Kellanova

Good morning, and welcome to the Keller Company's third quarter 2021 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. At this time, I will turn the call over to John Renwick, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Planning for Keller Company. Mr. Renwick, you may begin your conference call.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for a review of our third quarter 2021 results, as well as an update regarding our outlook for the full year 2021. I'm joined this morning by Steve Cahillane, our Chairman and CEO, and Amit Banati, our Chief Financial Officer. Slide number three shows our forward-looking statements disclaimer. As you are aware, certain statements made today, such as projections for Kellogg Company's future performance, are forward-looking statements. Actual results could be materially different from those projected. For further information concerning factors that could cause these results to differ, please refer to the third slide of this presentation as well as to our public SEC filings. This is of particular note during the current COVID-19 pandemic and supply and labor disruptions when the length and severity of these issues and resultant economic and business impacts are so difficult to predict. A recording of today's webcast and supporting documents will be archived for at least 90 days on the investor page of KelloggCompany.com. As always, when referring to our results and outlook, unless otherwise noted, We will be referring to them on an organic basis for net sales and on a currency neutral adjusted basis for operating profit and earnings per share.

And now I'll turn it over to Steve. Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. I hope you and your families are doing well. After all, we are still managing through a pandemic and still nowhere close to what any of us would call life is normal. This is certainly true from a business perspective as well. Therefore, we remain focused on keeping our employees safe and aiding our communities is more important than ever. We also continue to supply the world with food, but as we and all companies have discussed previously, this has gotten extremely challenging. Importantly, we remain on our strategy, Deploy for Balanced Growth, which is depicted on slide number six. This strategy continues to keep us on our path for steady, balanced financial returns for shareholders. We also continue to make progress on Better Days, our ESG-oriented program. A few Better Days highlights from quarter three are shared on slide number seven. This remains a critical element of our strategy, a clear focus of management, and a part of the DNA of Kellogg Company. And we have not lost sight of this during the current pandemic and business environment. And there is no question that today's business environment is as challenging as we've ever seen it. Our organization has risen to all of these challenges using creativity, skills, and work ethic to manage through them. Slide number eight attempts to categorize these challenges into three basic buckets. First, we're all familiar with the surges in market prices for commodities, packaging, and freight, all the result of supply, demand, and balances that may take some time to work out. We're working hard to mitigate the margin impacts of these high costs, from our active hedging program, which has given us strong visibility into our commodity costs, to mitigating cost pressures with productivity initiatives and revenue growth management actions. Second, by now we're also all aware of the economy-wide bottlenecks and shortages that are not only pushing costs higher, but are also making it very difficult to supply the market. Here's where our supply chain's control tower approach has provided us agility in addressing shortages and gaps in materials, equipment, and land and ocean freight. We've also taken actions to reduce complexity in our portfolio and operations. And third, we are seeing acute shortages in labor across all spectrums of the economy. This is resulting in absenteeism, high turnover, difficulty in attaining temporary labor, and for some of us, even labor strikes. To address this, we've had to recruit continuously, and we've executed contingency plans to sustain as much supply as possible in the face of open positions and work stoppages. Simply put, we are taking important actions to manage through today's unprecedented environment. And through it all, we're executing well in market and delivering balanced financial growth, which continued in quarter three and is discussed on slide number nine. Consumption growth remains elevated as measured on a two-year compound annual growth basis, even if it continues to decelerate as expected. We're seeing particularly strong consumption growth and share performance in many of our biggest world-class brands. And we continue to sustain strong momentum in our emerging markets. This momentum has been evident for the past few years and reflects our improved geographic footprint, the strength of our portfolio, our efforts to broaden our offerings into affordable price points, and our local route to market and supply chains. From a financial standpoint, these factors led to continued balanced growth. strong organic net sales growth, strong operating profit growth, strong earnings per share growth, and cash flow that remains well above pre-COVID 2019 levels. So in spite of all the operating challenges, we continue to deliver. And today, we are even raising our full-year guidance for net sales to reflect momentum in the business. At the same time, we are also reaffirming our guidance for operating profit earnings per share, and cash flow, despite a worsened cost and labor and supply environment. I'm sure you can appreciate that even holding guidance amidst these kinds of challenges speaks to the kind of dependability we strive for, regardless of business conditions. Let me now turn it over to Amit so he can take you through our financial results and outlook in more detail.