Conference Moderator: As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. John Dalfonsi, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

John Dalfonsi, Chief Financial Officer, BranchOut Food: Thank you. I am going to start with a forward-looking statement, and then talk about the agenda. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today’s call contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding outlook, guidance, and expectations for future performance. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those we discuss today. For discussing these risks, please refer to our most recent 10-Q and subsequent 10-K and other 10-Q filings with the SEC. Forward-looking statements speak only to today’s date, and we undertake no obligation to update them except as required by law. We will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most direct comparable GAAP measures are available in today’s press release and any appendix in any presentation.

With that, I am going to jump into the earnings call and we are going to go over, just like consistent with our other earnings call, we have an agenda we always like to go over, a summary and kind of recap of our strategy. That remains the same. Erick will go through a customer summary. Erick will go through plant operations and continual efficiency and margin improvement in the plant, and then sales prospects. Then I will finalize it with financial review of the quarter that was just released at market close. To go into our summary, just highlight we had our highest quarterly revenue of $4.45 million net. Obviously, the gross revenue was higher. Strong customer execution across all channels.

Key takeaway is we continue to execute our strategy of creating innovative products for customers to secure long-term business that is reoccurring, and to create full utilization of our plant with a 40% margin target. That has always been our plan, and we feel we are making good progress towards that. One change is that you saw that you are seeing a big step function up in our revenue guidance for the fourth quarter, and I will go over full-year guidance when we get to the financial part. But we are going to need to produce 70,000 kilograms up from what we were averaging 45,000 to meet the demands that are coming in terms of sales. So Erick will talk a little more about that. So Erick, I am going to hand it over to Erick, who is going to go over the customer summary, plant operations and continued efficiency, plus margin improvement and sales prospects.

Erick Healy, Chief Executive Officer, BranchOut Food: Perfect. Thank you, John. This is Erick Healy, CEO of BranchOut Food. Good afternoon, everyone. Excited to go through the last quarter and what we have coming up here. Q3 was a fundamental improvement in the company in terms of the high level revenue, as John mentioned. The breakdown of what we accomplished in that quarter is strategic to what we will talk about here for Q4 and beyond. The big one was, of course, our Sam’s Club product that we had the one-time rotation. The product went in and it sold extremely well. We met and succeeded their threshold, so we were successful in turning that over to an everyday reoccurring order. We are currently building that order right now, and it will be continuous moving forward. That is going to be back in the stores come September timeframe and in continuously.

The quarter itself, Q3, there was still some of that production was first time. Some of the products in that production were kind of the first time we had really scaled them up and dialed in the product quality and the efficiency and the attributes we wanted. We also invested heavily in marketing that product in order to secure this follow-on business. There was some rapid shipping, a lot of those things that we associate with customer acquisition in the beginning to secure that long-term business. While we were happy with our record revenue, all these things are reflected in the margins for the quarter. In addition to that, the other big piece in that quarter that was again, good on the revenue side, not so great on the margin side, was our industrial ingredient business.

We had a very large opportunity with some strawberries, specifically organic and conventional strawberry for our ingredient partner. Unfortunately, they needed it during the off-season of when strawberries are available. We ended up paying about 2X for the raw material, and that, of course, impacted our margins. The good news is that has turned into a much bigger piece of business now going in, again, to Q4 and beyond. We have orders from them for the strawberry that we can now produce during the season and with more foresight and getting these orders ahead of time during the season, we can contract the raw material and do it during the optimum time. With that, we essentially spent some margin upfront to secure the business, and we now have this reoccurring bigger piece of business.

There is a lot of that kind of baked into Q3 that we want to explain, and we believe we were strategic in the way we went to bat there, and it is setting us up for a very big Q4 and beyond. Beyond that, we had some Costco business that was first time. We had the Crunchy Mango Chips in Costco Bay Area that did very well, among other things. Q3 was a successful quarter. We see it, again, setting us up for a very successful Q4 and beyond. That is kind of the background of what we accomplished that quarter, and what we believe this is going to do for us going into Q4, and really right now as our factory is ramping up for these new orders. As John mentioned, we have always sort of averaged around 35 to 45 metric tons per month.

And we have talked about utilization quite a bit here and how important that is for our business. Historically, that has only been about maybe 40%, 45% utilization in our plant. With all these new orders that we have booked now, we are starting to ramp up our production capacity to, or, sorry, our production output to 70. We have some 80,000 kilogram months coming up here before the end of the year. This is all for booked business. Again, it is this reoccurring Sam’s Club order. It is all this new industrial ingredient business. We have a lot of new Costco business as well. We are also launching into Target right now, as we have said recently in some press releases. We have five SKUs going in branded in Target.

There is just a lot of stuff coming online right now, a lot of new sales that are frankly very exciting and, more importantly, getting our factory to that utilization level that we have always said that we need to get to for profitability. At these levels, all of our models indicate that we should be break even, beyond break even, really. Yeah, we believe that a lot of this business is now, instead of being kind of one-time big orders that come on and off, some of this is more reoccurring. That should really help our bottom line as well. It sets us up for a very exciting step function in revenue as well. We believe that Q4 should be around $6 million-$7 million, depending on kind of when some of the orders ship at the end of the year.

But we think that we can sustain that level. The revenue moving forward shouldn’t be as lumpy, and we should be able to sustain sort of that level going forward. It is a very exciting time. We are in an inflection point right now. This is really what we have been investing into the last two years since we opened our plant. We are very proud of our team, both on the sales and ops side, for getting us to where we are here. With that, John, I will turn it over to you if you have anything else, and then we will go into kind of future sales prospects beyond what we currently have.

John Dalfonsi, Chief Financial Officer, BranchOut Food: Sure. What I want to do now is move to our actual 10-Q and how we did for the quarter. What I always like to start with, if you have listened to these calls before, the balance sheet. If you look at our balance sheet, we have $8.1 million in current liabilities and $7.7 million in assets, $8.1 million in current assets and $7.7 million in current liabilities. But you have to take a closer look at this. It shows we only had $200,000 in cash. But like I have said in other earnings calls, cash, accounts receivable, and inventory, you have got to look at them as one because every dollar we have, we are rolling into orders because we are trying to keep up. One thing that has happened from day one since we have opened the plant is that we are getting more orders than the orders are not a problem. We are getting a lot of orders.

Given that we are getting so many orders, it kind of turns into a just-in-time manufacturing. If you look at our inventory turn, it is $3.3 million. Even if you take $14 million, which are kind of trailing sales, we are more at a, you are looking at a $6 million to $7 million run rate right now. The inventory turns are even faster, but they are less than 90 days. Remember, the product is on the water for 60 days. So really, cash instantly gets turned into inventory, which gets turned into accounts receivable. For example, we have over $1 million cash on the balance sheet, but that is getting recycled into inventory. Really, our capital needs are all around working capital. If you look at the current liabilities, the $7.7 million really is $4.7 million. You got that $3 million note payable.

If you recall, that is Dan Kaufman at Kaufman Capital. It is 8% note. He is a friendly investor. He is largest shareholder. He will extend that loan as long as need be to our ultimate goal, which is a revolving credit facility from a commercial bank. That is kind of what we get. Our AR is as strong as it gets with Costco and Walmart and Sam’s Club and MicroDried, their billion-dollar family, and inventory is all sold. It lasts. It has unlimited shelf, long shelf life. When I look at our balance sheet, I feel it is very healthy. I look at more of our current ratio of 2 to 1. Let us see. That convertible note is Kaufman Capital’s convertible notes that will ultimately convert. He has converted some already. That is, in my opinion, the pertinent things to look at on our balance sheet.

When you go to the income statement, we basically had a 2% gross margin. The reason behind that is, when you look at our product mix, Costco is 20% of the revenue. We actually did pretty well on gross margin, 43%. MicroDried, which is 33% of our revenue, those were the organic strawberries where our gross margin was 3%. Like Eric said, when you buy these raw materials, if you buy them on the off-season, it is the highest dollar you pay, which makes you think that, well, what we are moving to is buying raw materials during the high season and just making the products then. That saves 50% on the raw materials. The Sam’s Club, we said we thought air shipping was out of the way, we had to air ship that. That gross margin was 14%.

That was 31% of the revenue. When you look at it all, plus the utilization, since we are running at 30%-40%, what we had to absorb, it is kind of a break-even gross margin. If you look further in, I think there is tremendous opportunity. Just by buying on high season versus on the spot market, raw materials are 50% of our cost in Peru. Increased in kilograms going to that 70,000, we do not need any further people to execute on 70,000. Really no more hiring. I think you are going to see stronger gross margins, and that, I feel, is the opportunity with this company. Those are my high-level comments, the things that I feel are really important to take a look at. The last couple things I want to talk about is guidance.

We’re a little over $7 million for the six months, and we got two quarters to go, so that’s to get something with a 2 in front of it. That’s 13 to go, and we will make $20 million plus a product in the plant. The question is it delivered by December 31? It might be a couple million dollars that don’t hit delivery when we can invoice the customer till January. So something with a 2 in front of it, although we make something with a 2 in front of the plant, some of it might slip over. So it might be a number closer to 18 for the year. We’re still getting orders and delivering them. So it’s going to be down to the wire. That’s my thought there.

I guess if you think about it, we’ve made that something with a 2 in front of it in the plant. If you look at our run rate based on our fourth quarter, six to seven, maybe it’s eight, maybe it’s a little higher than that. We’re clearly in the 30s with that run rate. The last thing I get a lot of questions on is capital. We’ve only issued 500,000 shares this year. That was with our ATM in January and February. We’ve had a lot of warrant exercises, and then Kaufman Capital has given us debt. We may need some top-off capital. It might be a little more debt from Kaufman. We still got a little lift on the shelf, so that may or may not happen. The bottom line, given it does, it’s strictly to cover working capital and because of our growing orders.

Those I feel are the pertinent things. I’d like to hand it over for Q&A.

Conference Moderator: Thank you. Well, now we can jump into que-

Erick Healy, Chief Executive Officer, BranchOut Food: Sorry, let me go into the sales prospects. I got a few updates there, if we can do that real quick.

Conference Moderator: Yeah, go ahead.

Erick Healy, Chief Executive Officer, BranchOut Food: Yeah. So exciting stuff ahead. The Sam’s Club order is just sort of our foot in the door with that retailer. It’s, we believe, about an $8 million reoccurring business based on the sell-through we had initially. We are only in half of the doors at this point, so we believe that if we continue to perform, there’s an opportunity maybe mid-next year to expand that door count pretty significantly. There’s a category review coming up in March, so that’s something that we see as a good possibility that that could grow significantly. We have the second order that’s going into Sam’s that we’ve talked about as well. It’s the Tropical Mix, so it’s our core three tropical fruit chips, the pineapple, banana, mango, and that’s going into a multi-pack format. So it’s a very different eating occasion than the other product that’s in there now.

That product is a one-time rotation. It’ll be on shelf in January. That one as well, though, if it performs, which we expect it to, could easily convert to an everyday item as well. So that’s about a $2 million order at the end of the year here that we hope turns into an everyday continuous order. The industrial ingredient partner and others in that space is also growing rapidly. We did about $2 million in 2025. We think this year will be close to $7 million, and next year could be $10 million-plus in that channel. We’re seeing a lot of adoption of our products. A lot of strawberry, as I mentioned. We’re starting to do a bunch of blueberry. And then our tropical products are currently, we’re working on a couple different programs with some big CPG customers that are integrating them into their recipes of their products.

That is an exciting part of our business that continues to grow rapidly. Costco, a lot of stuff going on with Costco. We have an organic apple chip that is going in here in a couple of months, and then we have another order of the pineapple chips at the end of the year, four truckloads going into the southeast. That one keeps going. They keep reordering that, so that is a great proof point. We did just get an order last week actually, for our cheesecake. That is something we have been talking about for a long time. We are super excited about it. It is a totally new, innovative product, and Costco just committed to the first order of that. That will be going in in time for the holidays this year in the Texas region, and we think it is very innovative.

There has never been anything like it, and we expect that to do well and grow as well. That is exciting. We are also getting our dried cheese products out there. That is a brand-new product line, but we have already got some traction with that. We have a very large retailer. They have about 9,500 doors across the country that will be testing it here in the next couple of months. If that test goes well, that would convert into an everyday business with them that could be anywhere between $4 million to $6 million annually. It is another big one there that could turn into something. With that, we are going to take those dried cheese products. We are very bullish on them, and we are launching them in the convenience store channel. It is a channel that our sales team knows very well.

We have experience there, and we think there is a big opportunity there. With that is kind of all the big things. There are a lot of smaller opportunities or opportunities that are not quite as close yet. But, as John said in the beginning, new sales and new sales prospects have never been our problem. We continue to bring these in, and right now it is really the focus on the plants to effectively double their throughput to deliver on what we have. Yeah. That is essentially what I got. Let us go ahead and turn it over to questions.

Conference Moderator: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we pull for your question. Our first question comes from the line of Ryan Meyers with Lake Street Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Thinking about the $6 million to $7 million guide for the fourth quarter, as we enter into 2027, how much visibility do you already have into maintaining this level or building from that level going forward into 2027?

Erick Healy, Chief Executive Officer, BranchOut Food: Yeah, good question. I would say, a lot more than we have ever had before. This Sam’s Club every day is about a baseline of about $8 million annually. That is a new base business that we have never had. We have always had this very peaky, unpredictable revenue from Club and others. I would say with that, there is also the ingredient business, and with our partners there, they give us pretty good foresight now. We are getting very good at planning out six to nine months ahead. There is still Costco that comes in, and they will hit us with big orders, and it is hard to predict that. But I think we are moving in the right direction significantly, right? I cannot say that we have $6 million to $7 million booked solidly into next year, but we are starting with a much better base business.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Got it. That is helpful. As you guys look to double the production, is there any way you can help quantify the gross margin improvement that you expect to see from that as we progress through the rest of the year?

Erick Healy, Chief Executive Officer, BranchOut Food: Yeah. It is a great question. We have always. We built a very large plant, right? We built this plant assuming that we would get to this level, and we got there pretty quick, right? We have always priced our products. When we go to the customers or go into retail, we price our products. There are two considerations. There is what is the market willing to accept? So we kind of look at like products on the shelf or kind of competitive products in the space. Then we look at our costs, but we have always had to assume that that plant is utilized to a reasonable degree, right? So we have not actually gotten there yet, and this will be the first time where the plant is at the utilized level that we have always sort of assumed when we price the products to retailers.

We have always said 30% to 40% margins, and I think this will sort of unlock. You will kind of see the model come to life as we intended it to. Earlier this year, only utilizing the plant at about 40% with all the overhead costs in there. There is a lot of overhead that goes into the products that will effectively be cut in half. It is hard to quantify, but I believe that once the plant is fully utilized, we will start seeing some of those margins that we have always talked about.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay.

John Dalfonsi, Chief Financial Officer, BranchOut Food: Yeah, to give a little more

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Got it. Thank you for taking that question. Oh, go ahead.

John Dalfonsi, Chief Financial Officer, BranchOut Food: Ryan, I want to give a little more granularity to that because we are spending a lot of time on this. Number one is 50% of your cost. Peru is about 70% of our total cost, so we really do not have a lot, very little overhead. We have six people. Then you have your non-cost of goods, that is more of the packaging, the shipping, expenses from the time it leaves the plant to the customer. First of all, on the raw material is 50% of the cost. If you think about it, these orders are sporadic. They are just-in-time orders, so you have to buy on the spot market. You are paying double. For example, the strawberries were $2 a kilogram. On the high season, you get them for $1 a kilogram.

Now that we have this everyday business, we can plan the strawberries for $1 a kilogram. That’s 100% savings. Also just sourcing in general, as we focus on the core five, which are strawberry, banana, pineapple, apple, and mango. We can really, really focus on buying on high season and bringing those costs down. That’s going to be a big impact. We’re seeing it already. Secondly, just production flow. You got to air-dry these products before you put them in the EnWave machine. There’s a very tight standard deviation of moisture that you can put it into the EnWave machine. Optimizing the air-drying process, which we’re well under aware of that. The last thing I’d say is packaging. We can package inside the plant and save a significant amount of money. We think five, six, seven points right there.

Those are just things that scratch the surface. The way to think about this is you have this plant that opens. Everything’s coming at once. Now, a year and a half in, we’re kind of under our legs and now really looking on how to utilize it and how to get the margins up. That’s a little more granularity. Hope that helps.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay. Got it. No, that’s helpful.

Erick Healy, Chief Executive Officer, BranchOut Food: Yeah, no, the packaging is really exciting. We didn’t mention that earlier, but it’s a pretty obvious thing for us to do. It’s not a very technically challenging operation. But if you look at our numbers, by the end of 2026, we will probably have spent $1.5 million on outsourced packaging needs that we’ve had for our retail products. With maybe $150,000-$200,000 in CapEx, we can bring all of that in-house for next year, and we’re looking at doing that. To date, it’s been more about focus, focusing on what we do best down there is dehydration. But we feel like we’re in a good place now to bring that in, and I believe it’s going to be a pretty big unlock with our margins.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay. Got it. Thanks, guys.

Conference Moderator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I’d like to turn the call back over to Mr. Dalfonsi for any closing remarks.

John Dalfonsi, Chief Financial Officer, BranchOut Food: Thanks for joining, and we look forward to the next quarter. Thanks for your time.

Conference Moderator: Thank you.

Erick Healy, Chief Executive Officer, BranchOut Food: Thank you, everyone.

Conference Moderator: This concludes today’s call conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day.