Lancaster Colony Corporation (NASDAQ:LANC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Todd Brooks: Quick question following up on Brian’s last question, if you look at — and Dave you just talked about where you can’t hedge, you’ll go out and try to price for continued either sticky or even accelerating inflationary pressures and spots. How does that vary by channel right now? How do you think about pricing in the Retail channel, willingness to take it relative to the elasticity that you’re seeing? And kind of that early shot across the bow from, Whole Foods trying to push back on suppliers already, do you feel like pricing will be easier to get in the Foodservice segment going forward if needed versus the Retail segment?

David Ciesinski: Brian — Todd rather our conversations on pricing continue to be very constructive, both in Retail and in Foodservice. I’m looking at a sheet that shows me about a dozen discrete pricing actions that are going into effect in this — at the very end of our second quarter and early on in our fiscal third quarter which is now. And these are all conversations that were had in Retail that have sold through. And on Foodservice those conversations remain the same. I do want to go back and clarify a little bit on things where I saw Whole Foods’ announcement on commodities. And I don’t know what data they’re looking at but it doesn’t necessarily line up with the data that we’re looking at. What I would tell you is, things may have eased off of their high and discrete categories and maybe that’s particularly true in some of the commodities that they’re buying.

But 1.5 years ago we were looking at 20% inflation on raw material and packaging. We’re looking at 20% inflation through the remainder of this year. And even, as we look forward we’re continuing to see inflation albeit, at a lower rate. And that’s just on raw material and packaging. So any areas that you may see some modest pullback, is being overcome by areas where we’re continuing to see inflation. And that particularly I would point to things like beans. The price on the board may have pulled back some but basis which we really need that when you factor in what the total delivered cost is still remaining very, very high.

Todd Brooks: That’s clear.

David Ciesinski: So net-net we’re not seeing relief on inflation. We wish we were because we would be net beneficiaries. And we don’t have any intention at this point to roll back our prices, because the economics of our market basket don’t support that.

Todd Brooks: Okay. Great. Can I add a follow-up then does that just..

David Ciesinski: Yes, please.

Todd Brooks: And Tom, I think last time we talked about pricing I was going to kind of waterfall over the course of this fiscal year. I think we were looking to be running high-single digit in Foodservice and maybe mid-single digit at Retail. How does that change with these actions that you’re anticipating taking for the back half of the year?

Tom Pigott: Yes. So excellent question. So we’re now more high-single digit in Retail and very high single-digit in Foodservice. So we are looking at more pricing than we had initially anticipated based on these more recent commodity moves.