General Mills, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the second quarter fiscal 2019 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. If at any time during the conference today you need to reach an operator, please press star 0. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded Wednesday, December 19, 2018. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jeff Siemens, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, Jennifer, and good morning to everybody. I'm joined here this morning by Jeff Harmoning, our chairman and CEO, and Don Mulligan, our CFO. In addition, John Newdy, who leads North America retail segment, is joining us for the Q&A portion of the call. And I'll turn the call over to them in a moment, but before I do, I'll cover a few housekeeping items. Our press release on second quarter results was issued over the wire services earlier this morning, and you can find the release and a copy of our slides that supplement our remarks this morning on the Investor Relations website. Please do note that our remarks this morning will include forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions. And the second slide in today's presentation lists factors that could cause our future results to be different than our current estimates. And with that, I'll turn you over to my colleagues, beginning with Jeff.

Thanks, Jeff, and good morning to everyone. I'll start this morning by offering some quick thoughts on our year-to-date performance. I'm pleased to say that our results through six months keep us on track to deliver our full year targets. Our cost and capital discipline drove profit growth ahead of our expectations in the first half of our fiscal year. Our job to do for the second half is very clear, and that is to accelerate our sales growth in our North America retail and pet segments while we maintain our cost discipline. and we're confident in the plans we have to do just that. Now I'll turn it over to Don Mulligan to walk through our financial performance in the quarter. Then I'll come back to provide an update on our fiscal 2019 priorities and share a few highlights on our second half plans.