Blue Apron Holdings Inc (APRN) 2017 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to the Blue Apron Holdings second-quarter 2017 earnings conference call and webcast. All participants will be in listen-only mode. (Operator Instructions)

This call is being recorded. Following the conclusion of today's remarks, the Blue Apron team will be taking your questions. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Felise Kissell, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Felise Kissell, please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. On this morning's call we have Matt Salzberg, Chief Executive Officer of Blue Apron; and Brad Dickerson, Chief Financial Officer.

Before we begin, I'd like to review the following with you. Various remarks that we make during this call about the Company's future expectations, plans, and prospects constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the Safe Harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements and as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the risk factors section of the final prospectus related to our initial public offering, which was filed with the SEC on June 29, 2017.

In addition, any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. While we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if our views change. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any date subsequent to today.

During this call we may be referring to non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are not prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. These are described in more detail in the Company's earnings release and SEC filings, available on the Blue Apron website. You are encouraged to refer to the press release and SEC filings and to review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP results.

With that I would now like to turn the call over to Matt Salzberg, Blue Apron's CEO. Matt?

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Blue Apron's first earnings call as a public company. On today's call I will provide an update on our business and strategy, and Brad will then share a detailed look at our second-quarter results as well as the forward-looking view into the back half of the year.

The big news of our second quarter was our IPO, which, as you know, was launched on June 28 and subsequently closed on July 5. In the transaction we raised an additional $279 million of capital, which we plan to invest wisely to grow our business.

During the quarter, we added an additional $114 million of liquidity through a combination of convertible note issuance and extensions to our revolving credit line. This significant strengthening of our balance sheet, while a smaller capital raise than we initially planned, has made our business stronger, and we believe will ultimately allow us to grow our market-leading position.

We also recently completed a major internal reorganization that will allow us to innovate faster around a deep understanding of our customers. We created a new role and team -- our consumer-products team -- which will be led by Tim Smith, who has over 15 years of general management and supply-chain experience. This new team brings together our culinary consumer insights, ingredient sourcing, and packaging design teams under common leadership, and owns our consumer-product roadmap.

Fundamentally, our objective is increasing lifetime values and revenue per customer. Our roadmap will focus on expanding our offerings to be more flexible, diverse, and personalized, so we can serve new segments of customers as well as sell more products to our existing customers who want more from us. An example of a roadmap item that we just recently introduced and are excited about is 30-minute meals, which are now highlighted for our customers on our weekly recipe rotation as faster options. It's important to understand that we consider ourselves a branded consumer-products company, and continued investment in this pipeline will allow us to stay ahead of our competition and adapt to changing customer preferences over the years.

Additionally, the internal reorganization involved a number of changes to our technology team's product management function and our marketing team's product marketing function. Our technology team's focus is on continuing to expand our platform capabilities and producing more tools that will allow us to monetize our already significantly sized customer base even better, and our marketing team is focused on allocating more resources to monetization and engagement rather than acquisition. These changes are reflective of the fact that our customers behave more like e-commerce or consumer-branded goods customers rather than traditional subscription customers, and there is more we can do to monetize them across an entire lifecycle.

Our second-quarter financial results were driven by a number of factors, including many deliberate choices we made as a company. The most significant driver of our results was the planned reduction in marketing spend between the first and second quarter. In the second quarter we grew revenue 18% year-over-year while reducing marketing significantly from $61 million to $35 million between the first and second quarter. This reduction in marketing spend from the first to second quarter resulted in a significant improvement to our adjusted EBITDA from a $46 million loss to our $24 million loss, which was $22 million improvement. The timing and amount of marketing spend is a lever entirely in our control and drives both our year-over-year growth as well as our profitability.

Another factor that impacted the second quarter was the timing of our product expansion. As you know, we are currently in the process of rolling out significant changes to our infrastructure, both from operational and technological perspective, to allow us to offer a more diverse and personalized product assortment to our customers. The reality is we are behind on this work, and that delay impacted our second-quarter results as well as our near-term outlook, which Brad will review shortly.

Much of the delay is related to the launch of our Linden fulfillment center, the newest and most automated facility in our network. Linden shipped its first delivery on May 15, but in the second quarter still only represented approximately 3% of our network's national volume.

As we have moved into the third quarter, we are transitioning more volume from our older Jersey City center to Linden, and Linden will represent a larger percentage of our national volume in the back half of the year. During this ramp phase Linden will be operating at a significantly worse margin than our other centers. However, we still believe that Linden will ultimately become our most efficient center when fully scaled.

The delay is related to experiencing greater operational complexity than we initially planned for. We are hyper-focused on maintaining strong performance on metrics like on-time-in-full, or OTIF, to ensure seamless customer experiences, and will be more deliberate in expanding our offerings to customers with the current performance levels. We know lower-than-average OTIF scores directly impact our customer lifetime values, especially for customers early in their lifecycle with us; and we have seen some impact as part of this rollout.

Since margins and OTIF are both drivers of customer lifetime value, when they are impacted it affects the returns on our acquisition marketing as well. The interconnectedness of these drivers ultimately flows through to growth in financial performance.

Nobody is more disappointed by the unexpected delay and increased costs in this rollout than I am, and we are focusing our attention on solving these challenges as rapidly as possible. The good news is that we believe we understand the problem and are landing additional systems and fixes to improve our margins and OTIF rates. We do not believe there is any change to our longer-term view of customer economics as a result of these near-term challenges.

Finally, we are still very early in the rollout of our expanded product offerings, but we are encouraged by the results we have seen so far. For instance, when compared to our historical offering, we are seeing meaningful improvements in ordering behavior. Our customers are asking us for more products, and we feel a sense of urgency to finish this rollout so they can enjoy more of what we have to offer.

When we started Blue Apron five years ago, we knew that the idea of making incredible home cooking accessible to everybody was powerful and emotional. Today we believe we are building an enduring and iconic consumer brand, helping millions of Americans enjoy home cooking more than ever. Our team is excited and capable of taking this mission to new heights as a public company and is committed to delivering long-term value to shareholders as part of that effort.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Brad.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, everyone. On today's call I will be reviewing our second-quarter financial results in addition to providing insight into our near-term performance expectations.

We remain highly committed to building upon the strong foundation that we have created over the past five years to capitalize on our next stage of growth. As Matt articulated, we are undertaking a significant transformation in the business that did impact our second-quarter results and, as I will speak about in a moment, will affect our short-term financial performance as we pursue these strategies. We continue to believe that we are taking the appropriate actions to best position Blue Apron for long-term shareholder value.

Now, turning to our second-quarter results: net revenue increased 18% year-over-year to $238 million, driven by customer growth of 23%. We intentionally scaled back our marketing spend in the second quarter 2017 as a percentage of net revenue to appropriately manage our revenue growth, which impacted our top-line performance.

That decision was based on three factors: one, our recent shift in our marketing strategy that focused on aligning marketing spend based with the level of expected seasonal customer engagement to maximize efficiency; two, our desire to prudently manage the strategic rollout of our product expansion currently underway; and three, our need to focus on operational execution in launching our largest and most automated fulfillment center to date in Linden, New Jersey. As a result, year-over-year marketing expense as a percentage of net revenue decreased in the second quarter from 15.9% to 14.5% of net revenue and sequentially decreased from 24.8% of net revenue in the first quarter of 2017.

Cost of goods sold, excluding depreciation and amortization, as a percentage of net revenue was 68.7% compared to 63.1% in the second quarter last year, primarily from increased labor costs associated with launching our Linden fulfillment center, the rollout of our product expansion, and the overall wage increases across our fulfillment centers. This increase also reflects higher food costs related to increased seasonal produce in our recipes and other premium ingredients.

Product, technology, general and administrative costs -- or PTG&A -- increased to 27.6% of net revenue in the second quarter from 17.5% of net revenue in the second quarter last year, largely due to our increased hiring and increased facilities costs to support our ongoing initiatives and long-term growth strategies. Net loss was $31.6 million compared to the prior year's period net income of $5.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $23.9 million in the second quarter compared to earnings of $8 million in the second quarter last year.

From a liquidity and capital-resource perspective, our cash and cash equivalents was $62 million as of the end of the second quarter. We closed our IPO with 30 million shares of Class A common stock on July 5, generating net proceeds of $279 million for the Company. As a result of the timing of the close, the proceeds from the offering are not reflected on the balance sheet as of the end of the second quarter, but will be included in our third-quarter results. The proceeds from the IPO are expected to be used for working capital, capital expenditures, and general corporate purposes.

Capital expenditures were $34 million in the second quarter, including about in accounts payable, driven mainly by the construction of our new fulfillment center in Linden in addition to investments in automation equipment. We do expect our capital expenditures to significantly decrease in the immediate term, which I will review shortly.

Now I will speak to our expected financial performance for the remainder of the year. As Matt mentioned earlier, we are working through unexpected complexities and costs that have arisen with the ongoing launch of our Linden facility as well as current product expansion initiatives. These complexities have arisen within the last month as we continue to transfer more and more volume from our existing center in Jersey City to our new center in Linden. Currently our Linden center is approaching the volumes of our other existing centers compared to minimal volume in the second quarter.

In addition to the significant impact to our near-term labor costs included in cost of goods sold, these issues are also having a meaningful impact our revenue expectations, as the delays in rolling out our new product offerings create headwinds to acquisition of new customers and challenges around on-time-in-full rates impact retention of new customers. This recent operational development and its expected near-term effect on net revenue and cost of goods sold, in addition to the smaller raise of capital in our IPO than originally anticipated, has changed our strategic approach in managing the business for the remainder of 2017.

As Matt mentioned, the interconnectedness of cost of goods sold and on-time-in-full and their effects on marketing efficiency are important drivers of financial performance. Because of these factors we will be reducing our marketing spend in the back half of the year, which will in turn have an obvious additional impact to the Company's top-line growth. We plan to reevaluate this approach to marketing when such complexities and increased costs are behind us.

Taking all this into account, our second half of 2017 guidance is as follows: with a cautious view towards the back half of the year, we expect net revenue to be in the range of $380 million to $400 million. This view, based on our current understanding of the complexities in our operation, includes what we believe is a reasonable assumption relative to the continued product expansion and the transition to our Linden facility.

Cost of goods sold, excluding depreciation and amortization, as a percentage of net revenue is expected to be approximately 74% to 75%. Note this cost of goods sold rate is higher than we would normally anticipate and higher than the 68.8% in the front half of 2017, reflecting the near-term challenges we are working through.

The majority of the operational pressure is expected in the third quarter as we fully transition from our existing Jersey City center to our new Linden center and increase the velocity of our current product expansion efforts nationally across all of our fulfillment centers. This increase -- these increased costs in addition to the typical seasonal trends expected in the third quarter related to higher seasonal produce along with higher packaging costs during warmer months.

As I previously stated, we are pulling back on some of our marketing spend and anticipate our back half of the year marketing to be approximately 15% to 16% of net revenue compared to the 19.7% rate in front half of the year. We anticipate Q3 levels of spend to be higher than Q4 levels. We anticipate a similar PTG&A dollar spend in the back half of this year compared to the front half of this year as increased share-based compensation expenses will be mostly offset by other cost reductions.

As a result of the factors that I just stated, net loss in the second half of this year is projected to be $121 million to $128 million and adjusted EBITDA loss of $70 million to $75 million. Note this guidance includes the following, which are reconciling items between net loss and adjusted EBITDA: interest expense, net, we expect to approximate $4 million in the back half of the year. Other expense in the third quarter will include a non-cash loss of approximately $18 million related to the automatic conversion and settlement of the convertible notes upon the closing of the IPO; a one-time, non-cash impairment charge of approximately $8 million to $10 million in the third quarter related to the transition of all of our Jersey City fulfillment center operations to our new fulfillment center in Linden; share-based compensation expense of approximately $12 million; depreciation and amortization of approximately $9 million.

We anticipate weighted average shares of approximately 183 million to 188 million in the back half of the year. On the capital expenditure side, with the opening of our new Linden facility behind us in the front half of the year, we expect our spend to be approximately $20 million in comparison to the front half of the year capital expenditure of approximately $95 million.

Before taking your questions, I want to reiterate that our primary focus in the near term is to work through our operational initiative, focus on minimizing negative financial impacts they are creating, and set the foundation for 2018 and beyond. Although we are not discussing guidance beyond 2017 today, understand that much of our internal discussions are balanced around not only the near-term focus, but also the important initiatives to drive longer-term growth and shareholder value.

The team here at Blue Apron is eager to work through these challenges to continue to move our Company forward. We look forward to updating you on our progress in future earnings calls.

With that, we will turn it over to the operator for questions. Operator?

Thank you. We now begin a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) Mark Mahaney, RBC Capital.

Great, thanks. You talked about these changes bringing more flexibility, diversity, and personalization to the consumer offering. Could you give maybe a few other examples? I know you mentioned the 30-minute meals; I've seen that show up in my queue. But what else should consumers -- you know, future consumers, customers of Blue Apron expect in terms of how the service could get more personalized, diverse, and flexible? Thank you.

Yes, thank you for that question. So there are a number of things on our roadmap, and obviously we think about Blue Apron, and our vision for Blue Apron is really for Blue Apron to have a whole role in every home in America's life in some way that's convenient for them.

And historically, for the first five years of the company, as you know, we have had a limited product assortment. We've had a couples plan and a family plan. And on the couples plan we only had six recipe options, and you could only get a limited combination of those options. By adding more recipe slots and allowing customers to pick any of those slots, we can design a portfolio of recipes in a given week that accommodates a wider range of dietary needs and preferences.

Examples of that are things that are targeted at more specific dietary needs -- things like gluten-free or vegan. And these are just some examples. I'm not referencing sort of how and when we might get to these, but -- things that are targeted for faster meals or slower meals; weeknight occasions versus weekend locations; different dayparts. You know, our customers are asking for things like that as well. Thinking about different price points and how we can target different price points to different segments of the customer.

And what I'll say is the biggest change here from how we've operated historically is that we -- with a larger customer base that we've attracted over the years, we are increasingly focused on thinking about our customers as unique segments of people, not as a one-size-fits-all customer. And we've been doing lots of deep customer research here in terms of what different kinds of customers really want from Blue Apron, and what we can offer them by designing those right meals.

So those are some examples of some simple things. But we also believe Blue Apron should have a variety of add-on products as well, and we are interested in products outside of just core meal experience at the same time.

So there is a number of things there that are coming down the pipe. 30-minute meals is something that we actually just launched very recently. And what we're doing with 30-minute meals is streamlining those meals to be much, much quicker and sort of less variance in potential prep and production time on behalf of the customers. So the customers who just want a really delicious, fast weeknight meal will also still have some more experiential meals with different kinds of ingredients as well -- and making them more visible to customers on the website so that they can get the meals that they want more easily, by easily identifying them; and using data and personalization to also recommend the right meals to the right customers so that we can therefore increase order rates, revenue per customer, and happiness per customer.

So 30-minute meals is the one we are sort of happy to talk about right now. Menu optimization broadly is something that we are working on in the very short-term as well -- making sure we have the right mix of kinds of dishes that people want on a given weekly basis. And there's a number of new categories, like I mentioned, that we are evaluating and would love to talk about on future earnings calls and the like over time as well.

Okay, thank you, Matt.

Heath Terry, Goldman Sachs.

Brad, just want to dig into the makeup of some of this new guidance. The second-half revenue guidance, $380 million to $400 million -- I know you mentioned that that's due to a planned reduction in sales and marketing expenditure, but that's also significantly below sort of the run rate that you are at for the first half of this year. Can you give us a sense of what part of that decline is associated with that sales and marketing decline versus just losing existing customers or losing existing customer frequency, and what specifically is driving that?

Yes, so, as I spoke about, Heath, we are taking a cautious view towards the back half of the year revenue. And I can talk in a little bit about what some of those assumptions are towards revenue in the back half of the year.

But specifically in some of the changes, the delays that we've been having in our product expansion are impacting our ability on the acquisition side to drive incremental revenue through new customers, because obviously those offerings are very, very important to attract new customers, as Matt had talked about. So that is part of the impact.

Obviously, the challenges in rolling out our product offerings, specifically challenges in rolling out the Linden facility impacting our OTIF rates, also causes some short-term concerns with our customer engagement and retention -- specifically, as Matt mentioned, on newer customers also. That is obviously part of the back half of the year guidance. And again, with the cost of goods sold -- efficiency and the cost of goods sold rates we're talking about in the back half of the year, the decision to pull back on marketing was really along the focus of -- you know, focusing on the strength of our balance sheet and making sure that we could manage the financial performance in the back half of the year.

It's really hard to kind of separate how much of this was due to the delay in rollout and the impact of OTIF rates versus the pullback in marketing, to some degree, because they are all kind of interconnected to some degree. But I would say that they probably all play a relatively important part of this revenue guidance in the back half of the year, with the marketing calldown probably, I would say, being the most significant piece of it. But I don't want to understate the impact of the delay in rolling out our product expansion -- and also the OTIF rates, which are very, very important.

As far as the revenue assumption itself in the back half of the year, I do want to make clear we are not really assuming either a significant improvement or a decline from the most recent trends that we've been seeing -- and taking into account what we believe is a reasonable expectation of the go-forward path of product expansion and transition to Linden. So we're not assuming any kind of incremental benefits to the rollout of product expansion, because we're still working through the timing of that. And obviously we're not assuming that there's any significant decline from the recent trends we've been seeing. And that's included in our guidance.

Okay. And then can you also give us a sense of -- you know, as you talk about sort of the new product rollout, I know that was something that you had anticipated happening in late Q3 or early Q4; where does that happen now, given what you know about the operational challenges in Linden?

And we are nearly halfway through the third quarter. When you talk about being conservative in the guidance that you are giving for second half, how much of this is a reflection of where we are right now continuing through the end of the year? Or is there some expectation that that gets better or worse between now and the eventual launch?

Yes, it's a good question. And I think it also kind of impacts our cost of goods sold forecast for the rest of the year, too, and our guidance, obviously. So I think our approach to this is that we are taking -- you know, on a cost of goods sold perspective, especially in the margins, we are taking an approach of what we see today to continue through the rest of the year, with the biggest pressure really being on Q3, because that's the heightened pressure around the transition from Linden to Jersey City, which we expect will happen through the remainder of Q3 to some degree.

The product expansion rollout across the rest of the country is something that is starting to heighten also right now. So it will be, again, heightened in Q3. And we expect that to roll out through Q3 into early Q4.

There are some things that we're doing, just on a very near-term basis, around trying to simplify some things. And we've talked a lot about offering two to five meals per week on our two-person plan, and in the near-term we're going to kind of focus on two to three meals per week in that effort to kind of simplify the complexity in the fulfillment centers.

We hope that that will help a little bit in the near-term. That is not anticipated in my cost of goods sold guidance going forward, as I'm taking the current rollout and the current pressure points and rolling that out across the rest of the year.

So there is the ability to have some upside here, but again I'd be cautious in assuming that because this is a very, very recent event, literally within the last few weeks, that I'd be cautious to say that we have a high degree of confidence that we can beat this, as much as that's what we're seeing right now. And we are putting things in place that we hope will have a positive impact as we roll through the rest of the year.

Great, thanks, Brad.

Youssef Squali, SunTrust.

This is Naved Khan standing in for Youssef. Can you just touch upon your marketing efficiency and what kind of trend you're seeing there? And just kind of a related question on the competitive landscape: what are you baking in in terms of the competitive landscape for the second half?

Yes, so obviously we are not -- we don't have specific numbers to share with you other than the color, which I can help you with here, and really ties very closely to the story of our operational challenges that we are currently experiencing in the fulfillment centers. And I think the way that we think about marketing is highly quantitative in nature, and we only spend marketing dollars when we think we are going to generate very attractive returns on those marketing dollars.

That's especially on the acquisition side. And on the engagement side, obviously an increasing amount of our spend is also on engagement, but I'm just talking about acquisition right now. And acquisition is one of the big drivers, obviously, of revenue growth and revenue performance.

The way we look at it, as we look at the cohorted, cumulative revenue that comes off of new customers; and we look at our expected margins we're going to generate on that and compare that to what we think we could acquire customers for on a cost basis, the big -- the reason that we are pulling back on marketing beyond our expectations in the back half of the year is partly because a couple of parts of that equation are working against us with the rollout of Linden and the product expansion infrastructure.

So the direction that the different drivers are going -- and obviously the margins are lower, which impacts the profitability of the customers -- we are seeing higher OTIF rates -- sorry, worse OTIF rates, which impacts -- and OTIF, since we haven't used that metric a lot publicly, just so you guys know, is on-time-in-full. And the way we think about that, it's about delivering on time to the customer; and by in full, we mean 100% order completeness.

So a missing ingredient would impact, a mis-pick would impact that. And that's one of the biggest challenges right now on our OTIF rates, because so much of the process in our fulfillment centers is brand-new. And the change management associated with training thousands of employees and managers on the new process and getting process compliance is just taking us a little bit longer than we had previously anticipated. This is the most ambitious organizational change we've made.

And so when those OTIF rates are suffering, they also impact the order frequency and cadence of those new customers as well. And so one of the reasons that we are choosing to pull back on marketing in the back half of the year is because we are focused on only generating incredible returns on our marketing. And when we see that equation -- drivers in that equation move, we react in terms of managing the business as rapidly as we can. And so that's the impact there.

I would say that most of -- certainly we have competition, and it's our job as a company to out-compete our competition, both through great consumer product innovation -- I mentioned we think about ourselves as a branded consumer products company, and this reorganization that we did has a lot of really exciting roadmap items that we are going to be launching and executing on in high-quality way. So launching new products is a key part of continuing to out-compete our competition, as well as being able to deliver economic value, and being a product producer, and having end-to-end integrated supply chain. So we are very focused on that.

I would say that our decision to pull back on marketing is a little bit more driven, obviously, by these very direct near-term factors that we are talking about here that are impacting our -- the economics of our acquisition marketing somewhat, relative to a change in our view of the competitive landscape or the product offering and how well we are competing and the like.

Brad, do you have anything to add here?

Mark May, Citi.

Using the midpoint of your second-half outlook, your marketing spend, I think, is down about 30% year on year, about 35% down versus the first half. But your revenue outlook is kind of down, call it 7% year on year, about 20% versus the first half. What gives you the confidence that you can show that kind of leverage in marketing spend, i.e., that your revenue might not be down even further than that given how much you are pulling back on marketing?

Yes, Mark, I think part of it is just as we pull back on marketing, being very strategic about where we're pulling back on marketing. And you know, we have talked a lot at length in the S-1 and so forth around the mix of our marketing being acquisition-based and also brand-building-based.

So there's a lot of different channels of marketing that we're in the back half of the year, so we're being very strategic around which marketing we are pulling back on, and being very near-term focused on spending marketing in the most efficient way as possible with the money that we do have. And obviously, even with the pullback, we are still spending a decent amount of money on marketing. And the teams are really focused on the efficiency of that marketing going forward. And since we are pulling it back, the thought and expectation is that the marketing spend will be much more efficient on average than it was in the front half of the year.

Okay. And then, I guess somewhat relatedly, can you comment on the repeat behavior of your customers? And how does the recent repeat rate -- order rate compare with the 92% figure that you disclosed in the S-1?

Yes, those rates really haven't changed too much, so they fluctuate right around that 90% level. And we see a very similar rate in the second quarter. They haven't fluctuated that much.

Thanks.

Ross Sandler, Barclays.

Just a couple of questions. Can you first just talk about overall retention rates -- how they look today versus maybe 90 days ago or this time last year? Are you seeing any improvement in retention?

And then we noticed you guys have started to launch the two-meal plan in some markets. I was just wondering what the early read is on that uptake relative to the traditional three-meal plan under the couples plan.

And then lastly, you noted in the release that there was a little bit of food cost inflation in Q2 in the COGS. Just wondering, can you provide us a little bit more color there? Is that something that you expect to see going forward, or will that reverse out? Thank you.

Yes. So to answer your questions -- and I'll try to do them in order, but they are actually all somewhat related -- on the retention side, the way we look at our customers is on a cumulative lifetime value basis, which is how much revenue we generate off of them over X period of time, which is a combination of order frequency and order longevity, and also order value. We also obviously look at the margin associated with that.

What we said at the beginning of this call is that the launch of Linden in particular has caused our on-time-in-full rates to be lower than where we are comfortable with, which is why we are delaying some of that launch and taking it a little more deliberately, because we are focused on making sure that all of our customers have seamless customer experiences.

And so when our OTIF rates are worse than we would like, it does impact early customer lifecycle lifetime value somewhat. And that is one of the reasons why we are being more conservative on acquiring customers during this back half of the year while we are working through completing the launch in a high-quality way, so that all of our customers always get an incredible experience from Blue Apron.

As it relates to the impact of allowing customers to have more choice in terms of more recipes, more ability to choose which recipe they want, the ability to choose more or less recipes per week -- and also the way that we've actually -- I don't know if folks have noticed, but we've also changed a lot of the interface on the website as part of these rollouts, to allow it to be more obvious and easy for customers to choose what they want when they want it. We've seen what we consider some very good results, but the data is early.

And so in our internal analysis, which I can't quote for you specific numbers on, but we've seen meaningful improvements in revenue per customer and customer economics from some of the expanded offerings by allowing customers to pick more of what they want on the terms that are good for them. And so we are excited about that general philosophy, and that is how we are thinking about continuing to expand: offering more options to customers over time.

I want to emphasize that this data is a little early, and it's also somewhat confounded by the operational rollouts and the impact on OTIF rates and the like. But we are very encouraged by those early results. And the reason that we feel urgency to complete these rollouts in a high-quality way -- because it's what our customers want.

As for food, I'll let Brad speak to the food costs, but the one thing that I would add there is that with the acquisition of BN Ranch and a more strategic approach to how we're doing menu optimization in a given week, we've been doing things like putting more steak on the menu and putting higher-quality premium items on the menu, because we see that there are returns to that. And in some cases -- you know, I don't know if you've noticed, but this -- over the last quarter we had ribeyes on the menu and grass-fed beef on the menu quite frequently. And we see opportunities to drive better customer behavior through continuing to offer more premium offerings like that to the customers. And we do that because we believe that we will generate -- even though it costs a little bit more, we will generate better customer economics over the long-term from that.

So I'll let Brad speak a little bit more to the exact numbers on that. But that's kind of the philosophy, and we are being more strategic and tactical about how we compose those menus.

Yes, that's definitely one piece of it, Ross. And we definitely had some more premium recipes out there in Q2, especially toward the end of Q2; and then also going forward -- that's also part of our strategy is to make sure that we are looking on the premium nature of meals going forward, too. And that's included in our guidance.

Also, there is a seasonal component in Q2, and this goes into Q3 also. Obviously, the seasonal produce the that we have, in-season/seasonal produce as we get into the summer months tends to be a little bit more costly than outside the summer months. So that's also part of what we're talking about here. And again, that will also be a part of Q3 also.

And then obviously, as we look to move from Q3 into Q4, I think it's important to note again we see the heightened labor pressure with the initiatives we are working on in Q3. In addition, you do have the additional cost of seasonal produce in Q3, which typically tends to lighten as you get into Q4. And obviously packaging is a seasonal component for its heavier cost in Q2 -- in Q3, then Q4 also, so just to make sure you note that as you look at costs of goods sold between the quarters.

Kerry Rice, Needham.

Thanks. Just a couple questions. Maybe to follow up on Ross's question: you know, the impact of the new product rollout on, maybe, orders and average order value -- while I know it's early, maybe can you talk conceptually about what you expect to happen there? I mean, it sounds like with the -- beyond just more frequency and more choice, would we expect to see average order value come down? Or it sounds with premium products maybe is there opportunity to raise pricing there? Or is that just, again, another attraction? So maybe, just on a high level, what you think new product rollout will have impact on those metrics?

And then the second question, on marketing: as you pull back and you are more efficient, do you think more about, again, driving brand awareness, so staying kind of with more brand advertising, or focus a little bit more on performance as you pull back, a little more targeted? Any thoughts on that? That would be helpful. Thanks.

Yes. Well, I'm not going to give you too specific guidance here, because we don't think about it on the very specific drivers of AOV and the decomposition of that. What we're really looking at and trying to drive is revenue per customer over time, and that's how I would encourage folks to think about what we're trying to accomplish. It's revenue per customer and lifetime value per customer.

And on a given customer segment-by-segment basis, we might be happier to have lower AOVs but higher ordering frequency, or higher AOVs and lower ordering frequency. And of course the ability to sell more things to those same customers is a key part of our strategy of selling and offering and diversifying our product assortment. Because today we actually don't even have that many selling occasions to our customers, so more things that we can sell to them over their lifecycle is a really powerful thing that we'd like to do more of.

As it relates to your question on marketing, I think Brad actually spoke to this pretty well earlier in the call. And what I will say is we are pretty performance focused; we also do some brand marketing. We like our performance marketing to have brand elements to it, because we don't do performance marketing that doesn't reflect really powerfully on the brand that we're trying to build. That being said, in the back half of the year, we know when we change the total dollars of marketing that we have at work, differing buckets of marketing have different efficiencies. And we are scaling back the least efficient buckets first.

And I would add to that, Kerry, that just from a marketing perspective in the back half of the year, what you'll see from us is probably a decent balanced approach of -- especially if we roll additional product offerings out, and making them more aware to the general population of the ability to order two meals a week versus three meals a week; the quicker-prep meals that Matt talked about; the higher premium meals as far as choice goes; more choice, all those things -- as we are rolling that out across the country, anticipate a lot of our marketing to be around some of those things, too, so that it can work both from a acquisition perspective and also an engagement perspective, because we think a lot of those attributes are going to be important for attracting and retaining customers.

Okay, thank you.

Brian Nowak, Morgan Stanley.

Thanks for taking my questions; I have two. Just going back on the revenue per customer point, Matt, could you just talk about how you're thinking about kind of gross additions, or even churn -- what you saw in the second quarter, and how you thinking about gross new customers coming to the platform in the back half, in the current guidance?

And then just on the execution and the OTIF challenges, can you just talk about how long you've been seeing some of these execution challenges, kind of steps you've taken to fix them? And what are the main signposts that you look to kind of improve these challenges so far as you go throughout the back half of the year?

Yes, good questions. So on the revenue per customer side, I think you can see the metrics that we have put out in Q2 versus Q1. There was a pretty nice improvement in revenue per customer between Q1 of this year and Q2 of this year.

Some of that is reflective of the mix of customers in terms of new versus older customers. And new customers are very heavily driven by our marketing dollars. So what I will say is throughout the year, when you see us spend more or less on marketing, that drives engagement as well as acquisition, but it drives a lot of acquisition in particular. So I would think about new customers versus old customers in the context of -- at least correlated with -- dollars of marketing, and when we're spending those, in what periods.

As it relates to the kind of things that we're doing in the fulfillment centers right now, the biggest thing, quite frankly -- and it's hard to convey this on a call, but we are launching completely new technology, completely new infrastructure across all three of our centers at about the same time. And we have over 5,000 employees who are all being trained on new process and new systems that are more advanced than the systems that they are used to working with.

And so one of the most important things that we're doing right now is focusing on training and focusing on -- and there is, quite frankly, costs associated with that training of people who are not doing day-to-day productive work while they are being trained, as well as impacts from people who are doing work, who are just early in their lifecycle of being trained. And so we are very focused on training and process compliance.

There's also -- in New Jersey right now we are operating two fulfillment centers at the same time, and we are leveraging a management team across two fulfillment centers at the same time. So there is some increased complexity and cost associated with running those two fulfillment centers right now while we are transitioning volume. You know, adding more volume into the center is a good thing over time, and one of the things that will help -- you know, we are also focused on doing things like reducing complexity.

Brad mentioned that we are changing the way -- the combinations of boxes and how we do fulfillment; some of these are just optimization problems in terms of how many box sizes we want to be using, how we route certain kinds of orders to different kinds of order fulfillment processes, dependent on the most efficient way to fulfill that specific kind of order. And we are also still, quite frankly, landing certain pick systems in the fulfillment centers that haven't fully been installed yet across our network.

So those are all some big things that we believe will really help the situation. Some of them are short-term; some of them are longer-term. And we will keep you guys updated on the progress there as well.

And Brian, just to add to that a little bit, because you asked about the timing of some of the -- of the execution and so forth: so just to reiterate what Matt is saying here, the success of Linden is extremely important to our long-term initiatives around building a platform where we can offer incremental product offerings to our customers. And that product initiative in general is really important, but I don't want to understate how important Linden is to that. Because as Linden fully ramps up, it will be more than half of the national volume of our volume, and that's obviously going to be a very, very important success factor going forward.

So Linden itself is very important in the product expansion effort. And I want to reiterate again that as we opened Linden in the middle of March, through the second quarter the volumes that were going through Linden were really minimal. Matt stated in his remarks about 3% of the national volume was going through Linden in the second quarter.

As we've moved into the third quarter and very recently, we started to push Linden to an approximate volume of what we're seeing in our California and Texas centers right now. So the volume has definitely picked up, because obviously Linden is going to be taking a big part of the national volume at some point here over the course of the next few months. So we are now hitting that volume where the impact is becoming much, much more evident.

But I do want to stress that this is a very, very important part of our long-term initiative. And we're really focused on getting our way through this the next few months, because Linden itself is important to product expansion, which is important to the future of our business.

Jason Helfstein, Oppenheimer.

Thanks. I'll ask two. So you guys are clearly the biggest at this and have had the most experience, and basically what you're saying is that there is still learnings to be done, and as you get bigger, the challenges get bigger. And I'm just thinking about how you think about that relative to the rest of the industry and your competitors. And does it highlight that they're really -- you hit a certain level, and it becomes a greater-scale challenge as you're trying to balance the economics versus giving the customers what they really want?

And then I guess the second question: how do you get investors comfortable with LTV? I mean, you are making investments with certain numbers in mind, and I just think there's a lot of questions out there about what that is over time, and how do you get there? So any help with that? Thanks.

Yes, good questions. So absolutely scale is a challenge in our business, and one of the reasons that we have made such heavy investments in capabilities and in supply chain. It's not all that hard for someone to, out of their kitchen, put together a small volume of customers to do something similar to -- like what we do. But doing it at national scale in a high-quality way, consistently, week in and week out, and make money doing it, is certainly a complex task.

And when you're dealing with something like perishable food, it makes it even more complex, because perishable food isn't a widget, right? Quality really matters. The kind of supply chain that you build really matters. And that's why you have seen us spend so much time and effort over the last couple of years investing in building our farmers' networks to grow ingredients for us -- because at a certain scale you can't even go and buy ingredients on a secondary market; you have to grow them. And why we have invested so much in automation and capabilities in our fulfillment centers -- because it does, quite frankly, cost money and complexity to make money.

And so we think about ourselves like a consumer-branded products producer. And therefore, obviously, creating great products driven by customer needs is important, but the other important part of that is being able to produce those products at low cost and high quality. And that's why in some ways we think about ourselves like a manufacturing business, where we are consistently producing in a high-quality way, week in and week out; and we need to be really thoughtful about things like operational excellence, and process improvement, and margin. And so I think your insight is correct -- that there are real benefits to scale in our business.

And forgive me, your second question was on LTV?

How -- to help us in as much detail as you can. And thanks for that.

Yes, well, I think probably in future periods we'll be able to provide you guys some more insight into that. I think we gave a lot of color around how the different drivers of LTV have been moving in different ways, in particular over the recent time horizon as we've rolled out some of our new infrastructure very recently. Obviously margins is a key driver of LTV. Obviously OTIF rates is a key driver of LTV. And customer revenue and product expansion, which we mentioned, is a countervailing factor that's really -- we hope will continue to drive things like revenue per customer and the like.

The reason that we are so focused on offering more flexibility to our customers is because we believe that the path to continuing to improve LTVs over time is to sell more products to our customers, serve them in more personalized and customized ways, and not have a one-size-fits-all approach. So those are the kind of things that we are focused on -- and obviously also generating great margins, which has a big impact on that. And so we will be making and talking about different components of that, which folks could use to really gauge our progress in those areas.

Ralph Schackart, William Blair.

Good morning. Just on the Linden facility, I think you talked about it being about 3% of national volume today, with a long-term expectation being about half. Can you give us a sense of sort of the timeline there?

And then also, too, as you are sort of working to the transition at Linden today, how is that shaping your view or informing you for your new California center in 2019 that you expect to bring online -- and sort of any insights as you think about that new facility in 2019 and the timeline around that would be great. Thank you.

Sure, Ralph. So on the Linden facility, I'd make sure -- I want to clarify again: the 3% volume was in the second quarter. As we moved into July, specifically the back half of July, we started to approach the volumes of our Texas and California facilities in Linden. So I want to make sure we're really clear on that. It was minimal in Q2, about 3%; now it's somewhere in the 20% to 25% range of volume. And we expect it to be more than 50% of the volume when it's fully ramped up and we've transitioned fully from Jersey City.

The expectation of that is through the remainder of Q3 to work through the transition of Jersey City to Linden. So that's -- you know, really the focus right now is in getting through that in Q3.

From the California facility perspective, obviously again with the recent focus here in the changes with our operational challenges right now and working through some of these unexpected complexities and costs that we're seeing in the back half of this year in cost of goods sold, it has got us to focus on strength of the balance sheet. And we did talk about that on top of the fact that we did raise a little bit less money than we wanted to, and focusing on the strength of the balance sheet the rest of the year and into next year, and looking at our current volumes.

And you'll see this when we issue our 10-Q; we are bringing our CapEx guidance down. So if you recall in the S-1, we actually guided a CapEx number from the end of Q1 of 2017 through the end of 2018 in the $100 million to $180 million range. And based on our current view of the timing of the need specifically for another facility in California, we're going to be lowering that guidance. And you'll see that lowering in the 10-Q, but basically that $100 million to $180 million is now $75 million to $115 million; that is inclusive of our Q2 spend that I mentioned before. So we are bringing the low end of that range down about $25 million at the high end of that range down about $65 million. And the majority of bringing that high end of the range down is really the view of California not needed as we get through 2017 and 2018, and pushing that further out beyond 2018.

Obviously, we are not giving 2018 guidance today. So we will get much more clarity on CapEx in general later, but I wanted to make sure I was clear with that change in CapEx guidance.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you.

Scott Devitt, Stifel Nicolaus.

I had a question just around the OTIF rates in terms of whether you are specifically seeing impact in the transition from Jersey City to Linden, or what's happening in California and Texas. And as it relates to that, to the extent that this more specifically is related to the transition of fulfillment centers, how you think about that in terms of marketing spend regionally across the country in the back half of the year? And should we expect that where the volume impacts are negatively are coming from the Eastern part of the US versus more broadly across the country? Thanks.

Yes, it's an interesting question. So we have seen impact on our OTIF rates across all of our centers because of the rollout of our new infrastructure. That being said, it is most pronounced in Linden, which is just very newly being ramped right now, and it is the most automated and advanced center with the most new people and infrastructure.

So there is more impact in Linden then there is in the rest of the country. And certainly, as I mentioned to you, the interconnectedness of all the drivers we think about in terms of how we spend our marketing is one factor that we take into account when trying to generate attractive returns on our marketing spend. So it's something that we take into account when we can, and we obviously are seeking the most attractive returns we can get.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Salzberg for any closing remarks.

Thank you, guys. Thanks, everybody, for the time today. And we look forward to continuing to update you on a future earnings call and beyond.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.