FitLife Brands Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Irwin Acquisition Drives Revenue Surge as Legacy Brands Struggle

Unknown, Moderator/Operator, Conference Call Service: It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Dayton Judd, CEO of FitLife Brands. Sir, please go ahead.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Good afternoon. I’d like to welcome everyone to FitLife’s first quarter 2026 earnings call. We appreciate you taking the time to join us this afternoon. Joining me on the call is FitLife’s EVP, Ryan Hansen, and FitLife’s CFO, Jakob York. I will start by providing some general commentary about the first quarter of 2026. For the first quarter of 2026, total revenue was $25.3 million, an increase of 59% compared to the same quarter last year, with the increase driven primarily by the acquisition of Irwin, partially offset by weakness in Legacy FitLife. Wholesale revenue was $14.1 million or 56% of revenue, an increase of 166% compared to the first quarter of 2025.

Online revenue was $11.2 million or 44% of total revenue, an increase of 6% compared to the first quarter of 2025. Gross margin was 37.6% compared to 43.1% during the first quarter of 2025. The decline in gross margin is primarily due to the acquisition of Irwin, which has historically operated at a lower gross margin than Legacy FitLife. Gross margins increased sequentially for both Legacy FitLife and Irwin for the first quarter of 2026 compared to the fourth quarter of 2025. We expect Irwin’s margins to continue to increase over time as we work through a number of supply chain and other initiatives. Contribution, which we define as gross profit less advertising and marketing expense, increased 42%, driven primarily by the addition of Irwin, partially offset by lower contribution from Legacy FitLife.

Net income for the first quarter of 2026 was $1.7 million, compared to $2.0 million during the first quarter of 2025, with the decline driven primarily by higher amortization expense and interest expense associated with the acquisition of Irwin Naturals. Adjusted EBITDA was $3.3 million, a 3% decrease compared to the first quarter of 2025. With regard to brand-level performance, I’ll start with Legacy FitLife. Total Legacy FitLife revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025 was $12.5 million, of which 70% was from online sales and 30% was from wholesale customers. This represents a 28% year-over-year decrease in wholesale revenue and an 18% year-over-year decrease in online revenue, or a 22% decrease in total revenue. The declines were primarily attributable to lower online revenue for MRC and lower wholesale revenue from GNC.

The year-over-year wholesale comparison for Legacy FitLife was particularly challenging due to the restocking of GNC’s distribution centers during the first quarter of 2025 following the resolution of the previously disclosed commercial dispute that resulted in the company stopping shipments to GNC. Gross margin for Legacy FitLife declined from 43.1% in the first quarter of 2025 to 41.2% in the first quarter of 2026. Gross margin for Legacy FitLife increased sequentially from 40.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 41.2% in the first quarter of 2026. Contribution for Legacy FitLife declined 27% to $4.3 million, and contribution as a percentage of revenue decreased to 34.1% compared to 36.5% in the same quarter of 2025.

Sequentially, contribution was approximately flat from the fourth quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, with contribution as a percentage of revenue increasing from 32.5% to 34.1% over the same time period. Moving on now to Irwin. Total Irwin revenue for the first quarter was $12.8 million, of which $10.3 million or 80% came from wholesale customers and 20% came from online sales. Gross margin for Irwin for the first quarter was 34.0%, and contribution as a percentage of revenue was 31.3%. As previously mentioned, we began selling Irwin products on Amazon in mid-October, and the business scaled nicely throughout the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching almost $500,000 of revenue in December of 2025.

Amazon revenue continued to climb throughout the first quarter of 2026, reaching approximately $800,000 in March of 2026. Adjusting for the loss of Costco U.S. and Rite Aid as customers prior to our acquisition of Irwin and re-removing CBD for both periods due to the company’s decision to exit the CBD market. Organic revenue for Irwin during the first quarter of 2026 declined approximately 13% year-over-year. We estimate that approximately $1 million to one and a half million, or more than half of the decline, is due to lost revenue from the out-of-stock situations discussed on our previous earnings call. Now let me provide a few additional high-level comments and some forward-looking remarks, and then we can move into Q&A.

Regarding the balance sheet, we made a scheduled amortization payment of approximately $1.5 million during the first quarter, bringing our term loan balance to $37.6 million. We also paid down an additional $1.4 million on our revolving line of credit during the first quarter, bringing the balance to $4.2 million. We intend to continue to deploy excess free cash flow to further reduce indebtedness. Although the first quarter was challenging, we are encouraged that monthly revenue increased sequentially throughout the quarter. In addition, many of our Amazon selling accounts showed sequential improvement late in the quarter and into April. We are also encouraged by the continued growth of Irwin’s Amazon business, with revenue in April reaching approximately $900,000. Although the pace of growth is slowing, Irwin’s Amazon account has continued to experience sequential growth in the May month-to-date period.

We believe Irwin is positioned for further growth on Amazon as we continue to resolve the out-of-stock situations, successfully set up listings for the remaining products that have not yet been available for sale on Amazon, and launch our portfolio of Canadian products on Amazon Canada later in the second quarter. The subscriber count for Irwin products on Amazon also continues to scale rapidly, increasing from approximately 500 at the beginning of the first quarter of 2026 to approximately 3,600 as of the end of the first quarter of 2026 to over 5,700 today. Last, we are excited to announce the launch of 2 MusclePharm SKUs in several hundred Kroger stores nationwide beginning in June. This concludes my opening commentary, and we can now go ahead and open the call up for questions.

Unknown, Moderator/Operator, Conference Call Service: Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to join the queue to ask a question at this time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. We do ask if listening on speakerphone this afternoon that you pick up your handset while asking your question to provide optimal sound quality. Once again, please press star 1 on your keypad at this time if you wish to join the queue to ask a question. Please hold a moment while we poll for questions. The first question today is coming from Ryan Meyers from Lake Street Capital Markets. Ryan, your line is live. Please go ahead.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First one for me, Dayton, you had mentioned that monthly revenue improved sequentially through the quarter. Can you just talk a little bit about what you saw in April and then maybe what you’re seeing here into the first couple weeks of May?

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Thanks for the question. The trend throughout the first quarter, January was kind of tough. February was similar to January, although it obviously had 3 fewer days. If you kind of look on a revenue per day basis, it was stronger than January. Both January and February were in the kind of low 8s range. March we were kind of above 9 in terms of revenue. April is higher than January or February, but a bit lower or, you know, lower than March. April was actually our highest sales order month that we have had this year. We just had a lot of shipments at the end of the month of April, for most of our customers, we don’t recognize revenue until the shipments have been received.

Just to kind of put it in context, I think at the end of March, we had, you know, just under $1 million in transit, you know, that would’ve been adjusted out of March revenue and into April. At the end of April, we had about $1.65 million.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Again, April was decent, you know, higher than January, February, and if you normalize or look based on shipments, it was actually a pretty strong month.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay. Got it. No, that’s good to hear. Thinking about the Irwin business, you know, congrats on the strong success that you’ve seen there. I’m just curious, how much additional upside do you think remains in that business before you hit the kind of a steady state revenue rate, if you will, rather than, you know, growing from virtually nothing to close to $1 million? You know, what is that number? What do you think that number is to where it kinda steadies out?

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Yeah, that’s hard to say. You know, I think I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t get to at least $1 million a month. I mentioned kind of two or three things that I think is still kind of wind at our backs. One of them is that there are still a number of products, it’s probably around 20 products that are still not set up to be sold on Amazon. I mentioned when we had our call last time, when you put up a new listing, most of the time Amazon flags it, before you can sell it, you have to get it tested by one of their third parties, I mean, that process can take weeks.

The good news is when we get some of those SKUs up, and we get one or two up kind of every week, you know, we’re getting some traction with those, especially if they’re SKUs that have high wholesale presence. That’s one thing that I think will continue to help us. Another thing is out of stocks have hurt us. They’ve absolutely hurt us on the wholesale side, but just so you all know, if we’re out of stock on something, right, we prioritize, you know, the Walmarts and CVSs of the world, not Amazon.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Sure.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: There are some of our highest selling products. There’s one product in particular, probably one of our biggest sellers in the wholesale space that we’re hardly selling at all on Amazon, right? Because it’s been out of stock. Getting those back in stock and selling, I think is additional tailwind. I think I mentioned Canada in my prepared remarks. We have a number of SKUs, say between 8 and 10 products that are sold in Canada. Canada’s tricky ’cause you can’t just sell there. You’ve got to get what’s called NPN numbers. There’s a whole process you have to go through Health Canada, can take a year to get products approved.

It’s not gonna be a huge number, but you know, we do a decent amount of business in Canada, and we just in the last 2 or 3 days, got that account opened. And now it’s just a matter of getting kind of the inventory shipped in. I would be surprised if we don’t at least hit $1 million. The other thing I would say is, you know, initially we ramp up without a lot of marketing push or advertising push. We have turned on ads on Amazon for Irwin, and we’re doing more off Amazon as well for Irwin. As we continue to spend more on advertising, we would hope to see the impact, the benefit of that on Amazon as well.

I think if you look in the tables we provide, they give a breakdown of the spend for Irwin for advertising. If you just look at the trend, Q3, again, that was a partial quarter when we had just bought them, but we spent $72,000 advertising Irwin. In Q4, the first full quarter of our ownership, it was $182, and in Q1, it was $358, right? We are investing in advertising and marketing for Irwin, not just on Amazon. In fact, most of that spend is not on Amazon, but we would hope and expect that some of that spend, the benefit will translate to Amazon as well.

Ryan Meyers, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay. Got it. That’s helpful commentary. Thanks for taking my questions.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Yep. Thanks, Ryan.

Unknown, Moderator/Operator, Conference Call Service: Thank you. Your next question is coming from Sean McGowan from Roth Capital. Sean, your line is live. Please go ahead.

Sean McGowan, Analyst, Roth Capital: Thank you. Hi, Dayton. Hi, Ryan. I know you don’t break out MusclePharm in detail the way you used to, but can you give us some sense of how it’s doing, you know, directionally, both in terms of revenue performance as well as the realized margins there?

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Revenue is down, but what I would say is by choice. I think I mentioned this in our last call. Like, if you look across the board and you take out some of these international players that are very protein-heavy and super kind of margin aggressive, like if I want to sell to them at a 10% margin, I can. We’ve just chosen not to. Revenue is down, but if I were selling to them, right, or if I look at the other accounts that we’re continuing to sell to, we see good traction there. Online is doing well. It, you know, online was up for MusclePharm in 2025 for the full year.

It started trailing off like many of our accounts late in 2025. We actually hit a point where it was declining double digits kind of early this year, and it’s, you know, now back to, you know, barely being down kind of single digits. We’re getting some momentum there, back there, particularly online. I guess what I would say is it’s, it’s doing okay if we exclude the international customers that tend to be super price sensitive on protein.

Sean McGowan, Analyst, Roth Capital: Okay. Maybe you answered this partially, but if you kind of X out those accounts that you decided not to sell to, are you seeing them what kind of margin you’d like to see?

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I forgot that part. Margin, we expect margin will be higher there, right? Because the biggest drag on margins, like the least profitable customers in the set for us are those large international buyers of protein. When I no longer sell to them, like well over half of our revenue in the quarter for MusclePharm was online, and that is where we get the best margins. Margins, we expect to be better for MusclePharm going forward, right? Unless, you know, or until we decide to get more aggressive with some of the large international accounts.

Sean McGowan, Analyst, Roth Capital: Okay. Thank you. Switching to a question about Amazon. You’ve talked in the past about, you know, some changes that they’ve made, and, you know, we’re hearing that from some other people. Without asking you to, you know, give away secrets that could turn around and bite you, could you talk about how you were able to address that and fix it? Is it fixed?

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Oh, yeah. I would definitely say we haven’t fixed it. I think this will be a long fix. I alluded to the fact or mentioned in our, the call, right? We are seeing some sequential improvement. Right. If an account was, you know, had flipped negative, like MusclePharm is a great example. It’s probably our best performing account in terms of, you know, it went from positive to flipping pretty negative and has made a pretty good turnaround. I think this is a multi-month process. We are doing a whole lot more on Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok. We’ve been doing TikTok for Dr. Tobias for a while, but I think we started TikTok or we’re starting TikTok this month for Irwin.

You know, we’ve talked before, I think I mentioned in our last earnings call, kind of an endorsement arrangement we have with Joey Chestnut for Dr. Tobias, particularly the Colon Cleanse product. You’ll start to see some stuff on social media, ours and his here in the next couple few weeks. Our emphasis, right? We’re spending less of our advertising and marketing dollars on Amazon and more off Amazon. You know, from everything we’ve heard and from both Amazon people and colleagues in the industry is that’s kind of a new, the new formula for success on Amazon is, you know, drive success off Amazon.

Sean McGowan, Analyst, Roth Capital: Okay.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: We’re absolutely not declaring victory. We got a lot of work to do, but I think we’ve got some positive trends emerging.

Sean McGowan, Analyst, Roth Capital: Okay. Thank you.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Yep.

Unknown, Moderator/Operator, Conference Call Service: Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to join the queue to ask a question at this time, you may press star one on your telephone keypad. Once again, that’s star one if you wish to ask a question. Our next question is coming from Samir Patel from Askeladden Capital. Samir, your line is live. Please go ahead.

Samir Patel, Analyst, Askeladden Capital: Hey, Dayton. Couple things. I guess the first is, you know, we talked a lot last quarter about the dating initiative with the bottles, and I think you mentioned that you kind of expected shrink to start improving in Q2. Maybe just an update on how that’s going and how you expect that to play out over the course of the year.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Yeah, good question. I think when we did the last call, I think right around the time we were doing the last call, we were just receiving our first shipments of product with 3-year dating. We have received several products now with 3-year dating. We probably have somewhere between 15 and 20 products that are currently in production, though, that when we receive them here in the next few weeks, we’ll have 3-year dating. We have a whole number of other formulas that we’re ready to go with 3-year dating, right, next time we place a PO. Definitely making progress. We’ve whittled that obsolescence down quite a bit.

You know, I think we’re gonna hit an inflection point here pretty soon where we’ve done all we can to salvage the inventory that we bought and, you know, when I say bought, at the time of the transaction. You know, as we get more and more three-year dating in then, you know, I think the reserve will come down and margins should go up as we write off less inventory. Does that answer your question?

Samir Patel, Analyst, Askeladden Capital: Yeah. I mean, I guess to put a little finer point on it, if memory serves, you know, you said it was about $2 million a year, I think, that you were basically writing off. You know, I wonder if you can just provide some sort of cadence in terms of like, you know, are we still at kind of that $2 million a year level? Then I guess when do you expect that to go to zero? I think there’s probably some slight incremental costs related to, you talked about the overages that you need to hit that 3-year dating. I guess just sort of a cadence of like, are you expecting pretty slow and linear improvement over the next like, you know, year, or is it a longer term process, kind of a shorter term process?

Just any color would be helpful.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Yeah. I think, I don’t have any specific numbers to give you. It’s, I would say much of it is behind us. Like, we’re not expensing anything close to $2 million a year, right? When we bought the company, if you look at our inventory reserve, right, in the ten-Q, I don’t have it in front of me, and I could probably look it up here really quick, but the amount that’s in the reserve is not significant. It’s maybe $100,000. The reason for that is when you buy a company, you have to record the inventory at its net realizable value.

So there was a $2.4 million or $2.7 million reserve that effectively was taken out of gross inventory, right, at the time we booked it. We can’t go back and claw that back. To the extent we improve things, it would be reflected in higher margin, right? We kind of wrote off the inventory, and if we’re able to date extend it or sell it or something, right, that’s one of the ways you can see, you know, higher margins, right? ’Cause you’ve already written off the inventory. Again, that was The transaction was now, what, 9 months ago. We are working our way through that inventory.

The amount that was expensed to obsolescence in Q1, again, I don’t have the number in front of me, but it would’ve been very small, right? We’re kind of there, or we’re getting much closer. I think, you know, I think it’s We’re doing better, and I think we’ll continue to do marginally better over time.

Samir Patel, Analyst, Askeladden Capital: Okay. That’s helpful. Second, maybe, you know, I’d love some more color on the new MusclePharm placement. Anything you can share about that customer? Maybe, you know, if that goes well, obviously, that customer has a lot more stores it could roll out to. You know, maybe compare and contrast. I know last year we had The Vitamin Shoppe pilot that I guess didn’t end up working out so well. Just any learnings from that as you continue to try to get more wholesale distribution for MusclePharm.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: The 2 products that are going in there, it’s 2 flavors of a liquid L-carnitine. It’s a relatively new product, so this was not a product that MusclePharm had when we bought them. It’s one that we developed and launched after we bought them. We, as a company, do a lot of liquid L-carnitine. It’s a very big SKU for us in iSatori, our iSatori brand, where we sell thousands of units a week on Amazon, and also has distribution in places like Vitamin Shoppe. We also sell liquid carnitine under some of our other brands that are sold in GNC. It’s a product type that we’re very familiar with. It’s 2 flavors of liquid L-carnitine going into Kroger.

I don’t know the exact store count that Kroger has nationwide. I think they’re 2,000+ stores across all of their banners, so Fred Meyer, Smith’s, Kroger, et cetera. We’re going into between 700-800 stores nationwide, so it’s not, like, concentrated in 1 region. It’s, I know it’s multiple banners as well, so we’re gonna be in some Kroger stores, some Fred Meyer stores, some Smith’s stores. The product should be on shelf. I think we’re shipping it kinda later this month, and product should be on shelf in June. We’re doing some of the same things we did with The Vitamin Shoppe launch, but doing a lot of other things. You know, we do what’s called CTV.

We did this with Vitamin Shoppe too, but, you know, had a obviously bad outcome there in terms of some of the products being discontinued. Some of those MusclePharm Pro products are still in Vitamin Shoppe, just to be clear, but not all of them. CTV is where you can put an ad at the beginning of streaming services, and it’s geo-located, so we know the physical store address, street address for every one of the stores that is gonna have the product. Anybody living within three miles of that store, right, we can run ads on streaming services. We may do some direct mail. They’re gonna launch with a neck band coupon, right? Five dollars, like instantly, like the day you buy it, right, here’s $5 off to encourage trial.

This has been a big initiative and a big focus for our new CMO and our new kind of consolidated marketing team and we’re gonna do everything we can to make it successful.

Samir Patel, Analyst, Askeladden Capital: Yeah. Just I’ll drop off after this one. Just is that something that was kind of already in the works from your own team, or is that something that the Irwin team helped with? Like, did they have a wholesale relationship, or how did you kind of win that customer?

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Yeah. This one was a bit of a hybrid or actually more this one actually started I’ve talked before about the sales process for these types of sell-ins really to any major brick-and-mortar chain. It takes months if you’re lucky and years, right, if is more the normal case ’cause they’ll do a reset once or twice a year. This is one we actually started before we bought Irwin Naturals, right, in terms of going and meeting with Kroger and doing the presentation and getting some initial traction. It just so happens that the Irwin Naturals team, we have a number of products, right, in Kroger from on the Irwin Naturals side. We use the same broker to approach Kroger, there’s a lot of synergies there that benefit us after the acquisition.

This one actually started, with meetings before we even acquired Irwin.

Samir Patel, Analyst, Askeladden Capital: Interesting. Okay, thanks. Appreciate it.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: Yep. Thank you.

Unknown, Moderator/Operator, Conference Call Service: Thank you. There are no further questions in queue at this time. I would now like to hand the floor back to Dayton Judd for closing remarks.

Dayton Judd, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), FitLife Brands: To thank you all for joining us on the call. We appreciate it and look forward to speaking with you all again in the middle of August. Thank you very much.

Unknown, Moderator/Operator, Conference Call Service: Thank you. This does conclude today’s conference call. You may disconnect at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you once again for your participation.