John Bean Technologies Corporation

Good morning and welcome to JBT Corporation's second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. At this time, 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 followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw that question, again, press star one. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to JBT's Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations, Kendrick Meredith, to begin today's conference.

Thank you, Krista. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter 2024 conference call. With me on the call is our Chief Executive Officer, Brian Deck, and Chief Financial Officer, Matt Meister. In today's call, we will use forward-looking statements that are subject to the Safe Harbor language in yesterday's press release and 8 filing. JBT's periodic SEC filings also contain information regarding risk factors that may have an impact on our results. These documents are available in the investor relations section of our website. Also, our discussion today includes references to certain non-GAAP measures A reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable gap measure can be found in the investor relations section of our website. Now I'll turn the call over to Brian.

Thanks, Kedrick, and good morning, everyone. Let me start with the good news. As we said on last quarter's call, we were optimistic that improving poultry industry economics and strong quote activity would begin to translate to higher orders. This played out in the second quarter as JBT's strong orders included an initial recovery in equipment demand from North American poultry producers. Additionally, AGV, our automated material handling business, rebounded nicely in the second quarter as expected. Overall, this translated to the second best quarter in terms of orders in our food technology history and a 13% sequential improvement. With that said, JBT's second quarter financial performance fell short of our expectations, essentially to do a revenue shortfall. With much of that expected to be recovered in the back half of the year, we have refined our guidance to reflect 3% to 5% top line growth for the full year. Let me turn the call over to Matt, who will provide more detail on our second quarter performance and expectations for the full year. Then I'll speak about market and geographic order trends, our latest ESG report, and provide updates on the combination with morale. Matt?