Maple Leaf Foods Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Mayful Leap's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 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 over to Janet Craig, Investor Relations at Maple Leaf Foods. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ludi, and good morning, everyone. Speaking on the call this morning will be Curtis Frank, President and Chief Executive Officer, Dave Smales, Chief Financial Officer, and Dennis Organ, President Corp Complex and incoming CEO of Canada Packers. 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 discussed. Please refer to our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 MD&A and financial statements and other information on our website for a broader description of operations and risk factors that could affect the company's performance. We've uploaded our fourth quarter investor deck to our website, which includes support material for the quarter and the year. As always, the investor relations team will be available after the call for any follow-up questions you may have. And now I'll turn the call over to Curtis.

Thank you, Janet, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you here today as we review our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results and look ahead to what promises to be an exciting year in 2025. Joining me on the call today are David Smales, our CFO of Maple Leaf Foods, and Dennis Organ, president of our pork complex and incoming CEO of Canada Packers. As we highlighted in our supporting materials and press releases that were recently issued, we have plenty of positive news to share with you here today. The headline is that we closed out 2024 with strong momentum, setting the stage for what we are describing as a transformational year ahead. With that, I'll start by reflecting on our 2024 performance and summarizing our fourth quarter results before handing it over to David for a deeper dive into our financials. Toward the end of the call, I'll come back to reiterate our outlook for 2025, and of course, we'll leave time for your questions. Looking back on 2024, I feel an enormous sense of pride in what our team has accomplished. Through resilience and the relentless execution of the Maple Leaf Blueprint, we have made meaningful strides toward achieving our vision of becoming the most sustainable protein company on earth. We delivered significant financial improvement in what continued to be a challenging condition in the market and positioned ourselves for success in 2025 and beyond. Here are just a few highlights from our year. We successfully adapted our brand strategies to the evolving consumer environment, leveraging our portfolio of leading brands to deliver consolidated sales growth of 1.1%, driven by 3.9% growth in our CPG prepared foods business and prepared meats business. We completed the play on the highly successful startup of over $1 billion in major capital projects at London Poultry, and the Bacon Center of Excellence, where both projects achieved full business case benefits in Q4. We completed the first phase of our Fuel for Growth initiative, advancing our playbook to sharpen our cost focus and our competitive edge, delivering supply chain savings and SG&A reductions exiting 2024. We met our commitment to significantly expand our adjusted EBITDA margin in 2024, delivering a 250 basis point improvement for the year, and reaching 12.5% in the fourth quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA grew by $125 million, or nearly 30%, from $428 million in 2023 to $553 million in 2024. We increased our annual dividend for the 10th consecutive year. We demonstrated our ability to outperform our peers in both top and bottom line performance Through a combination of disciplined capital expenditures and the improved profitability of the business, we rapidly deleveraged the balance sheet as we said we would, delivering $385 million in free cash flow in 2024, $296 million improvement from 2023, while exiting 2024 with a net debt to adjusted EBITDA of 2.7, comfortably within our target range. We announced our plans to unlock value as a purpose-driven consumer packaged goods company by unleashing our world-leading pork company, Canada Packers, through a tax-free spinoff. And last, and perhaps most importantly, we have put the right team of incredible Maple Leaf leaders in place to lead us well into the future. With that as context for the full year of 2024, I'll briefly offer a few comments on our fourth quarter of the year. Our Q4 sales growth accelerated to 4.3% year over year, with prepared meats growth of 6.5%. We were obviously pleased with the performance on the top line, which was driven through the continued execution of our proven growth strategies, as we continued to have success in leveraging our portfolio of leading brands, accelerating the pace of impactful innovation, leveraging our leadership in sustainable meats, expanding our reach into the US market, and plugging our unique capabilities into our customer strategies. We made meaningful progress in Q4 with prepared meats sales and volume growing in both the retail channel and the food service channel, supported by double digit sales growth in our sustainable meats portfolio and in our US platform. On the innovation front, our new Schneider's frozen breakfast portfolio has been very well received by our customers and consumers, delivering strong initial sales, and winning the BrandSpark 2025 Best New Product Award. In addition to driving sales growth, we also took meaningful steps to improve our cost structure. We have now completed the first phase of our Fuel for Growth initiative aimed at reducing cost, increasing efficiency, and in the case of our strategic manufacturing review, looking to unlock future opportunities to boost capacity utilization. In Q4, we completed an SG&A reorganization in our commercial and operations functions, as well as in our plant protein business, reducing overall headcount. We also wrapped up a procurement project that focused in on leveraging our scale purchases to drive cost efficiency. This work, combined with the improvement in pork market conditions, the full benefit of our large capital projects, and growth in our prepared meats business, resulted in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 12.5%, a 240 basis point improvement from the same quarter last year, and an adjusted EBITDA that grew by nearly 30% to $155 million within the quarter. This strong business performance in turn generated substantial free cash flow, increasing $66 million year over year for the quarter. All said, we are entering 2025 with momentum and results that when combined with the completion of the spinoff of Canada Packers, that's the stage for our transformational year ahead. I'll come back to close the call, but before I do, I wanted to pass things over to Dennis to discuss the pork complex and then to Dave to review our detailed financial results. Dennis?