Mission Produce, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVO) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Bryan Giles: Tom, I would say that it’s still premature for us to kind of lock in on a number at this point. I think you mentioned a lot of things that are accurate. I think we have a pretty good sense on where our production is going to land. We know input costs are lower than what they were last year. So, we have a pretty good feel for what our cost per unit is going to be at this point in time. I think the wildcard is where pricing ultimately settles as we move through the season. We know we have a lower pricing environment this year than we did a year ago, at least in the early part of the season. So, I mean when we looked at Q3 last year, we had very strong, like contribution on per box margins because the price points were still extremely high.

Prices are much lower this year. And that’s going to create a more challenging environment from that perspective. But that being said, we have a better size curve. We have more commercial grade fruit this year that kind of fall within the sweet spot for retail promotion than we did last year. So, there is a number of positives, but there is the kind of that pricing, the market pricing condition, that’s the big question mark at this point. We don’t have a lot of our – we have seasonal volume commitments that we have been working through with a number of our retail and foodservice customers, but we don’t have a significant amount of pricing locked at this point in time. So, it’s just – I am hesitant to give any specific guidance as to where we may land there.

But I do believe that we feel the overall, the pricing environment this year will be lower on average than what it was last year. It’s just a matter of will those other favorable impacts offset it or not. I think you are thinking about it the right way, Tom. I just don’t have enough info to give you at this point to tell you whether it’s going to be worse or if it’s going to be better when we net everything out.

Steve Barnard: But the freight savings from last year is significant, we will say that.

Bryan Giles: Yes. And like I have said, because of those savings, we have margin for pricing to be lower and still generate better margins than we did last year because of all the other things we talked about.

Tom Palmer: Okay. Thanks for that. And then just maybe on the harvest timing. Because I know that, that’s kind of how you allocate costs in that segment. How skewed is it going to be to the fourth quarter, because you did make the note about the delayed harvest. I mean is it going to be a more balanced harvest than we typically see because I think it’s pretty normally that at least from a cost standpoint, and therefore, from a harvest volume standpoint, it’s more skewed to that third quarter even if the sell-through typically occurs in 4Q?

Bryan Giles: Yes. So, what we typically see in a typical year, Tom, we see about two-thirds of the harvest taking place in the third quarter, but about two-thirds of the sell-through of the fruit happening in the fourth quarter. At this point, because of – I think we came into this year thinking that we wanted to kind of try to balance that a little actually sell-through a little more fruit earlier as opposed to having so much come off during the fourth quarter. I think what’s going to happen in reality this year because of the maturity of the fruit, then it will probably be a breakdown that looks similar to what we have seen historically, where the sell-through in the third quarter, if I go back at the last 5 years, I think we have seen it as low as kind of 32%, 33%.