Hormel Foods Corporation

Good morning. Thanks for joining us. Next on stage, we've got Hommel Fouts. With us is Jim Snee, company's CEO, who joined back in 1989, as well as Jacinthe Smiley, who joined as the CFO back in 2021. The company just reported third fiscal quarter results yesterday morning, outlining its thoughts on the rest of the fiscal year and so on. And with that, I'd like to kind of introduce Jim and kick it off with the first question. So maybe just talk us through a little bit of what you've been seeing in the quarter, what you expect for the rest of the year, positives, negatives, a little bit just like the rundown so we understand where you're at right now.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having us, Ben. Always great to be here. I think the biggest takeaway from our Q3 earnings call is that our underlying core business across the enterprise is really, really strong. So when we think about our retail business, so many of our brands continue to do well. Brands like Black Label Bacon, Spam, Applegate, just a really good strength to so many brands on the retail side. Our food service business continues to perform well, really strong volume and top-line performance. Our international business continues to recover and rebound across all fronts, whether it's you know, in-country in China, some of our branded exports, and even our partnerships really starting to leverage some of the investments that we've made in Indonesia. We also talked about some of the headwinds in the business, but they're known headwinds. They're isolated headwinds when we think about, you know, some of the turkey impact, the planters' product disruption, and contract manufacturing. They're all known. They're all isolated. and really more of a top line impact because we didn't adjust our bottom line. We narrowed our guidance, but we maintained our midpoint.

And the other piece I'll add to that as well is, you know, in addition, the transform and modernize initiative that we're undertaking is truly paying dividends for us at the moment. And so when we think about a little bit softer top line and not having the impact on the bottom line and being able to maintain that, that really speaks to the benefits that we're having from the savings that we're seeing from Transform and Modernize and also looking to the expanded margins that we're seeing, which is exactly what we communicated to you as we undertook this and and communicated at Investor Day that we're taking on this initiative to really drive operating income for the company.