Del Monte Corporation

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Del Monte Produce's third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Today's conference call is being broadcast live over the internet and is also being recorded for playback purposes. 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 then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. For opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn today's call over to the Vice President, Investor Relations, with Freshstone Monty Produce, Ms. Christine Cannella. Please go ahead, Ms. Cannella.

Thank you, Regina. Good day, everyone, and thank you for joining our third quarter 2025 conference call. Joining me in today's discussion are Mr. Muhammad Abugazali, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Ms. Monica Vicente, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I hope that you have had a chance to review the press release that was issued earlier via Business Wire. You may also visit the company's IR website at investorrelations.freshdelmonte.com to access today's earnings materials and to register for future distribution. This conference call is being webcast live on our website and will be available for replay after this call. Please note that our press release and our call today include non-GAAP measures. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures are set forth in the press release and earnings presentation, which is available on our website. I would like to remind you that much of the information we will be speaking to today, including the answers we give in response to your questions, may include forward-looking statements within the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities law. In today's press release and in our SEC filing, we detail risks that may cause our future results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Our statements are as of today, October the 29th, 2025, and we have no obligation to update any forward-looking statement we may make. During the call, we will provide a business update along with an overview of our third quarter 2025 financial results, followed by a question and answer session. With that, I will turn today's call over to Mr. Mohammad Abou Ghazali. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Christine, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2025 in this course. We delivered another quarter of steady progress, supported by strong execution across our portfolio. We saw continued gross margin expansion in our fresh and value-added product segment, and our Pineapple program continues to perform well. Overall, our third quarter results affect our ongoing shift towards higher margin value-added categories, a key driver of profitable growth. We also took important steps this quarter to enhance long-term productivity and strengthen our financial performance. Most notably, we entered into an agreement to divest the operations of man packing, a business that has not met our profitability expectations. We believe this divestiture will strengthen our overall margin profile and enhance capital efficiency going forward. While these decisions are never easy, they underscore our disciplined approach to managing performance and ensuring that every part of our business contributes meaningfully to our bottom line. I would like to discuss a challenge facing the entire industry, the mounting pressure on global banana production. which I addressed last quarter and has since then only intensified. Porcelain World Tropical Race 4, which is known as TR4, was confirmed in Ecuador, one of the world's largest banana producers, making a serious escalation in Latin America after previous detections in Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. It is a highly contagious soil borne disease with no cure. And it's already destabilizing the region. In Peru, where TR4 was first detected in 2021, the impact is noticeable in the Pura region, the country's leading producer of organic bananas. A recent study found that 45 percent of farms are already infected and about 10 percent have been completely eradicated. Small growers are under mounting pressure as Black Catawba spreads and TR4 reaches new countries. With already thin margins across the sector, rising disease control costs are making survival increasingly difficult. At Fresh Del Monte, we have been preparing for these challenges for years. We are advancing work on TR4 resistant banana varieties, an essential step toward long-term resilience, but solutions of that scale take time. In the meantime, growers large and small are taking every possible measure to control these diseases. Each year, these efforts are becoming more demanding as the situation further deteriorates, placing new financial strains on growers across the industry. We are seeing the impact clearly in Costa Rica. As of August 25, production in the industry has declined 22% year over year. which is roughly 18 million boxes lost, with most of that loss stemming directly from black cicatoga. For a country long recognized for its agricultural efficiency, that's a significant and concerning decline, one that inevitably drives costs higher across the industry. Demand for bananas remains strong, What's shifting is the balance between supply and demand and the underlying economics of the category. Understanding that shift is essential for everyone involved. Sustaining this category over the long term will require closer alignment across the value chain, ensuring that pressures in the fields are understood and shared throughout the supply chain. The farmer can no longer absorb these rising costs. It is easy to take the bananas for granted. Simple, familiar, always there. But behind that simplicity lies one of agriculture's most coordinated and collaborative supply chains. Protecting it is our shared responsibility. And if we don't act collectively to support growers and stabilize this supply chain, we risk seeing this fruit and the livelihoods behind it disappear before our eyes. That reality weighs heavily on me and drives much of our focus today. With that, I will turn it over to Monica Vicente, our CFO, to discuss our financial results.