On Thursday, Buda Juice (AMEX:BUDA) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.

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Summary

Buda Juice reported a strong Q2 2026 with revenue growth of 26.4% year-over-year to $4.5 million, driven by organic growth and expansion into Walmart stores.

Gross margin faced downward pressure, dropping to 36.6% from 46.7% last year, due to startup costs of new product lines and elevated costs in freight and produce.

Future outlook is positive with preliminary Q3 sales up over 40% year-over-year, driven by same-store sales, Walmart expansion, and new dressing products.

Operational highlights include the launch of Ultra Fresh Dressings and significant growth in the Ultra Fresh juice category, now occupying a large portion of juice coolers in new retailer installations.

The company remains debt-free, with $18.8 million in cash, and plans to fund expansions from its balance sheet, including moving dressing production in-house by Q1 2027 to improve margins.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR (Dennis)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Dennis and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Buda Juice second quarter 2026 earnings call and webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad.

If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the call over to Brian Siegel, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Brian Siegel, Investor Relations

Thank you, Dennis. During today's call, Horatio Lonsdale Hands, Buda Juice Chief Executive Officer, and Clint Bowers, Buda Juice Chief Financial Officer, will discuss Buda Juice financial and operational results that were reported this morning. Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call, during the prepared remarks or in the question and answer session, whether general or specific in nature, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results in the future to differ materially from those discussed on today's call.

These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, specific risks and uncertainties disclosed in Buda Juice's periodic and annual SEC filings. Buda Juice assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or to update the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that they forecast. Please note that our earnings release is available on the Investor Relations page of the Buda Juice website and has also been filed on Form 8-K with the SEC.

Finally, on this call we will refer to non-GAAP measures, free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA. Please see our earnings release for an explanation of our use of non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to GAAP measures. With that I'd like to turn the conference over to Horatio.

Horatio Lonsdale Hands, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Brian, and good morning to everyone, and I appreciate your taking the time to join us on our second quarter earnings call. This was a strong quarter for Buda, and I'm excited to have the chance to walk through. The second quarter was a real step forward for Buda. It came earlier than we told you to expect as revenue grew 26.4 percent year over year to 4.5 million. On our last call we said the step up in growth would show up in the second half of the year, and it actually started in the second quarter.

Instead, two things drove that: our core beverage business continued to grow organically with our existing customers, and it picked up a partial quarter contribution from our second quarter expansion into 246 Walmart stores across nine states. On top of that, we added the new product line to our Fresh 35 platform, Ultra Fresh Dressings. I'll come back to both of those in a bit. With that being said, we did absorb real pressure on gross margin this quarter.

It was largely transitory, every piece of it identifiable, and most of it has an end date attached. And Clint will walk you through all of the details rather than have me summarize it. Our third quarter started even stronger. Through the first six weeks, our preliminary unaudited net sales are up more than 40% year over year. Roughly half of that is coming from same-store sales, and the balance is primarily from Walmart and dressings. That figure is preliminary and unaudited, and again is only for the first six weeks of the third quarter.

So let me set up the context, because the context is what makes this more than just a good quarter. There is structurally a shift happening in the grocery juice category. For decades it has been built around pasteurized, UV, shelf-stable juice sitting in a crowded cooler or in the center store aisle. Consumers are increasingly walking past it. What they respond to is truly fresh, clean-label juice at a fair price, kept cold in the produce section next to the fruit it came from.

Fresh is not a premium version of an old category. It behaves like a different category altogether, a daily staple bought by adults and children alike. We call it Ultra Fresh. We created it, and several large retailers are now resetting their juice sections around it. As customers experience Ultra Fresh, they come back to try new flavors and make it a larger portion of their beverage spend as they recognize its utility as a beverage too. It's a value beverage.

With Buda Fresh products ranging from $1.47 to $5.99, the entire family can enjoy them. We believe there is a structural change in how this category gets merchandised, a beverage category worth roughly $57 billion a year and growing. Here is how quickly it's moving. In one recent installation, the new store for a large national retailer, our Buda Fresh section occupies about a third of the juice cooler. Based on early observations, we believe it may be outselling the entire pasteurized juice set beside it.

I want to be careful with that. It is one store and one early read, and we are treating this exactly that, but it is consistent with what we have seen in our established markets. When people are offered genuinely fresh juice at a fair price, they don't generally go back to pasteurized. Juice is the core of our Ultra Fresh value. But Ultra Fresh was never just about one bottle of juice. It is a capability and our Fresh 35 cold chain running end to end, a home in the produce section, and hard-earned trust with some of the largest retailers in the country.

Building that took years and it is generally difficult to replicate. It is the reason retailers came to us when they decided to move their juice section to fresh. And once you own it, you carry a great deal more than juice in that section, such as our dressing products. What matters strategically is this: it is still part of the Fresh 35 cold chain, sits in the same produce section, and serves the same customers and has the same buyers. It was contributing.

Within weeks, we are already in conversations to bring our dressing to additional customers. Meanwhile, the core juice keeps expanding right alongside it. Buda Fresh is now in 246 Walmart stores across nine states in both single-serve and multi-serve formats, merchandised in produce with an entry price of $1.47. That is mass market positioning at the largest grocery retailer in the world, and we hope it is a starting point rather than the end point.

We'd like to be in more stores with more items, and we're working on how to get there. With our momentum accelerating, we believe Ultra Fresh has the opportunity to make Buda a truly national brand and place our products in grocery stores across America. The opportunity is enormous and we're just getting started. With that, I hand it over to Clint.

Clint Bowers, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Horatio. Good morning, everyone. Second quarter revenue was 4.5 million, up 26.4% from 3.6 million. This increase came from organic growth in the core beverage business and a partial quarter of new sales from the Walmart expansion and new dressings business. As Horatio said, gross margin did have downward pressure this quarter, coming in at 36.6% versus 46.7% a year ago, a decline of 1,010 basis points. Now for context on what drove this pressure, I'd like to detail it out.

Roughly 320 of the 1,010 basis points came from paying a third party to co-pack the fresh dressing while we build the capability in our Buda Dallas plant. We consider this as part of the startup cost of entering the category before we can make the product ourselves. About 270 basis points came from inbound freight cost on the juice business, which ran well above their usual level due to elevated fuel prices. Roughly 100 basis points of additional labor costs for training and audit readiness work tied to our facility upgrades and customer expansions.

Thirty basis points or so in product and customer mix. Lastly, 290 basis points came from higher produce costs versus last year, mainly limes that were still elevated coming into the second quarter following the first quarter supply disruption we discussed last time, and as we stated last quarter those costs were starting to come down and did in fact return to normalized levels towards the end of the second quarter. And to clarify, when we remove the additional costs of our higher inbound transportation, co-packing costs, and additional labor investments made, we indeed arrived back to our historical gross margin levels above 40%, consistent with our expectations during last earnings call. With all that as evidence, the unit economics of the core business did not change this quarter. Now to expand a bit more, these four items behave differently from each other, so let me talk through each one. First, the high co-packing costs for the dressing business will end when we move it to the Dallas plant. We are actively spending capital dollars on our Dallas facility for this brand new line, and we expect to start production in the first quarter of 2027, and we expect dressing margin and consolidated gross margin to improve as soon as it happens.

Second, the high produce costs experienced in the first quarter and towards the end of the second quarter are behind us since towards the end of the second quarter we have seen normal and stable produce costs. Third, I cannot put a date on the increased inbound freight component, but if it persists we can elect to pass on that additional cost and this is something we're keeping close tabs on. And lastly, the additional training labor was specific to these major upgrades and initiatives currently in process.

We look at this as an investment into the business and our growth. What I can tell you is that these factors impacting the second quarter do not reflect a change in what it costs us to make and sell our core juice business. Moving to below gross profit. Operating expenses were 1.2 million against half a million last year, or 26.8% of revenue versus 14.7%. The increase is a full period of public company costs of 185,000, 213,000 of stock-based compensation expense, as well as the commercial capability we are adding for Walmart and the dressing business.

As we said last quarter, we still expect public company costs to run around 1 million a year. And as a note, this was the first quarter we recorded stock-based compensation, and it will continue moving forward. Operating income was 0.4 million versus 1.1 million last year when we were private and carried none of these additional costs. Interest income was 149,000 driven by a higher cash balance than last year. Income tax expense was 129,000 and another reminder that we converted from an LLC to a C Corporation on January 1st. So we're a federal taxpayer now, and last year's comparison does not carry an equivalent expense. Net income for the quarter was half a million, or $0.04 per diluted share on 12.9 million weighted average diluted shares. Adjusted EBITDA was 0.7 million, or 16.1% of revenue, against 1.2 million and 33.8% a year ago. We ended the quarter with 18.8 million in cash and no debt. Cash used in operating activities for the second quarter was approximately 365,000 versus a cash flow of 741,000 in the same period last year.

The main factor driving this decrease was our strategic decision to move a large customer off an early pay 1% discount to standard net 30 terms. This is a one-time change and no impact to collectability. Secondarily, lower net income year over year resulted from the gross margin items I walked through in detail earlier plus public company and stock-based compensation costs as well as income tax expense that were not there on a comparable basis last year.

On the investing side, we spent approximately 470,000 on property and equipment during the quarter and 700,000 in the first half of the year related to expanded capacity and automation for our existing juice business and the ongoing buildout of the new dressing line. All of that is growth capital and it all came from our own balance sheet. Free cash flow was negative 0.8 million versus 0.7 million last year. This quarter's negative free cash flow was driven by the one-time increase in AR related to the change in payment terms with our customer that I mentioned earlier and the higher capex related to the investment in standing up the dressing production line. These two items, one-time in nature, negatively impacted free cash flow by 1.9 million during the quarter. Lastly, our general observations as we get to the halfway point of the third quarter are very positive and continue to show strong growth and momentum both organically and expansionary. As Horatio mentioned earlier, preliminary and unaudited third quarter-to-date sales are running more than 40% ahead of last year. This includes organic sales, Walmart, and Fresh Dressing, with organic sales currently making up half of that.

Additionally, we saw the juice business gross margin back to historical levels, save the increase in inbound freight, which I'm not able to forecast, though we continue to have the ability to pass through. So while our consolidated gross margin may stay below our historical range while we continue to utilize a third party to co-pack the dressing business, we do expect it to materially improve when produced in our Dallas plant in quarter one of next year.

So although we are currently giving up some gross margin this year, it is having a meaningful positive impact on our overall net income right now. In summary, we are profitable, we carry no debt, and we are funding these profitable expansions out of our own cash, which is the position we wanted to be in as we headed into the third quarter. Back to you, Horatio.

Horatio Lonsdale Hands, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Clint. The juice category is being rebuilt in front of us and is being rebuilt exactly the way things are hardest to do: truly Ultra Fresh products, all cold, delivered safely and reliably with no in-store labor. That is what we built this company to do. And our Fresh 35 cold chain is built, running, and already engineered to be carrying more than just juice. Our job is now to stay disciplined and keep executing operationally while staying profitable, and to make sure that whenever a retailer decides to go fresh, Buda is the obvious choice.

We are very excited about where we're heading, and with that, operator, we're ready for questions.

OPERATOR (Dennis)

At this time I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question is from the line of Ryan Myers with Lake Street Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Ryan Myers, Analyst at Lake Street Capital Markets

Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on another strong quarter here. Just starting off, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about if you're seeing any increased interest from other retailers and if we should maybe expect any additional customer wins in the second half of the year here.

Horatio Lonsdale Hands, Chief Executive Officer

I didn't hear that. Ryan, you're coming in a little bit low.

Ryan Myers, Analyst at Lake Street Capital Markets

Yeah, just if you guys are expecting any additional customer wins here in the second half of the year and if you guys have seen inbound interest from potential new customers.

Horatio Lonsdale Hands, Chief Executive Officer

We are seeing a lot of interest. There's a lot of excitement around this category and what we're doing. So I can't directly answer that question. I'm to say there is a lot of interest. There's a lot of energy around it. Everyone's following what's going on in the Ultra Fresh category. Now we're seeing, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people are just walking straight past the normal juice set there to the Ultra Fresh category. In some of the retailers we already have product, and we're looking at growing with existing customers also.

So generally very positive. Great energy around it.

Ryan Myers, Analyst at Lake Street Capital Markets

Got it. That's great to hear. And then, on the dressing business, obviously looks like a pretty exciting opportunity there. Can you just sort of walk us through the potential size of that category? I mean, it's a large category in comparison with juices itself. But does that just expand the addressable market for you guys? Just any sort of way you can size that up for us would be helpful.

Horatio Lonsdale Hands, Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Well, you know, just to put it in context, the ranch business, which is one part of the dressing business, is about a $2 billion a year business right now. So it's very big. We have our existing customers who were really interested in the dressing business for us to do the dressings, and that's why we got into it. And so this is something we're very excited about because we have the cold chain, the Fresh 35. It's the same basically plant, the same facility, the same customers, the same buyers, and the same retail customers coming in.

So we have both white label and Buda Fresh opportunities, and we expect to see much more of this happening in the latter part of this year.

Ryan Myers, Analyst at Lake Street Capital Markets

Okay, got it. And then lastly for me, the 20% or so same-store sales growth that you guys are seeing here in the third quarter — I think this is the first time you guys have sort of talked to that — but how sustainable do you think that growth rate is as we move forward?

Horatio Lonsdale Hands, Chief Executive Officer

That's a great question. Well, we're seeing as, you know, we grew what, 4% in Q4 to like 17 and change last quarter, and now the second quarter was up 26 plus, and now it's trending even higher. The energy around the Ultra Fresh is just amazing. When people try the product, they buy it and they go back for more. And now that we have a single-serve which sells for, what, $1.47, I mean, you know, that is a really value product. We have the big family size bottles; they sell for $5.99. So what that does is not only do we have a, you know, a fresh product that is absolutely delicious with clean ingredients, but we also have the value side of it. Even though it is a premium juice, it's not priced as a premium juice. It's priced mainstream to the mass market with very limited demographic areas. So I think that is what's so exceptional about it — not only do we have great taste and we're clean and we're Ultra Fresh and we're totally different to the market, we bring consumers what they want, but they don't have to pay through the nose.

It's a value that they can truly see. So, you know, that's part of the opportunity and what's so, so exciting about it. So we're seeing it grow everywhere. We're putting our products now — it's growing really nicely.

Ryan Myers, Analyst at Lake Street Capital Markets

Got it. That's great to hear. Thanks for taking my questions.

Horatio Lonsdale Hands, Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Ryan. Brian, do you have any questions online?

Brian Siegel, Investor Relations

No, there are no questions.

OPERATOR (Dennis)

There are no further questions on the phone line. Thank you all so much for joining the Buda Juice second quarter 2026 earnings conference call and webcast. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.