Treehouse Foods, Inc.

Welcome to the Treehouse Foods second quarter 2022 conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, simply press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Please note, this event is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Treehouse Foods for the reading of the Safe Harbor Statement.

Good morning, and thanks for joining us today. This morning we issued our earnings release, which is available along with a slide deck in the investor relations section of our website at treehousefoods.com. Before we begin, we would like to advise you that all forward-looking statements made on today's call are intended to fall within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on current expectations and projections and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. Information concerning those risks is contained in the company's filings with the SEC. In addition, we will be discussing operating and financial results on an adjusted basis. A reconciliation of those non-GAAP measures referenced during today's call to their most direct comparable GAAP measures can be found in today's press release on our website. I'd now like to turn the call over to our CEO and President, Mr. Steve Oakland.

Thanks, PI, and good morning, everyone. I'm joined today by Pat O'Donnell, our interim CFO and Chief Accounting Officer. As we announced previously, Pat stepped into that role upon Bill Kelly's departure. We appreciate Bill's contributions, and we wish him well. We are fortunate to have a strong, deep bench of talent here at Treehouse. And Pat has quickly transitioned into the role and responsibilities of interim CFO. He has led both the controllership and financial planning and analysis functions since joining Treehouse in 2017. We are pleased with our second quarter results as our strategy to drive operational and commercial excellence, optimize our portfolio, and support our people and talent continues to pay dividends. Our second quarter results are yet another building block that we have in place to continue to improve service and profitability throughout the year and to position ourselves well for our fourth quarter seasonal peak. Our top line performance reflects the impact of our pricing to recover inflation and our ability to capture incremental volume specifically in our snacking and beverage businesses. More broadly, private label consumer demand continues to accelerate, posting 22 straight weeks of share gains in the categories that we operate in. As the underlying fundamentals of private label have strengthened, increased demand demonstrates that the value proposition is resonating with consumers. Input cost inflation continued in the second quarter, particularly in inputs like eggs, wheat, and oats. In response, we have communicated and are implementing additional pricing that will be reflected late in the third quarter. While the labor and supply chain environment continues to present challenges, our operating teams are demonstrating great agility as we remain focused on servicing our customers. We continue to invest in our workforce with retention and engagement being a high priority. We are also taking steps to make our manufacturing work environments more appealing. Everything from facility upgrades to designing more effective and attractive work schedules so that Treehouse can be viewed as the employer of choice in each local market. Taking all of these factors into account, we are raising our top line guidance for the full year and reiterating our outlook for adjusted EBITDA. As I noted a few moments ago, private label is gaining momentum. Inflation is driving shelf prices higher, which you see on the left-hand side of slide four, making the private label value proposition even more compelling to consumers. Price caps, noted on the right, continue to be in the low 30s. While price caps will vary, At these levels, the private label value proposition is very attractive. The combination of high shelf prices and high price caps translates into a dollar savings for a basket of private label goods that has never been greater. This is translating into a shift in consumer purchasing behavior toward private label, which you can see on slide five. You can see that the pandemic-related trends in the past two years actually began to reverse early this year, and that private label share gains have been accelerating since March. For those of you looking for more of these macro data points, you'll note that we've included a few additional slides in the appendix. Overall, I'm encouraged with our progress, and I believe that we are very much on track to continue to improve service and profitability throughout the year as we begin to enter our seasonal peak. We are effectively managing inflation with pricing, collaborating with our customers, and executing on our efforts to drive cost savings across the network. I want to thank our Treehouse employees for their effort and commitment to making these things happen each and every day. Before I turn it over to Pat, let me say that we continue to work very diligently to reshape the Treehouse portfolio through a divestment of a significant portion of our meal prep business so that we can build leadership and depth around a focused group of categories in our higher growth snacking and beverage businesses. We are encouraged with the progress we have made on this process thus far, but will not be providing further comments on that topic unless and until we have definitive information to share. With that, let me turn it over to Pat to take you through the details of the quarter.