Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc.

Good day, and welcome to the Lamb-Weston Second 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 Second Quarter Fiscal 26 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 in 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. Our global teams are embracing and executing our Focus to Win strategy, strengthening customer partnerships and driving cost savings. I want to thank the team for their ongoing dedication and solid execution. As I reflect on the first half of the fiscal year, we are building momentum in the business and addressing areas of opportunity. Business turnarounds are not linear, but we are pleased with the progress we are making. Specifically, we are seeing top-line strength as we focus on customer relationships, which has led to share gains. Volume growth was up 8% in the second quarter and 7% for the first half of the year. To keep up with customer demand and ensure we maintain high customer fill rates, we are reopening previously curtailed capacity in North America. North America, the largest segment of our business, is in a solid position. As we partner with customers and deliver on consumer insights, the team is leaning into Lamb Weston's history of quality, innovation, and value, which has resulted in several new item launches. Our cost savings plan is well on its way, and we expect to deliver our target for the year. But equally as important, we are building a culture of continuous improvement within the organization that will unlock future opportunity and strengthen us competitively. And we are reducing volatility with customer contracting and raw procurement strategies. That being said, It remains a dynamic macroeconomic and competitive environment, especially across international. But in this changing market, we have clear and accountable plans to control the controllables as we work to deliver long-term profitable growth for Land Weston and improve returns for our shareholders. Finally, we are managing our capital efficiently. We are delivering strong free cash flow and our capital spending is down. In addition, we repurchased $40 million of shares during the second quarter. And finally, in line with our long-standing commitment to returning cash to shareholders and in keeping with our annual dividend increase since becoming a public company, the board approved a 3% increase to the quarterly dividend. Five months after unveiling our Focus to Win plan, we are making solid progress. We are winning with customers as we focus on the principles that made Lamb Weston the industry gold standard. Category-leading innovation, exceptional products, and customer-centric partnerships. there is meaningful opportunity ahead of us. Strengthening customer partnerships is the cornerstone of our strategy and where we have spent much of our time the last several months. We continue to drive momentum and retention and wins. I, along with our teams, are meeting with our global customers during what remains a dynamic consumer environment globally. Our goal is to drive true partnership in service, joint business planning, menu innovation, and importantly, how we can grow together. We have line of sight to volume growth for the balance of the year. We ended the second quarter with more than 90% of our open contracted volume negotiations concluded, including all material contracts. By the end of calendar 2025, we will have completed negotiations on the vast majority of our large chain contracts, supporting our customers with price and trade. We have gained share, including with new and growing customers. Bernadette will speak in more detail about restaurant traffic trends, but our customer success has allowed us to increase volume this year despite soft traffic. To maintain our high service levels and customer fill rate standards, we restarted North American lines that were previously curtailed. This production began late in second quarter and includes additional production lines to what we discussed during our first quarter call. With the capacity being reintroduced into our market and our network, capacity utilization rates and our North America facilities are returning to more optimal levels versus the very high utilization rates we recently experienced. We are benefiting from our global footprint. While North America accounts for approximately 90% or more of our profitability, the international markets are estimated to represent 75% of the global industry volume growth through 2030. This is an attractive opportunity that we are well positioned to capitalize on. Our global manufacturing footprint and supply chain network enable us to partner with existing and new customers around the world, capturing volume in fast-growing markets such as Asia and Latin America. Our global footprint enables us to partner with the largest customers around the world, tap into faster-growing markets, and leverage a global manufacturing supply chain to diversify supply and risk. In the near term, and as we discussed during our first quarter call, the international environment remains competitive. In Europe, a strong potato crop has coincided with softer restaurant traffic and lower export demand due to localization of recently added production in other regional markets. Our European business is also more open and less contracted, which contributes to pricing pressure. And while there has been some recent consolidation in the market, it is too early to assess its impact. In Latin America, where there are few established players, we're building a strong foundation for long-term growth. Our new facility in Argentina is already producing and qualifying product for key customers. The region's market is growing quickly, and as we scale, we expect to capture meaningful share and strengthen our position as a preferred supplier. We are actively working to rebalance supply and demand within our network, better leveraging underutilized assets and ensuring we have the right assets globally in the right places to serve customers in our priority markets and channels. Shifting to our achieving executional excellence, our cost savings initiatives are on track. As part of these efforts, we are building a truly global supply chain with the customer at the center of everything we do. Manufacturing and the centers of excellence are working as one, delivering improvements in run rates, safety, and becoming better aligned on how we measure ourselves and how our customers measure us. In addition, we are investing in tools that will help improve our demand and supply planning as we optimize our supply chain. Innovation is another core pillar of our focus to win strategy. Internationally, we have launched our new snap fries, which is our crispy fast fry. An innovation that allows for crispy and fast oven preparation. Our testing of this product is ongoing, and we've had early success expanding with airline customers. This innovative product opens additional market opportunities to sell hot, crispy, and delicious fries where we couldn't in the past. Finally, a quick update on the crop. which is consistent with the update we provided with first quarter earnings and demonstrates the focus we have on planning our North America raw needs. We've completed the harvest and we are processing for storage across our growing regions in both North America and Europe. Overall, yields were above average and quality was average in both North America and Europe. I will now turn the call over to Bernadette to review the quarter and our outlook.