Central Garden & Pet Company

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Central Garden and PET's fiscal 2024 third quarter earnings call. My name is Robert and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, all participants are on a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. If anyone should require operator assistance during the call, please press star zero on your touchstone pad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Frederick Edelman, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Frederick Edelman Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining Central's third quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. With me on the call today are Beth Springer, Interim Chief Executive Officer Nicola Hannas, Chief Financial Officer, JD Walker, President Garden Consumer Products, and John Hansen, President Pet Consumer Products. In a moment, Beth will highlight our key messages, and Nico will provide more details about our results. After the prepared remarks, JD and John will join us for Q&A. Comments made during this call include forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from what we share today. We've described the range of risks in our SEC filings, including in our annual report on Form 10-K, and undertake no obligation to publicly update these forward-looking statements. Our press release and related materials, including the GAAP reconciliation for the non-GAAP measures discussed on this call, are available at ir.central.com. All growth comparisons made are against the same period in the prior year, unless indicated otherwise. If you have further questions after the call, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. And with that, I will now turn it over to Beth Springer. Beth?

Thank you, Friederike, and good afternoon, everyone. Let's begin with the three key messages we would like you to take away from this call. Recognizing we had record earnings in the third quarter of 2023, we delivered solid third quarter 2024 earnings performance in a challenging environment. Gap EPS was $1.19 and non-gap EPS was $1.32. Unfavorable weather negatively impacted our sales of live plants and continuing softness in durable pet products more than offset our double-digit e-commerce growth across the pet and garden categories. Second, we further expanded gross margin. Our strategy to simplify our business and improve efficiency across our organization continues to bear fruit. Recent cost and simplicity milestones include our decision to exit the underperforming pottery business over the next fiscal year and the closing of a live plants distribution facility. And third, we are maintaining our outlook for the fiscal year. Given the recent significant decrease in market prices for grass seed, we now anticipate a write-down of approximately $15 to $20 million in our grass seed inventory in the fourth quarter. While we see a path to delivering our outlook, it is worth noting that we also face continued volatile weather, uncertainty about retailer inventory, and the value seeking consumer. Longer term, we believe the consumer trends in the pet and garden industries remain attractive, and our cost and simplicity program will continue to enable us to improve profitability and generate the fuel to make thoughtful investments in our central-to-home strategy. Finally, I want to thank all 6,700 members of Team Central for their hard work and dedication this quarter. And with that, let me hand it over to Nico, who will share with you more details. Nico?