Company: UTZ
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001739566-25-000053
Chunk: 11

Company: Utz Brands, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 11
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 scalable, resulting in the ability to drive higher margins on incremental revenues and enabling us to realize significant cost savings when integrating acquired brands onto our established platform.

We have historically expanded the geographic reach of our distribution network from our Core Geographies, where we benefit from strong brand awareness and heritage, to our Expansion Geographies, where we have expanded both organically and through acquisitions. During the fiscal year ended December 29, 2024, we were able to expand our market share in our Expansion Geographies. We plan to continue to expand our distribution and sales of Branded Salty Snacks in these geographies, supported by our increased brand investments, expansion of our direct-to-customer and DSD distribution capabilities, and potentially through strategic acquisitions.

Direct-to-Warehouse: For a number of our customers, we either ship products directly from our facilities to their distribution centers or allow them to pick-up products directly from our facilities. These customers are then responsible for fulfilling shipments to their own retail stores. The DTW model is often preferred by some of our national mass, club, and grocery customers that have sufficient scale and capabilities to efficiently manage distribution and replenishment for their own retail stores.

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Direct-Store-Delivery: We are one of few scaled U.S. salty snack providers with extensive DSD capabilities. Within our DSD system, our IOs pick up products from our manufacturing facilities, distribution centers, storage facilities, or small bins and distribute and sell these products to retail stores within a geographic territory. Our DSD system provides service to both large and small customers, and it provides us a competitive advantage in expanding distribution, increasing shelf space, executing in-store merchandising activities, and ensuring products are fresh and available wherever consumers shop. Our DSD network includes approximately 2,500 routes reaching over 81,500 retail stores in 2024.  While we expect to have a small number of routes under the ownership of the Company as we acquire and re-sell routes as part of our normal operations, as of December 29, 2024, substantially all of our DSD routes are managed by IOs.  Over the last several years, we have converted from a predominately company-owned route sales professionals ("RSP") model toward the use of IOs. We believe this transition benefits us by creating motivated IOs and a more variable cost structure for our company. (See “Item 7 Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations of Utz Brands Holdings — Recent Developments and Significant Items A