I'm George Kelly with Roth. I'm excited to have Deanna Jurgens, who's President and CEO from Armanino Foods of Distinction today. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. We don't have that much time. Same setup as the last fireside chat with Adam. I'll take questions from the audience. I've got some to get it kicked off, but if you have questions, please shout them out. Let's start. You just reported your fourth quarter last week, I wanted to chat a bit about your fourth quarter results. Tell us, you reported nice growth. It was a little deceleration from what you've done recently, though, and I think there's some unique sort of components to that. If you could just walk us through the growth in 4Q. Sure. We reported growth of up 5.5, that was a little bit of a deceleration. We'd been high single digits. If you look at kind of the drivers behind it, last year, Q4 2024, we had some one-time orders, shipments to our retail channel that were not repeated. It was really kind of a one-time impact to the quarter. I still felt good about the absolute dollar sales in the fourth quarter, we really had a high overlap driven by that. I think the thing to take away is it wasn't an ongoing growth driver going into 2026. We feel good that we still drove growth given that high overlap that we had. Good context just to explain why it was a little bit of a deceleration. Yep, understood. Also in the quarter, your margins, we keep thinking, we initiated coverage in, I think it was January, and you've been public about expecting a slight reset to your margin profile. Really didn't see it in the fourth quarter. The gross margin continued to be really strong. Your EBITDA margin, I think, was 33% in 4Q. I guess the question is, should that continue? What are your expectations for this year around margin, both gross and EBITDA margin? Just high level. Yeah. Our gross margin declined, but it was still 47% plus. We did have 50% in the prior year. The driver of that, again, we accrue for trade based upon our forecast. I release trade throughout the year based upon if we're over-accruing. The leadership team before me waited until the fourth quarter and released everything in the fourth quarter. That's why we had a gross margin of 50% from the prior year. I still felt good about 47%. Then we had really strong flow-through with our operating margin. I think we had a lot of open roles that I still hadn't filled. You saw SG&A was lower, or some of the things that were decelerating in the fourth quarter that helped our operating margin. Yeah, I've been signaling that I expect gross margin to come down to the mid-40s, 44% or 45%. George is bringing it up to 46%. There are definitely, as we look at our top-line mix and where that mix of sales is coming from, as we start to bring in international business, as we start to bring in national QSRs, slightly lower margin business for us. We do expect some impact on gross margin for that. Plus, I've put a lot of investment into high-quality headcount that will affect OpEx somewhat. Just trying to manage 2026 as a bit of an investment year and a growth year, we feel really good 2027 and going forward that we'll continue to deliver strong margins. That said, and I love to prod on Adam, is that we are still going to deliver gross margin in the mid-40s, and we expect our operating margin to be high 20s. I don't know if we'll keep it in the 30s, I feel good about high 20s. Still relative to our competitive set, top tier on both sides. Yeah, it's excellent. Okay. Shifting, I want to talk just sort of about the core food service business. If we look back, I think it's since 2018, it's been something like a 9% CAGR. There's pockets within food service that have been really challenged during that period, especially for the last couple of years. It hasn't been all up and to the right in a lot of areas within food service. I guess the question is, how have you been able to generate such strong and consistent growth? Maybe before that, what is it about your product that food service customers like so much? What I love about food service is it is largely, the majority of our business is quick service restaurants and casual fine dining. We are still in college, universities, cruise ships, airlines, but that is the bulk of our business. You deal with a lot of chefs. As I go out on sales calls, it's very culinary inspired. Chefs really respect and know good quality product. When you look at our product, going back to the Armaninos, when they immigrated from Northern Italy, they brought this Basil Pesto recipe that is still the inspiration of what we deliver today. We source the highest quality. Our basil farm is an hour from our plant, so we harvest it. We can manufacture product shortly thereafter. We are complete clean ingredient. Then we freeze immediately after we produce, within 90 minutes. It really preserves that quality and freshness. The type of cheese we use, the type of oil we use, the type of manufacturing and processing that we do, we all feel is very high quality, unique to us. I sit there with chefs, we cut our product constantly against competitors, and they're always like, "There's no comparison." I think that we win on quality, taste, texture. The other thing is, we have been around for 30 years. Armanino was one of the first. They didn't really produce Basil Pesto or pestos before Armanino. Everybody made their own pesto at home. We are very well known within the food service channel and very well respected for all of those things I talked about. It really helps to differentiate us, and now I'm putting a huge focus on Basil Pesto, but all of our secondary sauces that we sell. I feel we have a lot of opportunity. For those reasons, we have a very strong moat around us as a company that has been extremely hard for competitors, national competitors, large CPG, to try to penetrate and get into. That's a little bit about the product. Yeah. That's helpful. Maybe walk through what happened with different national CPG that tried to come into the space. Today, we have a majority share, and the other competitors in our space are low single digit in terms of share. We are over 50%. A lot of the current pesto providers are local or regional. They're not national in scope. Nestlé wanted to get into the category, I would say five, six years ago, they tried for two years to get in, they just weren't successful, didn't meet their metrics, and so they came out. I think about that. Coming from large CPG, I worked for PepsiCo for many, many years. Why would they not succeed? They have the money. They have the scale. If you think about it, they're not a food service first company. They're not a sauce company. They have a lot of other areas of focus that is the priority of the company, of what they're doing and how they're doing it. They're trying to get into this little business that is very culinary, is very established, food service is unique versus retail. I think if you're a retail-focused company versus food service focused, it is a difference in how you penetrate. Plus they expect a lot of business, a lot of return very quickly, and that doesn't necessarily happen within the food service space. Okay. Anyone- I wanted to answer your other question about just how do you succeed in food service given the trends. Yeah. Just real quickly on that. I am hyper-aware of what is going on in the categories today and in food service in particular, and we see a lot of companies considering bankruptcy or closing store or restaurants or different things that are happening, and I've went out, and I've talked to a lot of them. I think in the food service space, you can never rest on the customer base that you have. I talk about food service, it's a business of hunters. My team, I hire hunters, not farmers. Farmers is kind of on the retail, and you're nourishing, and you're growing your existing business. I want people that are out there getting new business constantly in the pipeline because you can never just rely on the business that you have. It's about new customer acquisition, and then it's also about expanding your current offering within your existing customers. I think those are two things that are really important to ensure even if the industry isn't growing as fast, that you are. Understood. Okay. Any questions from anyone? Please. Go ahead. Maybe because you're new in the role there, maybe you can just talk about what you saw, what you're doing different compared to your predecessors. I remember I met Bill Armanino a long time ago. Yeah. Did a lot of stuff between. Maybe just talk about yourself and how you've changed things. Sure. Lucky you to have met Bill. For me, I think the board really wanted to grow top line. I think the company has been very steady state and kind of more conservative in their approach. I think when they brought me on, they're very focused on someone with more of a commercial background, which is me, and has really had experience in driving growth that maybe is new for the company. My predecessor, for example, was very focused on growing the retail channel, which I think is really hard because we're a frozen pesto sauce. As a consumer going into the grocery store, you don't think of pesto in the frozen section. I think that I've really pulled back on that. It's not very profitable, and I've really doubled down on food service. The things that are new for us that we haven't done is we've been in one customer in Asia, distributor, for a very long time. We never had resources focused on them. We really didn't do anything to develop that business. For me, having spent a lot of my time driving international businesses, I think it's a huge opportunity for growth. One is we are going to expand not only Asia, but we are in conversations right now with the Middle East. We'll see how that's going with everything going on, but Africa, Europe, and North America. Really good initial discussions there. That's one new source of growth. The second, which was really surprising to me, is national accounts, McDonald's, Yum, Chipotle. We'd never talked to them. We had one LTO in Dunkin', and that ended, and we kind of let that relationship go. Beyond that, we really never have approached these customers, and that's where I've spent most of my career with food service is at that level. I went out and I hired someone. She worked directly for Panera Bread and Chipotle, so she's got the decoder ring, and she can speak their language, and she knows what's involved. We are in active conversations with those customers now, and I'm really excited about the potential there. Those are two examples of very different approaches for us to grow the top line than maybe what was done in the past. Do you worry about your ability to execute on those contracts if you get them? That's a good question. We have been operating out of the same plant that Bill got us into 30 years ago in Hayward, California. We still have production capacity, we can grow there. I'm really limited in terms of packaging and storage. We are satelliting our offices, and I'm having to just go find space. I would say we're not very efficient in those terms. As I'm looking at national accounts and looking at if we were to get into one or two of these, it could scale the business pretty quickly, and also with international. What I've done is two things. The first thing I went is to talk to all of our major suppliers of our core commodity ingredients to say, "If we were to grow our business by 30%, would you be able to supply me?" They said, "Just give me time." The good thing about national accounts is they are all about time. They want to make sure they're forecasting. They want to make sure you can supply. The beauty of frozen is we can build inventory. If we know customer X is going to buy 50,000 cases for an initial shipment, we can work over a period of months to build that inventory up. My suppliers are telling me, "Yes, we can supply." Then second is I'm evaluating currently manufacturing capacity. Not only could I get something that's more efficient and house everything all under one roof, but at a cheaper cost with better technology, equipment, all these kind of things to really position us well as we look to grow into the future. Go ahead. Well, I'm new to your story. Would your balance sheet support a 30% expansion like that currently? I think so. We've got about $30 million cash. We have no debt, really good margins. As I'm looking at the opportunities for us to scale, the thing is, honestly, if we were to get into McDonald's, they're going to require a compressed margin from us. As I think about that, what that also enables me is scale. Suddenly, I can buy a lot more at a much lower cost. I can drive greater efficiency in leveraging all of my assets. While I may have to compress some on the gross margin, I'm going to be able to flow through that scale throughout my organization to drive margins down the P&L. We're thinking through all of those things right now, but preparing ourselves so when that happens, we're ready. I know this was before your tenure, the Dunkin' LTO that you just explained, can you walk us through how it was executed? How was your product applied there? Did they have it in store? Was it in some kind of central manufacturing, some plant somewhere? How did that work? What I know, and I don't know all of the details of it, is that they were assembling the sandwiches at the restaurants. Okay. They would heat it in one of their little ovens that they have. You see them at Starbucks when you buy something. We would supply them the pesto, and then they would assemble it, and they would cook it in the store. Okay. With what you're having conversations with these various national accounts, do you expect something similar? Would it be in each, whatever, Panera or McDonald's or something, and they would keep frozen product there? Are there other kind of ways that you could hook them into your product? The going-in conversations has been that we would supply frozen, and then they would thaw, and then they would use on the line that they're assembling. All of the discussions that we're having is that it would be an existing menu item I am not trying to go down the LTO route with these guys. I'm trying to say, "How do you take a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and how do you add something to that to really enhance the experience for your consumer?" Trying to get them in the mindset of core menu. Part of what we're doing, like this customer, they sent us all their equipment guns to say, "Okay, if we thaw your product and you put it, this is what we use on our front line, is it going to be able to work with our existing equipment? Right. The thickness of the pesto or whatever product that we're making for them. There is a lot of operational testing that goes in before you even get to, how well does it sell- What's my profit? How does it affect my line so as my employees are assembling whatever product that is, that it's intuitive. Because one of our customers was really interesting. We were showing them several sauces, and they go, "We love all of them, but you just showed us two green sauces that I think my front line would get confused with Basil Pesto." We didn't even think about that. How do you make sure that they are not going to put the wrong sauce on the wrong item? There's just a lot of those kind of conversations that we're having with customers right now, before we even enter into what that LTO is going to be. Okay. You will fully flesh out all of those things. They do multiple rounds of testing, by the time that thing launches, whether it's LTO or core menu, you're ready. Okay. They're ready. Okay. Hello Yeah, go ahead. It's, again, not knowing the story and new to the company, it seems like you are a major change agent. You're talking about going international, you're talking about going much larger scale. Is the board behind you? Are you bringing the board with you? How's that dynamic? Yeah. Before I go there, I'm not abandoning our current strategy. Our core food service U.S. business is still the foundation of who we are as a company. As we go into 2026, that will continue to be the driver of growth while we're trying to stand up some truly new incremental sources of growth. The board hired me to be a change agent. They were saying, "We need to shake things up a little bit. We need to try a new approach. We're going to bring someone on that has that skill set." They have been incredibly supportive. At the end of the year when I shared my three-year strategic plan with them, they completely approved it, supported it, and they have been behind the strategies of growth that we have. It is a change, and it is exciting because I think there is so much potential that is untapped. It's not like you're a wonderful business that couldn't grow, and they brought you in. Let's get going. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Maybe one topic we hadn't covered is just the fresh deli. Adam was just up here. I know you were part of that. Is that a big opportunity? I've sent Adam my sauces. Still have to follow up with him on that. You got a few prepared meals there that you're using some other pesto. We today are largely in the frozen food section, which is very expensive and not profitable. For me, I've spent a lot of my career in retail, and so I'm like, it is a big channel. It just doesn't really fit with our strength and what makes us unique and different. That's when I was like, how do I pivot the strategy a bit? Could I still utilize the channel, but in a way that leverages our product and our strengths being food service operator? One of those is back of house. We have hired a broker who is specifically calling on back of house for us so that as they are assembling, not all of them come prepackaged like Adam's. A lot of these retailers, they are assembling product back of house, so that we could supply our sauce too. We've had some really good initial discussions there. Club is another big one, so there's a lot of food service operators that are going to buy their products at club. We need to be there for them. The e-commerce, so Albertsons, Walmart, Kroger, all really getting in the e-commerce place. They want to be more competitive with Amazon. It's a digital shelf. I don't have to deal with consumers going down the frozen food aisle. They just type in, "I want a pesto," and up pops my product. I think that those are some ways that I've been thinking about retail differently that can still leverage who we are without compromising, and not meeting the consumer where they are. Understood. We're running out of time. Maybe just one more. Your stock currently trades OTC. You said publicly you're considering an up-listing. Do you have any kind of timeline on that? Yes. That was definitely a priority of our board when I started. I brought in a new team. My CFO just started in January. We are just finishing getting our 2025 earnings out, Q1. I need him to really ensure that our financial controls are strong and solid. We are starting to make some conversions to get us SEC ready, so I have a new auditing firm, I have a new legal firm, all of which are SEC compliant. We were not before. Just to make sure that we're starting to really see some of these strategies for growth start to take off, that I feel very confident in the performance. I've worked with the MZ Group to really start having conversations like these to get our company out there in a more meaningful way for investors, so that when we are ready to up-list, we could really maximize that, but also be ready as a company for it. I think timing, which was your question, I would say probably 9-12 months. 9 to 12 months. Okay. All right. I think we're out of time. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.