Conagra Brands, Inc. (NYSE:CAG) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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David Palmer: I wanted to ask you about your multiyear sales trends or how you’re maybe thinking about that. This quarter, the sales trends were stable on a four-year basis. And your guidance implies roughly stable for your organic sales trends with that 5% or so organic growth in fiscal 4Q? I wonder if you see reasons for reacceleration in the multiyear trend into the first half of this upcoming year? You mentioned the supply chain maybe a point or so. And the reason I’m asking this is because stable four-year trends will get you to maybe flat to up 2% organic revenue by the first quarter, which I’m sure is not great news. So, I’m wondering about reasons for reacceleration beyond maybe that supply chain hiccup you mentioned?

Sean Connolly: Well, David, we’re not obviously going to get into next year’s guidance today. But I’ll come back to the mechanical point that I made at the beginning of the Q&A section here, we’re going to go into this phase here where we start getting into Q1 and then Q2 and then Q3 next year where you really start to wrap on the pricing, and you’re going to see dollars come down, but you’ll see the unit declines that were tied to multiple waves of pricing tied to the elasticity start to rebound. So that’s going to be a shift. That’s going to be in everybody’s next fiscal year, and it’s going to be different for every company because every company started pricing — so you’re going to see that shift. And I think everybody’s got to start to model for that and prepare for that because then when you get through that, you’re going to be back to pretty much everybody’s long-term algorithm.

And for us is sales, that’s low single digits. And so that’s what we expect. And then we pursue that a variety of ways, the bulk of which is through innovation. Dave, anything else you’d add to that?

Dave Marberger: Yes. But David, what you’re poking at is true, right? So if you think about Armour, for example, where we had a recall, we pulled everything and now we’re replenishing and some of that will drift into the beginning of fiscal ’24. So when you have that, that’s obviously going to be a tailwind, right, for the quarter. But that’s what’s made these last couple of years, so difficult because every quarter, there’s different dynamics in terms of when different companies are on allocation and then when they get off allocation and what does that do to shipments versus consumption. And so it’s hard to put a really big point on it, plus we’re not going to get into detail on guidance until July. But conceptually, that’s correct. When you’re on allocation or you’re out of stock and then you replenish, you are going to see a bounce back from that.

David Palmer: I wanted to ask maybe one more, going to see, if you could comment a bit more on the inflation. You said you’re expecting inflation for all of calendar ’23. If that were up low single digits then you would be talking about a flat second half of calendar ’23, meaning your first half of fiscal ’24. So I’m wondering what type of inflation are you thinking about for — as you enter into fiscal ’24?

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