared to the third quarter last year. And our active customer base grew by 16%, driven by the high customer acquisition. So what all of these metrics tells you is that we did have a very strong quarter when it comes to growth and most of our top line metrics points in the right direction. With that, let's move on to our contribution margin. So turning to contribution margin. We reported SEK 72 million for the quarter, representing an increase of almost 20% compared to last year, largely driven by our higher top line. It is important to note that the contribution margin typically varies with seasonality. The third quarter is usually our lowest margin quarter as volumes are lower due to summer vacation and we see a higher share of discount associated with post-summer customer acquisitions. There is a balance between cost and customer experience. With the positive momentum that we saw in the beginning of the year, we were comfortable with experimentation on customer experience to continue to drive top line growth. Our contribution margin for the third quarter came in at 27.1%, which is 0.8 percentage points lower than last year. The lower margin is mainly explained by 2 factors. First, we had a relatively higher cost for discounts, reflecting the increase in new customer acquisitions. As discount vouchers are deducted in our net sales figures, this means that contribution margin is reduced, all else equal. That said, we view this as an investment, and we are accepting a temporary lower margin today in exchange for a higher profitability in future periods. And the second reason for our lower contribution margin is due to the relatively higher food costs seen in the quarter. We talked about the increase in food cost last quarter as well. This is linked to adjustments we made in our pricing structure in combination with menu enhancements. These were changes that we were successful in driving customer experience, but also led to a shift in customer behavior that we did not fully anticipate and which resulted in a higher food cost. These 2 factors together explain why input goods as a percentage of net sales increased to 49.8% from 47.6% last year. Looking at the last 12 months, our contribution margin is at 30.7%. Given the high level of customer acquisitions and the tweaks that we made to the customer experience, we are now relaxing our target slightly and expect the full year contribution margin to land between 30% and 31%. With that, let's move on to the next slide. And before I go into profitability in details, I could start to address a common misconception. Due to the seasonal effects with lower volumes during summer vacation in combination with higher cost to ramp up after summer, towards the end of the quarter, we are historically not EBIT positive in the third quarter. However, with that said, we are very pleased to have tripled our EBIT year-to-date. And a fun fact is that we, in the third quarter, actually achieved a positive EBITDA of SEK 5.6 million, and this is the first time since the pandemic-boosted year of 2020 that we have reported a positive EBITDA in the third quarter. EBIT also improved significantly with the loss reduced to SEK 5.3 million from SEK 17.2 million last year, mainly driven by the sharp volume increase. This represents an improvement of 6 percentage points in the EBIT margin, to a large extent supported by economies of scale as our sales increase. Another key driver behind the improved EBIT this quarter was the reduction in sales and marketing expenses. In the third quarter, sales and marketing expenses accounted for 14.4% of net sales compared to 19.1% last year. It is worth noting that last year, we allocated a relatively higher share of our marketing budget to the third quarter, which impacts the year-over-year comparison. Additionally, last year, we made an organizational change that shifted the equivalent of SEK 1.6 million in the third quarter cost into central functions. The purpose of that organization update was to drive a greater marketing efficiency. And I would say that, that has proven very successful given the results this quarter. Despite spending less, we achieved a record growth in new customer acquisitions. This, of course, points to a significant improvement in our average cost for acquiring customers, our CAC, which has come down. Looking ahead, we expect to see continued marketing efficiency. For the full year, we now anticipate sales and marketing expenses to be below 12% of net sales. And a final note before leaving this slide, the improvement in our EBIT margin is the result of economies of scale. As we talked about at our recent Capital Markets event, we will continue to maintain a strict cost discipline while continuing to drive top line growth. Looking ahead, we expect to see scale effects to support further margin expansion, moving us toward our long-term EBIT margin target of 7% to 9% by 2028. As a reference, our last 12-month EBIT margin was 5.7%. All in all, I'm pleased to see the improved profitability. So let's move on to have a look at the cash flow. As is typical for the third quarter, we see a ramp-up in volumes following the summer period. This seasonal increase in activity leads to a buildup in working capital, which in turn has a positive effect on our cash flow. The pattern is not unique to this year, but the improved profitability that we do see this year is translating to a higher cash flow. Free cash flow for the quarter was almost SEK 30 million. This is an improvement of SEK 33 million compared to last year, driven by higher profitability and timing effects in working capital. Year-to-date, free cash flow amounts to almost SEK 57 million, which was almost SEK 36 million higher than last year, explained by the higher cash flow before changes in net working capital. And to give you some perspective, the year-to-date free cash flow has already surpassed the full year figure for 2024. At the end of the period, our cash position was SEK 134 million, which is up from SEK 98 million a year ago. Now let's turn to the next slide and have a look at our future periods. So with the strong growth in the third quarter, I want to take a moment also to set the expectations for the period ahead. Our long-term financial targets predict a net sales growth between 7% to 9%. We see this as a realistic and sustainable growth for Cheffelo with a normalized customer acquisition rate. And I want to underscore that this is not intended as a forecast for 2025 as we do expect a higher growth in 2025. It is important to emphasize that our underlying growth remains robust, and we see continued momentum so far in the fourth quarter. That said, there are 2 factors that I want to highlight that will impact our reported growth in the fourth quarter. First, the strong growth in the third quarter was largely driven by a significant increase in new customer acquisitions. While we do expect to maintain a higher level of acquisition also in the fourth quarter, the fourth quarter typically sees a lower share of new customers compared to the third quarter. As a result, the effect of a strong acquisition activity will be less pronounced in the overall growth rate for that quarter. And second, there is a calendar effect. In 2025, there are 52 Mondays compared to 53 in 2024. Since we do recognize revenue on a weekly basis, this means that the fourth quarter this year will have a full week less of revenue, which will then naturally dampen the reported growth rates. That said, we still expect to see net sales growth in the high single digits for the quarter. Turning to contribution margin. As mentioned, we are now relaxing our target slightly and expect a full year contribution margin to land between 30% and 31%. On sales and marketing expenses, the expectation is to come in below 12% of net sales for 2025. And finally, on EBIT, the last 12-month EBIT profitability at the end of the quarter reached 5.7%. With a slightly lower contribution margin in the fourth quarter, we expect a lower EBIT percentage for the full year compared to the last 12-month EBIT. However, it is still expected to be above the previous EBIT target midpoint of 5%. With that, I would like to hand back to Walker for a quick summary.

All right. Thanks, Erik. And let's turn to this last slide and leave you with some following takeaways from the presentation. So the local currency growth rate at almost 27% in Q3 was driven by 64% and increased customer acquisition. We saw year-to-date EBIT tripling on the back of a SEK 12 million increase in the Q3 EBIT result. We have strong momentum as we enter Q4, and this positions Cheffelo for a successful end to what has already been an outstanding year. We highlight once again our new long-term financial targets with net sales growing at 7% to 9% annually to target SEK 1.5 billion in net sales by 2028. This with an EBIT margin of 7% to 9%. We also want to take the opportunity to mention the recent Capital Markets event that we held in October. If you haven't had a chance to watch it, you can find a link to the video on our web page. Enthusiasm within the organization remains high. This has been fueled by what's been an impressive year-to-date results and strong momentum as we approach the end of the year. I'm both impressed and inspired by the engagement and hard work that every member of the team is bringing to our shared success. I continue to look forward to accomplishing even more going forward. This concludes our prepared remarks, and we're ready to answer your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And we have received one question here, and this is from Amir. And he asked the question, what early cohort behavior are you seeing with SAS Eurobonus? Is there a risk that they have only tried it for the points only? And I think this comes a little bit back to sort of the discount expectations that have been placed in the market by participants and pushing discounting as a way to attract customers. Ultimately, that risk lies with every single customer acquisition. If the only reason that they want to try the service is to get inexpensive food or cheap food, there's always a risk that they won't continue. So what we're trying to do here is move away from obvious discounting. What we're seeing with the SAS Eurobonus partnership is because of the way that the partnership is structured, customers are actually paying full price for a set number of deliveries. And then once they receive those deliveries, then they receive their Eurobonus points. This is a level of repetition that we, in our experience, are content with seeing as sort of getting over the first hurdle of onboarding customers. The behavior we see after that is sufficiently good to want to continue with these types of partnerships. So we have the next question coming from Alexander. Is the Q4 net sales growth in reported or currency adjusted figures? Also, does the commentary from Q4 '24 on the extra delivery week still hold, impact of SEK 8 million on sales and SEK 2 million to SEK 3 million on EBIT? I'll leave this one to Erik.