Westrock Coffee Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Westrock Coffee (NASDAQ: WEST ) released second-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Thursday. Read the complete transcript below. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

3 million, representing a 39% year-over-year increase, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of EBITDA growth. 36 times, indicating strong financial health and reduced reliance on external capital. Revenue from Beverage Solutions grew nearly 17% year-over-year, driven by increased volumes in RTD can, glass, and multi-serve bottle formats, as well as new product launches and customer wins. Westrock Coffee is leveraging Palantir's AI platform, Foundry, to enhance real-time analysis and operational efficiency, which is expected to further improve operational leverage.

The company reaffirmed its 2026 consolidated adjusted EBITDA outlook of $90 to $100 million, and its recent market wins suggest continued revenue and profit growth without additional capital expenditure. 5 million for the quarter, with a forecast of $30 million for 2026, down from previous years, reflecting a structural shift in the company's capital profile. Westrock Coffee plans to continue expanding its product offerings and manufacturing capabilities, focusing on maximizing margins and driving operational excellence, while maintaining a strategic focus on shareholder value creation. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day and thank you for standing by.

Welcome to the Westrock Coffee second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone.

You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Jauan Arnold, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Please go ahead. Jauan Arnold, Vice President, Corporate Development & Investor Relations Thank you, and welcome to Westrock Coffee's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. With us are Mr.

Scott Ford, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Chris Pledger, Chief Financial Officer. By now everyone should have access to the company's second quarter earnings release issued earlier today. com.

Certain comments made on this call include forward-looking statements which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs concerning future events and are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements.

Please refer to today's press release and other filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made today. Also, discussions during this call will use some non-GAAP financial measures as we describe business performance. The SEC filings as well as the earnings press release provide reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. With that, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Scott Ford, our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer.

Scott Ford, Chief Executive Officer Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm pleased to report that 2Q26 was another strong quarter across every part of our business.

It was our fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year consolidated adjusted EBITDA growth. We turned free cash flow positive ahead of our anticipated schedule, and we ended the first half of the year almost 10% ahead of our internal EBITDA plan. The platform we spent the last three years building no longer requires capital; rather, it is a generator of cash. 3 million, a second quarter record and up nearly 39% year over year.

33 million was more than twice 1H25. 36 times, our fifth consecutive quarter of sequential deleveraging, and, significantly, we were free cash flow positive both for the quarter and on a year-to-date basis. Commercially, our momentum continues to build. Second quarter Beverage Solutions net sales grew nearly 17% year over year, led by the continued volume growth of our RTD can, glass, and multi-serve bottle formats in Conway and driven by increasing volumes from both existing and new brand partners across the portfolio.

From packaged coffee and single-serve cups to coffee RTD beverages, we have a pipeline of new products in queue, from refreshers, energy, and high-protein drinks to functional and nutraceutical single-serve cups. Our customer and sales pipeline has never been more robust, and the fact that our recently expanded manufacturing capacity is now fully operational continues to shorten our sales cycle with brand partners.

Further, our recent market wins enable us to forecast revenue and profit growth that builds materially over the next several quarters without the need for additional CapEx or new sales wins, prime examples of which are recent incremental can format volume wins from both historic and new customers in our Conway facility. This facility will be an increasingly meaningful contributor to segment profitability through the balance of this year and into next. Turning to single-serve cups, our volumes were up over 9% year over year, excluding the volumes lost to a customer that departed us through industry acquisition and consolidation.

New customer inbound interest remains strong. We continue to expect new volumes to begin arriving in late '26 with full replacement targeted by the end of '27. Our work with Palantir is increasingly showing up in how we run the business day to day. Foundry's AI is now driving real-time analysis across our manufacturing, logistics, and planning systems, giving our teams live visibility into performance as it happens rather than after the fact.

This is structural, not cosmetic. We are not bolting AI onto a beverage company; instead, we are running this platform on an AI-native operating core, and the operating leverage it creates is only beginning to show up in our results. With the first half behind us, we are reaffirming our 2026 consolidated adjusted EBITDA outlook of $90 to $100 million. While acknowledging that both of our first two quarters came in ahead of our internal plan and we feel quite optimistic about the back half of the year, our sales and operational momentum is continuing to build.

Our story this quarter is a simple one: we have become a cash-generating platform executing at pace with a strong team, again delivering record results. We are growing sales, expanding EBITDA, deleveraging the balance sheet, and now generating free cash flow. That is the business model working exactly as promised.

I want to thank our entire team, from the folks on the plant floors in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Malaysia, to our sourcing and logistics offices around the world, to our systems and corporate teams, and to our shareholders whose conviction and steadfast partnership through our expansive build-out phase made this quarter's milestone earnings and free cash flow generation possible. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris Pledger, our CFO, for the financial details. Chris Pledger, Chief Financial Officer Thank you, Scott, and good afternoon, everyone. Our second quarter results reflect continued momentum across our platform.

8% versus the second quarter of 2025, led by Beverage Solutions, where net sales grew nearly 17% versus the same period. Through six months, consolidated net sales were approximately $614 million, up 24% versus the first half of last year. 6 million compared to the prior year. 1 million of incremental depreciation and amortization expense associated with placing assets into service at the Conway facility and a $2 million negative impact year over year from non-cash mark-to-market adjustments in our SS&T segment.

5 million, up 19% over the first half of 2025. 4 million from $15 million a year ago, and through the first half of 2026, we are operating income positive compared to a $28 million operating loss in the first half of 2025. 6 million net loss incurred in the second quarter of 2025. 3 million, which reflects a record second quarter result for Westrock Coffee, increasing almost 40% compared to the consolidated adjusted EBITDA generated in the second quarter of 2025.

2 million, up 13% versus the same period of 2025. Growth was driven by the continued ramp of our RTD can, glass, and multi-serve bottle formats in Conway; new customer wins in our flavors, extracts, and ingredients business, including the launch of a lemonade refreshers program; and improved fixed cost absorption across our manufacturing footprint. And once you exclude volumes from the customer that departed following an industry acquisition, single-serve cup volumes grew 9% across both existing and new brand partners, consistent with the recovery trajectory we outlined earlier this year. 3 million in the second quarter of 2025.

2 million generated in the first half of 2025. The variance between quarters is simply a function of shipment timing. SS&T continues to be a strategic capability for the platform. 5 million in the second quarter of 2025, and we're on pace for estimated capital expenditures in 2026 of approximately $30 million, down from the $160 million in 2024 and the $89 million in 2025, which again represents a structural shift in the capital profile of this company.

As previously announced, on June 30, we extended the maturity of the vast majority of our Beverage Solutions credit facility to November 2028 and elected to terminate our covenant relief period ahead of schedule, which lowers our borrowing cost. That extension reflects the underlying momentum of the platform and gives us meaningful financial flexibility now that Conway is fully commercialized. At quarter end we had approximately $73 million of unrestricted cash and revolver availability under our Beverage Solutions credit facility, and we remain fully in compliance with our credit agreement. 36 times, deleveraging slightly from the first quarter.

2 million in free cash flow and is now free cash flow positive for the first half of the year. We told you to expect this inflection in the second half of 2026, but we got there a quarter early. Our second quarter results again demonstrate the earnings power of a platform that is not just built but performing—five consecutive quarters of year-over-year consolidated adjusted EBITDA growth, five consecutive quarters of sequential deleveraging, and now turning free cash flow positive a quarter ahead of schedule.

With the heavy investment phase behind us, our focus remains squarely on three priorities: selling the remaining installed capacity we've built, managing the customer mix to maximize margins, and driving operational excellence across all of our plants. The first half of 2026 shows what that focus delivers, and it keeps us firmly on track for our reaffirmed full year 2026 consolidated adjusted EBITDA outlook of $90 million to $100 million. With that, we'd be happy to open the line for questions. OPERATOR Thank you.

At this time, we will conduct the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question you will need to press star 11 on your phone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.

Our first question comes from Eric Delaurier of Craig Colomb Capital Group. Your line is open. Yvette, Analyst Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Congrats on getting free cash flow very significantly ahead of expectations. It's really great to see. Congrats on all the progress here. My first question just kind of on the pipeline.

So on the one hand you have this state-of-the-art, one-of-a-kind facility in Conway that's creating this demand pull. On the other hand, this disruptive M&A in the industry is also kind of causing somewhat of a push, customers looking for alternative manufacturing options. Bit of an impossible question here, but how much of your pipeline strength do you kind of attribute to each of those? And I suppose kind of bottom line of my question, do you feel like you're taking share on a net basis?

Do you feel like there's this kind of activity of overall changing of manufacturers right now? And just how do you view your sort of competitive dynamics within that? Thanks. Scott Ford, Chief Executive Officer Sure.

Yvette, this is Scott. It's a great question. It is. I think it's probably the most important question in terms of what is the trajectory of the business.

Not just the mechanical readout of the data, but what's going on at a strategic level. I think it's right on target. As you know, this is a reasonably small industry. Most, most of us know what other people in the industry are doing, what their capabilities are.

Most of us have figured out about where they price things. Most of us have figured out what their, we can kind of all guesstimate where each other's costs are, et cetera, et cetera. It's the nature of any industry. We are across the board winning share in every single category that we play in.

We have won material share. Some of it is in our run right now and some of it's coming in over the next 12 months in the roast and ground space. We have won material new share and we alluded to this in some of our prepared comments in the canning format. We have won.

We continue. We are, what, 4x the growth rate of the overall single-serve cup industry taken as a whole. So I think if you just, if you go product by product, we are winning share. We are winning share because we are bringing in customers that want to see and want to get priced on a super competitive, very large-scale, very automated platform.

And as they come in and start to work with us on one part of our business, we try to show them everything else that we do. And when we show them that and we can start to take over issues for them across their book, like their risk management, like some of their green coffee and other supplies, price fixations and things of that nature so that they get a more predictable pull-through in their own financials. That's just been a winning combination.

And frankly Will Ford, our COO, and Kyle Newkirk, our Chief Customer Officer, have lived on the road and lived in the plants with the sales team and with the operational support team, and they have driven momentum unlike—and I mean I'm not going to take you through the data, but we did take our board through it—it is the fastest growing business win set of relationships that I have personally ever seen in my professional career. And it is a tribute to those folks in the sales and operations team who've been delivering for big customers and are getting bigger and bigger customers that are coming in the door behind them. I'm super proud of them.

So thank you for asking the question. Yvette, Analyst Thank you, thank you for the answer. I mean that's highly encouraging to say the least. Very exciting to see what else is to come here?

You touched on the expanded product portfolio sort of playing a factor in your ability to take share here. You've obviously expanded your own product capabilities quite significantly recently—protein and energy drinks to name two. Where do you see your overall product capabilities now compared to, say, where you'd like them to be in a year or so? Do you feel like you've sort of completed or rounded out your product offerings?

Are there more sort of white space or more opportunities to come here? Scott Ford, Chief Executive Officer So I think that there are incremental opportunities, and there are incremental product sets, maybe even down as fragmented as down to different types of SKUs that some of our customers would like to see us put in a format line for. We're going to continue to work through that. We've got several that are on the drawing board.

We've got several that are in our current plan that we're adding.