Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc.

Please stand by. We are about to begin. Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Lamb Weston first quarter 2026 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Debbie Hancock, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us for Lamb Weston's first quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call. I'm Debbie Hancock, Lamb Weston's Vice President of Investor Relations. Earlier today, we issued our press release and posted slides that we will use for our discussion today. You can find both on our website, lambweston.com. Please note that during our remarks, we will make forward-looking statements about the company's expected performance that are based on our current expectations. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the cautionary statements and risk factors contained in our SEC filings for more details on our forward-looking statements. Some of today's remarks include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with our GAAP results. You can find the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations in our earnings release and the appendix to our presentation. Joining me today are Mike Smith, our President and CEO, and Bernadette Madrieta, our Chief Financial Officer. Let me now turn the call over to Mike.

Thank you, Debbie. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. The Lamb Weston team delivered first quarter results that exceeded our expectations and show commercial momentum in our business. While we are early in our focus to win execution, we are energized and excited by the emerging evidence of results coming from the foundation that we began to lay earlier this calendar year. Our goal remains to drive profitable growth and win with customers by focusing on the principles that made Lamb Weston the industry gold standard. category-leading innovation, exceptional products, and customer-centric actions. We are early in the journey, but our North Star is clear. I want to thank our hardworking team globally for their excellent work. Let me provide a few key messages I would like to leave with you today. First, we delivered another quarter of strong volume growth. This is a result of excellent work across our organization from innovation, quality, consistency, and our focus on the customer. we are seeing positive customer momentum as we invest behind strategic differentiators. Second, we are acting with urgency to implement our new strategic plan, Focus to Win, including working to deliver our cost savings program, which is in their early innings, but tracking to our plan of achieving at least $250 million of annual run rate savings by fiscal year end 2028. Third, We have new innovative products coming this fall, and we are winning new business and growing with existing customers as our teams go to market with a more customer-centric Lamb Weston organization. Fourth, in response to sustained volume growth in North America, we are restarting a curtailed line. Lastly, we are acting with urgency to position Lamb Weston for long-term success in shareholder value creation, including by prioritizing the specific markets and products where we believe we have a sustainable competitive advantage. Now let's discuss the quarter in more detail. Our first quarter results were led by volume growth in both segments, price mix within our expectations, the benefits of our cost savings initiatives, and significant progress in improving working capital, reducing our capital investments, and driving strong free cash flow generation. As we roll out our Focus to Win strategy and drive operational and strategic changes across our business, we are doing so from a leadership position within a category of opportunity. Whether at home or away from home, let's take a minute to remind ourselves why fries. Traditional French fries are one of the most profitable items on restaurant menus. Fries are the most ordered item at U.S. restaurants. They appeal to a broad range of consumers and are America's favorite order across every generation. The fry attachment rate, or how often someone orders fries with their meal, remains approximately two percentage points higher than before the pandemic. What that means is that when people go out to eat, they are ordering fries more often than in 2019. And we see positive trends around the globe. For example, global demand is growing with an estimated 44% of global menus offering fries. And as multinational and local market QSRs expand, They continue to see developing markets with fries, which is trending positive. Finally, global fry volume growth has outpaced total food growth versus 2019. In July, we launched Focus to Win, our new strategic plan to unlock near and long-term value. And while it is early in our efforts, we are making progress. I see it in the focus our teams have and the decisions we are making. We have clearly identified savings plans and our teams are executing. All this is happening as we work to be our customer's number one partner, a world-class potato company, and an industry-leading innovator. Looking at each of the pillars of our strategy, a few early examples include within strengthening customer partnerships, we have realigned our sales teams around our priority markets. In North America, we are augmenting our successful direct sales force with a broker model to expand our reach into under-penetrated channels of the business. The Lamb Weston organization is embracing a customer-centric mentality. We have secured several new wins around the world, including expanding our share in business and key away-from-home categories, such as C-Stores and Cash & Carry, and outside the U.S., we've increased our business with QSR customers. In terms of executional excellence, the supply chain organization is elevating Lamb Weston's operations. we have undertaken programs across manufacturing, logistics, and procurement that are not just driving cost savings, but meaningfully improving our run rates, our quality, and our customer satisfaction metrics. In response to sustained volume growth in North America, as previously mentioned, we are restarting a curtailed line in the latter part of the second quarter to ensure we maintain strong customer fill rates. Our global footprint and the untapped capacity in our manufacturing network allows us to take on new business and provide additional support for our customers. Additionally, we begin shipping from our new manufacturing facility in Marta Plata, Argentina. Approximately 80% of production will be destined for export, primarily for Latin America, including Brazil. Finally, setting the pace for innovation. We take great pride in our position as an innovation leader, and we are working to directly improve the customer and consumer experience. drive breakthrough innovations, and innovate how we operate. As I mentioned in July, we've established global innovation hubs to orchestrate disruptive innovation platforms, one in North America and one in the Netherlands for our international markets. This fall, we are launching exciting new products into retail that are aligned with customer trends. This includes flavor-forward offerings from Alexia, such as garlic and parmesan crinkle-cut fries and dill pickle seasoned fries, as well as expanding our licensed brands with Paw Patrol waffle fries and shaped tots. And internationally, we continue the rollout of our really crunchy artisanal fries, which are performing exceptionally well. Before Bernadette provides a more in-depth review of the quarter, let's discuss the upcoming potato crop. We're harvesting and processing crops in our growing regions in both North America and Europe. Currently, we believe the crops in the Columbia Basin, Idaho, and Alberta are above historical average and in the Midwest are near average as growing conditions in all regions have remained generally favorable. In Europe, growing conditions in the industry's main growing regions of the Netherlands, Belgium, Northern France, and Germany have also been favorable, leading to an above average yield forecast for the region. We continue to expect our potato costs in Europe to be flat, to slightly lower than the previous year's fixed price contracts. As a reminder, In North America, we've agreed to a mid-single-digit percent decrease in the aggregate in contract prices for the 2025 potato crop. We expect to realize the benefit of these lower potato prices beginning late in our fiscal second quarter. We'll provide our final assessment of the potato crops in North America and Europe when we report our second quarter results. I will now turn the call over to Bernadette to review the quarter and our outlook.