DENVER – Jammin Java Corp., d/b/a Marley Coffee has issued the following letter to its shareholders.
Dear Shareholders,
It’s been an exciting and, in our opinion, a tremendous 18 months. We believe that the goals that we have met this past year have the potential to set the company up for exceptional growth moving forward. We are very excited about what Fiscal 2015 has to bring.
In Fiscal 2014, we established a national grocery distribution network, increased our brand awareness, strengthened our international presence and are now truly aligned with a large and innovative organization, Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee, Inc.
Our story this last year is one of expansion and this upcoming year we are prepared to build on that platform with organic growth. We’ve outlined our strategy for the rest of calendar 2014 below and will be judging ourselves on how well we execute on that strategy.
Relatively speaking, this company is less than 18 months into “full” distribution in the grocery retail sector. We hired our Senior Vice President of Sales only 18 months ago. We established our corporate headquarters in Denver in July of 2013 and brought on two regional sales directors in October of 2013. Category managers and brokers were hired shortly thereafter.
Over the course of the last year, we’ve gained distribution in over 5,000 stores in North America and have authorization in approximately 10,000 stores. We’ve established distribution in two of the largest chains in the country, Safeway and Kroger, and tripled our revenues year-over-year from $1.8 million to $6 million from Fiscal 2013 to Fiscal 2014.
While this growth is substantial, we’ve been able to maintain our core principles, to create the best tasting and most sustainable coffee in the world.
Throughout the year we’ve been honored with wins from Singleservecoffee.com, which stated “this is the first time that an entire brand line-up have all scored the excellent category,” and from the food editor of the British GQ as the best celebrity coffee in the market. All of our coffees continue to be either organic or Rainforest Alliance certified.
The past year was a “developmental year” in the retail grocery space for the company; we’ve gotten our products on shelves.
Coming out of last year, we’ve put an infrastructure in place that can help our next phase of growth. In October we hired Red Button Consulting, LLC to help manage our accounts plus establish and execute the promotional support our retailers and distributors require.
Working in partnership with Red Button, we believe that we have effectively deployed our trade and consumer marketing dollars, with the goal of ensuring gross margin goals in our current accounts.
We also hired two top-tier food brokerage companies, Alliance Sales & Marketing and National Sales Associates, to represent, merchandise, and market the company at a store level with over 400 brokers on the ground.
Marley Coffee has what every brand strives for but very few obtain; a powerful emotional response from consumers.
Because of the day-to-day guiding principles and decisions of our founder and Chairman, Rohan Marley, our products provide a tangible connection to Bob Marley’s music and philosophy, resulting in a deep, long-lasting affinity for the brand. However, just because we have this brand doesn’t mean we can take our marketing strategy for granted.
We have to focus on getting consumers to try our products. The heart of this year’s goals is to build brand awareness, drive trial of our products, and increase velocity at current retailers. This was one of the main impetuses for securing our relationship with Mother Parkers.
While we are still looking to gain additional distribution, we are not pursuing it at the same pace we did during the past 18 months. We can “buy” our way onto shelves by paying listing fees, but, unless we’re supporting new accounts with a full range of marketing programs, we don’t believe the strategy would be nearly as effective as building sales in our existing accounts.
We have four primary strategies for the remainder of Fiscal 2015:
1) Increase our turn rate (velocity) within existing distribution while strategically looking for new stores to expand into.
2) Focus on building brand awareness to drive that growth.
3) Capitalize on our relationship with Mother Parkers, both from a revenue and innovations perspective.
