International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc.

At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the IFF first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen only mode until the formal question and answer portion of the call. To ask a question at that time, please press star on your telephone keypad. If you would like to remove your name from the queue, please press star two. Participants will be announced by their name and company. In order to give all participants an opportunity to ask their questions, we request a limit of one question per person. I would now like to introduce Michael Bender, Head of Investor Relations. Michael, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. Welcome to IFF's first quarter 2025 conference call. Yesterday afternoon, we issued a press release announcing our financial results. A copy of the release can be found on our IR website at ir.iff.com. Please note that this call is being recorded live and will be available for replay. During the call, we'll be making forward-looking statements about the company's performance and business outlook. These statements are based on how we see things today and contain elements of uncertainty. For additional information concerning the factors that can cause actual results to differ materially, please refer to our cautionary statement and risk factors contained in our 10-K and press release, both of which can be found on our website. Today's presentation will include non-GAAP financial measures, which exclude those items that we believe affect comparability. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their respective GAAP measures is set forth in the press release that we issued yesterday. With me on the call today is our CEO, Eric Fehrwald, and our CFO, Michael DeVoe. We will begin with prepared remarks and then take questions at the end. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Eric.

Thanks, Mike, and hello, everyone. I look forward to discussing our first quarter financial results, which build on our strong performance in 2024, and demonstrate continued growth and progress toward our strategic goals. Now, despite the current uncertainty and challenges in the wider macroeconomic environment, IFF continues to deliver solid results as we focus on what we can control by delivering top-notch innovation to our customers while continuing to reinvest in the long-term value creation opportunities for our business. I'll begin by walking through the quarter as well as the steps we are taking to manage through the current macro environment and further drive long-term profitable growth. I'll then turn the call over to Mike DeVoe, who will provide a more detailed look at our financial results and our current outlook for the rest of 2025. Then we'll open the call for questions. Now, beginning with slide six, IFF had a solid start to the year with our refreshed strategy and renewed commitment to operational discipline driving solid results across our businesses. As we've heard previously, one element of our enhanced business-led operating model was separating our former nourish segment into two segments of taste and food ingredients. Separating these businesses into focused units enables us to better track their progress more quickly identify growth and margin opportunities, and drive performance and accountability across our portfolio. With this in mind, we are pleased to have delivered strong, broad-based growth across four of our business segments in the first quarter, including taste, pharma solutions, scent, and health and biosciences. Volume decline in food ingredients, primarily driven by weaker performance in protein solutions, due to some pull forward of orders in the fourth quarter and limitations in our capacity that are now being addressed. Also, it's worth noting that part of the top line weakness in food ingredients was attributed to planned lower pectin sales as we purposefully walked away from low margin business to focus on higher margin businesses within food ingredients. Furthermore, with most segments delivering growth, and our ongoing productivity initiatives, we achieved 9% growth in comparable currency neutral adjusted operating EBITDA as this broad-based improvement was led by strong performances in taste and pharma solutions. And I'm excited to share that we also completed our previously announced divestiture of pharma solutions to Roquette two months ahead of our publicly announced schedules. This strategic action further strengthened our capital structure and enabled us to achieve our long-term target of net debt to credit adjusted EBITDA ratio of below three times. We are incredibly grateful to the Pharma Solutions team who kept the business running well during the divestiture and for their many contributions to IFF over the years, and we wish them well. Now, shifting gears for a moment to discuss the current market environment. While I'm encouraged by the momentum we have carried into 2025 and all that our global teams have done to strengthen our financial and operating foundation, broader macroeconomic dynamics remain challenging and, as we all know, continue to evolve quickly. We've been through complex macro environments before, and what we know from history is IFF is resilient in times like these as we focus on controlling what we can. Our customers and ultimately end consumers rely on the quality of our products and solutions, the expertise of our talented teams, and the trusted partnership for which we are known in our industry. Those values and characteristics are in high demand during times of uncertainty, and we are staying focused on execution as we collaborate with our customers to be even more productive as we drive growth. And right now, we're working very closely with our customers to mitigate impacts of tariff actions, and we continue to stay nimble and disciplined in response to macroeconomic uncertainty, which we expect will continue throughout the year. With this in mind, and given what we see currently, we are maintaining our full-year guidance ranges at this time, which Mike will discuss in a bit more detail in the back half of the call. With that, I'll pass it over to Mike for a closer look at our results for the quarter. Mike?