Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from Andrew Wolf – BB&T Capital Markets.
Andrew Wolf – BB&T Capital Markets
I wanted to ask you on the sales line, there were two things, first, Millbrook looked like at least sequentially the sales were a little better. Is that real growth or more seasonal, kind of like the core business?
Michael Funk
No, I’d say that’s more seasonal. Overall Millbrook’s sales results were just slightly under our internal forecast. But nothing material.
Andrew Wolf – BB&T Capital Markets
The core business, it’s held up as you said, can you comment how it was doing intra-quarter and perhaps quarter to date? You know there’s some concern out there that the channel is seeing some slowing recently.
Michael Funk
We haven’t seen that Andy, I’d say I would describe the quarter as well as the period after the quarter as very consistent, we haven’t seen any noticeable changes in sales either total or by our channels.
Andrew Wolf – BB&T Capital Markets
Also on sales, the way I view Millbrook from a strategic rationale was to really increase the addressable market for the company, mainly the conventionals. Can you comment on progress there, how it’s coming together, is that still something where you think there could be a lot of progress made in the coming months and years?
Michael Funk
We certainly hope so, we’ve been working on getting an integrated sales approach to our supermarket customers in which we can sell them the full breadth of our product assortment and bring them the expertise for not only the natural and organic side of the business but the specialty ethnic business.
We’ve got a lot of interest from lots of supermarket chains looking at this and we expect to make inroads over the coming year on some new business opportunities as well as expanding some of the specialty offerings to our existing customer base within our natural channel as well.
Andrew Wolf – BB&T Capital Markets
Have you had any progress with the latter yet, getting any further penetration with the existing customers or is that, now that Millbrook is stabilized sort of a place you can now focus more intently.
Michael Funk
Yes, I’d say it’s now more of a place we’re focusing on and a big part of it is getting our capacity set up so that we can handle the extra SKU counts and certainly our two facilities that are under development are going to assist us in that to a great degree. So getting the infrastructure right sized so that we can attack that market with the full assortment of products is what we’ve been working on.
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