Darling Ingredients Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Darling Ingredients second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jim Stark. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Andrea. Welcome to the Darling Ingredients Q2 earnings call. Participants on the call this morning are Mr. Randall C. Stewie, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Brad Phillips, our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. John Bullock, our Chief Strategy Officer, and Ms. Sandra Dudley, our Senior VP of Renewables and Strategy. There is a slide presentation available, and you can find that presentation on the investor page under the events and presentations link on our corporate website. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, and other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in yesterday's press release and the comments made during this conference call and in the risk factors section of our Form 10-K, 10-Q, and other reported filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. Now, I would like to hand the call over to Randy.

Hey, thanks, Jim. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us on our call this morning. It's great to have everybody here. Over the trailing 12 months, Darling's Ingredients business has generated in excess of $4 billion in sales and now more than $1 billion of combined adjusted EBITDA. To us, this is a significant breakthrough for all of our stakeholders and puts us on an accelerated path to continued growth across all of our business segments in the coming months and years. Darling opportunistically repurchased approximately 76 million of common stock during the second quarter because we believe that our diverse green global business will continue to appreciate in value in the near future. We saw many records in Q2 in all segments and including our joint venture, Diamond Green Diesel. Our global ingredients business generated approximately $222 million of EBITDA, and DGD produced $132 million, which is our half, making our combined adjusted EBITDA just shy of $354 for the second quarter. We are very excited about the anticipated startup of the new 400 million gallon renewable diesel expansion in Norco. We are approximately 60 days from the largest project of its kind to begin producing one of the greenest hydrocarbons on the planet. Also, we are pleased that the startup of the 470 million gallon renewable diesel plant located in Port Arthur, Texas, has now moved to the first half of 2023 for startup. Once Port Arthur is online, the DGD platform will have 1.2 billion gallons of renewable diesel production capacity and 50 million gallons of green gasoline capability. With that, now I'd like to hand it over to Brad to take us through the financials. Then I'll come back and discuss our outlook and why we're raising our guidance for the balance of 2021.