Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE:HRL) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jacinth Smiley: Yes. And another important point to just mention here, Rupesh, is that as we have this elevated inventory, what it does is also just delay us from recognizing and benefiting from some of the costs coming down. When we think about freight rates, markets coming down, we haven’t really been able to realize those, and that’s been delayed. We talked about it in the fourth quarter that we should see that relief here and those benefits showing up in our margins this quarter, and that’s been delayed as well and affecting where we’re sitting right now from a guidance perspective.

Rupesh Parikh: Great. I’m going to slip in another question. So I think in your prepared comments, you mentioned something about learning about people, I think you said technology and processes. What are the key learnings there? And then how quickly can they be implemented?

Jim Snee: Yes. I’ll go ahead and start on that, Rupesh. I mean I think there’s a couple of things there that we need to talk about just to level set those comments. I mean the first thing is we’re a much larger company today than we were two years ago. And it’s not just the Planters acquisition. That’s part of it. But we’ve seen significant growth in our business. We haven’t stopped acting on our strategic priorities. Everything that we’ve talked about in terms of becoming more balanced, transforming our company. We’ve continued to move that forward, all while navigating this crazy current environment and managing through avian influenza. And so when we say that we’ve learned a lot about our people. We have the right people as we’ve gone through our GoFWD initiative, we just need to make sure that we have them doing the right work and GoFWD will help with that.

When we talk about processes, as we’ve integrated our businesses, there are processes that will need a refresh. When we think about inventory, pricing decisions, brand resourcing, and GoFWD will help with that as well. And then on the technology side, I’ll maybe let Jacinth add some color there.

Jacinth Smiley: Yes. So from a short-term perspective, we are probably just a level set, I mean, this team knows how to manage inventory. And so what we’re doing in the immediate term here is just returning to that pre-pandemic discipline when we think about S&OE and the process that is aligned with ensuring that we’re listening to demand signal, connecting our commercial team with our supply chain team and getting all our supply planning aligned. And so that’s what we’re doing in the immediate term. And then from a long-term perspective, we have made significant investment from a systems and technology standpoint with Project Orion. And we paused that intentionally as we were integrating Planters, integrating JOTS and that was purposeful to get those done correctly. And now we’re now continuing that work to enhance our S&OP and our end-to-end planning and be able to leverage our technology and our people to get us to the next level.

Operator: The next question comes from Robert Moskow of Credit Suisse.

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