Post Holdings, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Q1 2024 Post Holdings Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Daniel O'Rourke, Investor Relations for Post. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us today for Post's first quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. I'm joined this morning by Rob Vitale, our president and CEO, Jeff Zadix, our COO, and Matt Maynor, our CFO and treasurer. Rob, Jeff, and Matt will make prepared remarks and afterwards we'll answer your questions. The press release that supports these remarks is posted on both the investors and the SEC filings sections of our website and is also available on the SEC's website. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and an audio replay will be available on our website at postholdings.com. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that should be carefully considered by investors as actual results could differ materially from these statements. These forward-looking statements are current as of the date of this call and management undertakes no obligation to update these statements. This call will discuss certain non-GAAP measures. For reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP measure, see our press release issued yesterday and posted on our website. With that, I will turn the call over to Rob.

Thank you, Daniel, and good morning. As Daniel mentioned, we're dividing the call a little bit differently this morning. I will make some opening comments about the state of the business. Jeff will provide more detailed overview of the segment performance. And Matt will provide his customary overview of the financial results. The business is off to a tremendous start to fiscal 24 with an exceptional first quarter. Vastly improved manufacturing performance and discipline in pricing and cost management enabled us to continue the momentum we built through the back half of fiscal 23. Our business continues to benefit from diversification in product, channel, and price point. As a result, our volume story is a bit more of a mixed bag. We saw volume decreases across our branded retail businesses, but food service remained resilient, our value offering benefited from consumer trade down, and we saw encouraging stabilization of our refrigerated retail side business. Both the grocery and pet division of our consumer brands platform performed well. We continue to be extremely pleased with our investment in the pet category. We expected to see expanded margins. However, we have seen decent volume growth despite a slow build in the incremental investment. we will still incur some incremental cost, but our confidence is growing with respect to our ability to sustain higher volumes and higher margins in our underwriting case. Our grocery business is well positioned in value and is holding share in premium. Our food service business continues to drive mix and shows promise in terms of increasing its stabilized run rate. Refrigerated retail has dramatically improved the supply chain, and Weetabix continues to perform well in a challenging environment. Suffice to say, each business contributed to exceeding expectations, and each business contributes to our confidence in raising our outlook. Jeff will go into greater detail in his comments. From a consumer standpoint, while the rate of inflation and interest rates have pulled back, there remains significant cumulative inflation and higher interest rates. Moreover, economically sensitive consumers face reduced benefit support. We continue to see shoppers be more selective with their spend. In an interesting dichotomy, we see those same shoppers prioritize convenience and on-the-go purchasing. As far as capital allocation in the first quarter, we prioritized M&A over share or debt repurchase, as we spent approximately $250 million on two tuck-in acquisitions. Despite funding these transactions with debt, we reduced our net leverage to 4.5 times. With the smucker pet acquisition and two tuck-in transactions, we have integration commitments as priorities. However, the broader capital markets have seen a significant reduction in long-term fixed rates. We monitor this cost closely as it underpins our allocation decisions with respect to share buybacks, debt reduction, or further M&A. This trend, lower rates, in tandem with our strong operating performance and reduced leverage results in posts having greater optionality than in almost any time in our corporate history. With that, I will now turn the call over to Jeff.