Kellanova

Good morning. Welcome to the Kellogg Company's third quarter 2022 earnings call. 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 with publishing analysts. At this time, I'll turn the call over to John Renwick, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Planning for Kellogg Company.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for a review of our third quarter results and an update regarding our outlook for 2022. I'm joined this morning by Steve Cahalan, our Chairman and CEO, and Amit Bhanati, 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 a particular note amidst the current operating environment, which includes unusually high input cost inflation, global supply disruptions, and uncertain global macroeconomic conditions, all of whose direction, length, and severity 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. We are delighted to be able to report yet another quarter of momentum, progress, better-than-expected results, and an improved full-year outlook. Our organization once again exhibited grit and creativity in navigating and executing through a global operating environment that showed little to no signs of easing. We continue to improve our service levels in spite of persistent bottlenecks and shortages of everything from materials and equipment to trucks and containers. We also continue to mitigate the profit impact of exceptionally high-cost inflation with good execution of productivity initiatives and revenue growth management actions. And even in this unusual operating environment, we again saw the strength of our portfolio play out. We sustained our strong growth momentum in snacks around the world, and our emerging markets saw strong growth in all key category groups. And in our North America cereal business, we continued to recover inventory and share more quickly than expected from enormous disruptions late last year. At the same time, work continues on the plant separations which we announced in June. A recent milestone was the announcement of our North America cereal company leadership team, and we continue to work on organizational design and carve out financials. And through all this, we delivered a financial performance for quarter three that exceeded our expectations and enables us to raise our guidance for the full year. In short, another good quarter, adding to a track record of dependable delivery, and with plenty of reasons to be confident that this kind of delivery can continue. You can tell our Deploy for Growth strategy is working from the quality of our results. Slide number six shows one key metric, our net sales growth. As you know, our momentum is not new. Our third quarter showed acceleration of a trend that has been running above our long-term target for the past few years. And while this third quarter acceleration was led by price realization necessary to keep up with soaring costs, the elasticity impact on volume has been less than expected, and our world-class brands continue to perform especially well in market. We are seeing this momentum across markets and category groups. We grew net sales organically in all four regions and in all four category groups within those regions, from snacks to cereal to frozen foods to noodles and other. So this momentum is broad-based and long-running and another reason to believe in our strategy, portfolio, and people. As a key element of our Deploy for Growth strategy, our ESG strategy is also working. A few highlights from quarter three are shown on slide number seven. Let me now turn it over to Amit, who will explain our financial results and outlook in more detail.