Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Lam Weston Third 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 Lam Weston's Third Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. I'm Debbie Hancock, Lam 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 SAC 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. Mike and Bernadette will provide prepared remarks, and then we will be available to take your questions. Let me now turn the call over to Mike.

Thank you, Debbie. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. I want to start by thanking the Lam Weston team around the world for their hard work in what continues to be a dynamic market. Their expertise, disciplined execution, and willingness to embrace change and act with urgency have been instrumental in the progress we are making. In the third quarter, we delivered another solid performance, the fifth quarter in a row of in-line or better results, demonstrating that we continue to do what we said we would do. This strength supports our updated fiscal 2026 outlook, including a tighter guidance range and a higher midpoint of net sales and EBITDA. This was led by ongoing momentum and a strong sales performance in our North America business, where customer wins, share gains, and strong retention delivered 12% volume growth and 5% net sales growth in the segment. Over the past year, we have made considerable progress in this business across our operations, and most importantly, with our customers. This has enabled us to grow while restaurant traffic and consumer sentiment have been soft. Overall, QSR traffic was up 1% in the third quarter. Bernadette will speak to this in more detail. In North America, our focus this year was on strengthening our customer partnerships and consistently executing. We finished our customer contracting season with a higher retention rate and solid new customer acquisition. At our production facilities, we've delivered improvement in our run rates and core operational KPIs. We are generating cost savings ahead of plan across our business, and our employee engagement scores have improved significantly. Our international business, as expected, was challenged by an evolving market environment resulting from a significant surplus in the European potato market due to expanded potato acreage and a robust crop of potatoes during the last growing season. Local sourcing in developing regions such as Middle East, China, and India, which is affecting exports from Europe to those markets, and persistently lower restaurant traffic in key countries. We are taking decisive actions to manage our business in the near term and protect profitability. During the third quarter, we announced the closure of our Munro Argentina plant, and consolidated production from the Latin America region in our new modern Mar del Plata Argentina facility. As we'd previously announced, we began temporarily curtailing a production line in the Netherlands at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Further, the company doesn't plan to resume production in one of its previously curtailed Australia locations. While we believe the competitive backdrop in certain international markets may result in less capacity expansion than was anticipated, We are focused on controlling what we can control, acting with urgency across the company, and being disciplined in our capital investments. It has been a year since I joined you for my first earnings call as CEO. Over that time, we have taken significant actions to improve our performance. We developed and in July began executing our focused win strategy to drive targeted decision making and actions. This strategy is a departure from Lamb Weston's previous focus on growth and scale. Instead, we are taking a more thoughtful approach to where we are geographically and from a capability perspective, positioned to win long-term, including where our customer proposition is strongest, and making sure any investments we make are evaluated through this customer and return-centric framework. As we near a year working with this paradigm, The changes are significant and inform our decision-making and how we compete for business on a daily basis. As part of these efforts, we set a target of $250 million in cost savings by fiscal year-end 2028. Our first goal was to achieve $100 million in savings in fiscal 2026. As of the end of third quarter, we have already delivered on those full-year savings and are tracking ahead of our program targets. These savings have afforded us the opportunity to make selective investments in support of our customers. We believe these targeted reinvestments have been the right long-term choice for our business and have been particularly powerful as they are paired with the improvements we have made in execution to deliver higher consistency and quality for customers and our continued commitment to product innovation. Altogether, these have combined to drive substantial improvement in our positioning with customers. which is reflected both in strengthened retention and new customer acquisition. But to be clear, the actions we have taken and will continue to take on cost and capital deployment opportunities are structural. As we move forward, we believe they make us a more competitive organization while also positioning us for improved operating leverage in a more favorable price mix environment. We are also evaluating additional opportunities for improvement and savings across the organization. the details of which we will share in the future. Perhaps most importantly, we believe we are just getting started. Our new executive chair, Jan Krops, brings extensive experience and an intense focus on operating execution from his time at AB InBev. Jan is highly focused on helping us evaluate opportunities to improve in international markets, whereas experience in a leading global company is providing valuable perspective on how to navigate a dynamic environment. We will also soon welcome Jim Gray, our incoming CFO, who will bring an additional fresh perspective to our work. We also have a refreshed board with seven new members since July with expertise in food, consumer goods, agriculture, supply chain, and finance. This group is focused on improving performance, driving better returns on capital, and driving long-term shareholder value creation. As I have said before, business turnarounds are not linear. But nine months into Focus2Win, we are making clear progress against our key business objectives. We have significantly improved our position with customers. We are improving our North America operations and are controlling the controllables internationally in a dynamic market, while we work to deliver on the cornerstone of our strategy, prioritizing markets and channels. With that, let me get to some specifics to illustrate the progress we are making. First, strengthening customer partnerships is central to executing our strategy. We've made meaningful progress in deepening and strengthening our relationships with customers this past year. As part of the analysis we did last year, we evaluated and streamlined our US commercial go-to-market strategy and structure. Importantly, our direct sales team has positively impacted our selling on the street, including execution of pricing and working through challenges directly with customers. This is a key market differentiator and a core component of our customer partnership model. Our team is 100% focused on Fry's and the attractive financial role that they serve our customers. We have also augmented our direct team with a broker model and key channels where we saw this to be the most efficient way to immediately accelerate our near-term competitiveness. Second, in our achieving executional excellence pillar, we are focused on continuing to build an agile investing class supply chain that allows us to operate efficiently and consistently while balancing supply and demand. This includes curtailing production when needed, closing production facilities that don't meet our customer and efficiency standards, and restarting production seamlessly as we did in North America. Finally, within our efforts to set the pace for innovation, I want to highlight grown in Idaho brand. We invested in a landmark category study highlighting how consumers think, feel, and shop for frozen potatoes. This work led to a reinforcement of the grown in Idaho brand essence. As a result, we are launching a new brand positioning that is rooted in real and created for people who value where their food comes from. Shortly, you'll begin to see this brand show up on shelf with new packaging and a new clear message tied to made with real Idaho potatoes. Moving to slide eight, as you know, over the past several months, we were engaged in contract negotiations for the 2026 potato crop. In North America, contract negotiations are nearly complete. Overall, we expect a low to mid single digit percent decline in raw potato price in the aggregate and have largely secured the targeted number of acres across our primary growing regions. Planting is on schedule for the early potato varieties, and we expect planting for the main harvest to be completed by the end of April. In Europe, Fixed price contract negotiations for 2026 crop are underway and progressing as planned. Based on our current indications, overall pricing is pointing toward a mid-teen percent decline in our contracted agreements from 2025. Fixed price contract planning across the European growing regions will continue through the end of April. We will provide our customary update on the outlook for the North American and European potato crops when we report fourth quarter earnings in July. In addition, we do not currently anticipate a material impact from recent fuel and fertilizer inflation to impact our fiscal 2026. In closing, our focused wind strategy is taking hold. Our focus is solidly on our customers as we strive to strengthen our partnerships around the world. It is on executing exceptionally well and delivering on our cost savings work. We are identifying and driving opportunities created from heightened accountability around our goals and by building a culture of continuous improvement in cost and capital management, agility, and improving our capital efficiency. I will now turn the call over to Bernadette to review the quarter and our outlook.