Kerry Group plc

Good day and welcome to the Carrier Group Q1 2023 results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the star one again. For operator assistance throughout the call, please press star zero. And finally, I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. I'd now like to welcome William Lynch, Head of Investor Relations, to begin the conference. William, over to you.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to Kerry's Q1 2023 results call. I'm joined in our call by our CEO, Edmund Scanlon, and our CFO, Marguerite Larkin. Edmund and Marguerite will take you through today's presentation, and following this, we will then open the lines for your questions. Before we begin, please note the user disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. I will now hand over to Edmund.

Thanks, William, and welcome, everyone. We appreciate you joining a little earlier than usual this morning. As we're conscious, it's quite a busy day for reporting today. So turning to slide four and my overview comments on Q1. In the quarter, we delivered organic growth of 8.5% at group level and 8.4% in taste and nutrition, which represented a continuation of the strong organic performances we achieved over the past number of quarters. Growth in Q1 was more weighted towards pricing as we continue to manage through the inflationary pricing environment. In terms of volume, we delivered 1.2% growth in taste and nutrition, despite the effects of increased pricing across the industry. Key drivers of this volume growth were strong performances in food service, particularly in the AFMEA and Europe regions, with the retail channel in North America reflecting our customers reducing their inventory levels through the period. Overall consumer demand in Q1 remained relatively resilient, while innovation activity was high, with customers primarily focused on adding new taste profiles, enhancing the nutritional characteristics of their products, and adding more value options. We had good overall growth in dairy, snacks, and farm and use markets, with strong performances in savory taste and taste sense salt and sugar reduction technologies. And just to update you on strategic progress that we've made in the period, As previously announced, we divested our sweet ingredients portfolio to ERCA for 500 million euro. And we also made good progress in developing our footprint and adding capacity for growth in a number of areas, most notably in apnea with the development of our new taste facility in Indonesia. So now I'll hand you over to Marguerite to take you through the detail of our performance, and I will close out later with the outlook.