Maple Leaf Foods Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Maple Leafs' third quarter 2022 financial results conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being broadcast 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. We will go over the instructions for the question and answer session following the conclusion of the formal presentation. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Mike Rall, Investor Relations at Maple Leaf Foods. Please go ahead, Mr. Rall.

Thank you, Michelle, and good morning, everyone. Speaking on the call this morning will be Michael McCain, Executive Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtis Frank, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Geert Varellen, 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 third quarter 2022 MD&A and other information on our website for a broader description of operations and risk factors that could affect the company's performance. We have 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 that you might have. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Michael McCain. Michael?

Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Maple Leaf Foods' third quarter 2022 earnings call. You've all seen our operational and financial results this quarter. So our goal this morning is to demonstrate that notwithstanding very narrow, identifiable and very short-term factors were an important inflection point in our business. Our goal this morning is to leave today's discussion with three, just three essential takeaways. First, we hope that you take away a very clear and identifiable understanding of the external forces that are driving this short-term highly abnormal outcome, with the confidence that these forces won't be with us for long, and but for a normalization of these pandemic and war-induced forces, we are right now operating at the underlying commitment of 14-plus percent adjusted EBITDA margins, targets that we set five years ago because of the structural health in our business today. Second, we hope that you take away with the same confidence that we have in our plant-based business that we will not only meet our commitment to adjusted EBITDA neutral or better by the end of 2023 as we transition the business model, we are now even working on initiatives that we feel could exceed this target, and long term, after this transition is complete, this category, and remember, it is just a food category, not a revolutionary new concept, this category will give us reasonable, steady growth, and be highly profitable as well. Third and finally, we hope you take away the confidence to know that we've effectively placed a billion dollars of brand new assets on the ground in three new facilities and we're on the cusp of pivoting these investments from cash out to cash in with the return on capital that you expect from us. In our meat business, our adjusted EBITDA margin was 8.5%, roughly in line with the last quarter. But these three things are really, really material takeaways to drill into. So here are some of the highlights of what you're going to be hearing this morning from Curtis and from Hirt. You're going to hear a quantified detail on why this short-term gap exists and what the outlook is. It's solid, and it's an optimistic story. You'll hear that we have closed over 50% of the gap in our adjusted EBITDA losses in plant-based protein. I prefer to call them investments. By the fourth quarter, just after six months, and there's more detail going to be offered today on plans for the remainder of that gap. You're going to hear from Curtis and Hirt that we have over a billion dollars of new assets, and you're going to hear that they're now fully in startup mode. You're going to hear that this is actually two-thirds of our debt level in two facilities, and they're on the cusp of pivoting to generating $130 million of new cash flow. Finally, you will hear from Hirt about a non-cash technical accounting adjustment in our plant business. I would urge you not to be distracted by this. It is simply a technical accounting valuation change driven mostly by a modeling assumption of rising interest rates. It's non-cash and it has no material consequences. In fact, many would believe it is a positive thing. Great investors commonly separate the value of a company and the price of its stock at any moment in time. Inflection points, as you well know, are important to identify in this analysis. I believe our stock price today is not at all reflecting the underlying value of our company due to the three factors that I describe above. but we are at such an important inflection point. If you're a potential buyer of our shares to take advantage of this, thank you for sharing in our confidence. If you are a potential seller of our shares, please know that we feel this price level represents a significant discount to the intrinsic value of the company due to the factors that I describe above. I'll now turn the call over to Curtis in here, who will unpack our operational and financial performance in more detail. Curtis.