Maple Leaf Foods Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Maple Leaf's third quarter 2020 financial results conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being broadcasted live on the internet and recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. Please note that there will be a question and answer session following the formal remarks, and we will go over the question and answer session instructions following the conclusion of the formal presentation. I would now like to turn the conference call over to James Allison, Investor Relations at Maple Leaf. Please go ahead, Mr. Allison.

Thank you, Joanna, and good morning, everyone. Speaking on the call this morning will be Michael McCain, Chief Executive Officer, Curtis Frank, Chief Operating Officer, and Hert Morellen, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some statements made on today's call may constitute forward-looking information, and our future results may differ materially from what we discuss. Please refer to our Q3 2020 NDNA and other information on our website for a broader description of operations and risk factors that could affect the company's performance. We've also uploaded our Q3 investor deck to our website, which includes support material for the quarter. As always, the investor relations team will be available after the call for any follow-up questions or any detailed modeling questions you might have. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Michael McCain. Michael?

Thank you, James. And good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the police third quarter 2020 earnings call. I'm joined today by Curtis Frank, our chief operating officer and hair to Berlin, our chief financial officer. On the call, we will discuss the performance of our business during the third quarter as well as the outlook for 2020 and beyond. And then we'll open the call to questions. We continue to do our best at Maple Leaf through the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's been devastating for many and life-changing for all of us. Through this, Maple Leaf continues to evolve as an organization, but our purpose and our commitment to shared value remains unchanged. This includes supporting a safe, economically robust, and more inclusive society moving forward. Maple Leaf remains guided by three core principles, first and foremost, protecting our people while we operate our critical infrastructure. Because of our early action in responding to this crisis, we were able to maintain business stability and continuity while implementing procedures and protocols to protect our people. This has really put to the test, it was put to the test this summer when Brandon, Manitoba, the location of our main primary pork processing facility, had a significant and sustained community outbreak of COVID-19. We responded immediately to further enhance our COVID-19 measures, including additional testing and contact tracing. We worked alongside local health officials, our union, and the community to flatten and hopefully extinguish the curve. We were able to determine through very careful and comprehensive investigations that throughout this community outbreak, Our facility remained a safe working environment with no evidence of any workplace transmission of the virus. It was absolutely critical to keep our employees safe and it was crucial to maintain operations to fulfill our role as an essential service and keep our operations running and running safely. Unfortunately, some team members testing positive and the new protocol from China restricting importation of food products from facilities that had COVID cases, we voluntarily stopped shipping to China. We also bore the impact of high absenteeism rates for an extended period of time, which commercially impacted our ability to produce the value-added products that drive our business model. We're in the process now of being relisted in China and hope to begin shipping into this important channel sometime in the near future. Curtis will take us through this in more detail in a few minutes. Second core principle is maintaining the security and continuity of our supply chain, allowing us to continue fulfilling our essential role in providing food for Canadian and international markets. Building on what I just mentioned with respect to our Brandon, Manitoba facility, our team has been tireless in their efforts to operate with minimal disruption in our meat protein business. Protocols, workflow, and product mix continue to evolve, and we've seen operations improve as we work through this crisis. As Curtis will discuss, we did see operational challenges in our plant protein business. While most were production issues, including ones that affected our packaging, there was also some operational impact due to the complexity of working in a COVID environment. Team is working around the clock, continuing to optimize our operational capacity and performance in that business as well. Third, we must continue to support the vulnerable communities and our stakeholders through this journey. Throughout the crisis, we've remained true to our purpose and our commitment to shared value. We've been actively engaged in providing our communities with emergency food relief donations and supporting frontline healthcare workers. This quarter, this included three mass distribution to the Brandon community, as well as supporting our hog raising partners who are materially impacted by depressed hog prices due to the COVID market disruptions, which have since recovered. Turning to the business, Curtis and Herc will review our operational and financial performance. But I want to touch on how we are executing against our blueprint. We often speak of our purposeful journey and our commitment to shared value and long-term sustainable value creation. This has led us to significant advances in our blueprint for success, including becoming the first major food company in the world to be carbon neutral just under a year ago. This journey is also one that is built for and committed to growth. We are focused on profitable growth in our meat protein business. The growth strategies that we've been executing against, including the expansion of our sustainable meat platform, renovating our core brands, and geographic expansion are reflected in our performance. In fact, compared to our CPG peers, we are growing at 9% on a trailing 12-month basis, almost double what our peers' top-line sales growth has delivered. The success of our strategy is also evident in the progress we made in the third quarter in our meat protein group despite the significant disruption caused by the pandemic. We delivered on our strategy of profitable growth in meat protein with strong sales growth coupled with gross margin and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. In fact, we delivered the fourth consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA margin above 11%. In Q3, we delivered revenue growth of 6.4%, and adjusted EBITDA margins of 12.1%. In our plant protein business, there's no pulling punches here, we had a very difficult quarter with performance that is unacceptable. There are several factors which impacted that performance, and COVID created further complexity. The bottom line is that we had supply chain challenges. and we are laser-focused on resolving them. We've built a strong foundation for plant protein by investing for growth and investing to win. And despite these disappointments in our operational performance in the quarter, we are seeing very strong end demand for our products with robust POS growth that is consistent with our long-term sales target. The market continues to be a high-growth phase. and consumers are refining their tastes in plant protein. Our brand renovation, portfolio of products, and our continued investment in brand development makes us extremely well positioned to remain a strong long-term player in this market. So I'll now turn over the call to Curtis, and he'll discuss some more details in this regard.