Post Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:POST) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Post Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:POST) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 3, 2024

Post Holdings, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q2 2024 Post Holdings Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there’ll be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to your speaker today, Daniel O’Rourke, Investor Relations for Post. Please go ahead.

Daniel O’Rourke: Good morning. Thank you for joining us today for Post’s Second Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Call. I’m joined this morning by Rob Vitale, our President and CEO; Jeff Zadoks, our COO, and Matt Mainer, our CFO and Treasurer. Rob, Jeff and Matt will make prepared remarks and afterwards will answer your questions. The press release that supports these remarks is posted on both the investors and the SEC filing sections of our website and is also available on the SEC’s website. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and an audio replay will be available on our website at postholdings.com. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that should be carefully considered by investors as actual results could differ materially from these statements.

These forward-looking statements are current as of the date of this call and management undertakes no obligation to update these statements. This call will discuss certain non-GAAP measures. For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP measure, please see our press release issued yesterday and posted on our website. With that, I will turn the call over to Rob.

Robert Vitale: Thank you, Daniel, and good morning. Our business maintained the momentum we saw in Q1 with a strong Q2. Strong manufacturing performance, disciplined pricing, and solid cost management continued to drive results. With isolated exceptions, volumes generally declined. As we have previously mentioned, SNAP reductions are a meaningful component of the decline. However, there also remains a disconnect between macroeconomic statistics and consumer sentiment. Over time, we expect this to largely impact consumption, location and price points rather than volume. We like the balance of our portfolio it provides by virtue of the mix of products, price points and channels. Within our Consumer Brand segment, grocery and pet continue to perform well.

While we have incremental investments to make, our confidence continues to grow regarding the sustainable contribution run-rate from our pet acquisition. Cereal remains well-positioned in value, and is holding its own in premium with margins improving in both category subsegments. Equally important, the integration of pet into PCB is progressing and remains on-track. Our foodservice business continues to deliver strong results, demonstrating its value proposition to customers through excellent service levels and its value-added product offering. While we saw a bit of a slowdown in restaurant foot traffic this quarter, we believe it is temporary and our historical algorithm and growth drivers remain intact. Refrigerated retail continues to focus on driving volumes through its vastly improved supply chain, while Weetabix remains resilient in a challenging, albeit improving environment.

As far as capital allocation, we remain opportunistic with our triangular focus on share buybacks, leverage reduction and M&A. The M&A pipeline has increased, and we continue to look for opportunities both strategic and tactical. The debt refinancing we completed in February was exquisitely timed and created broader options for each bucket of capital allocation opportunity. Overall, I am very pleased with our performance through the first half of the fiscal year and remain very optimistic for the balance of FY ’24. With that, I will now turn the call over to Jeff.

Jeff Zadoks: Thanks, Rob, and good morning, everyone. Starting with PCB, both our grocery and pet food products had another strong quarter, each driven by growth in our value offerings. Within grocery, cereal performed in-line with the category as we held branded share in both dollars and pounds. Cereal category volume showed some signs of improvement as the rate of decline slowed to 3.6% for the quarter. We expect category volumes will continue to normalize in Q3 now that we have fully lapped the reduction in SNAP benefits. The main profit drivers within grocery continue to be carryover pricing and strong operating cost performance. For our pet food brands, category share grew in both dollars and pounds. This growth combined with strong manufacturing performance drove our results.

We further ramped investments in our premium pet brands in G&A in preparation for exiting the TSA with Smucker’s. Finally, from a network and supply chain perspective, we are focused on optimization for both cereal and pet. We are on track to capture the benefits of closing our Lancaster, Ohio Cereal plant in fiscal 2025. For pet, we are implementing an optimized warehouse and distribution network combined with grocery and lining up all the necessary internal and third-party capacity to fully exit the Smucker’s co-pack agreement in the first half of 2025. Moving to Foodservice, we had another strong quarter as favorable mix and customer renewals were supported by excellent service levels. While we did see a pullback in overall egg volumes from declines in restaurant food traffic and inventory reductions at certain customers, we continue to see growth, strong growth within our higher margin, pre-cooked egg products, which were up approximately 5%.

There remains significant runway in our business by not only moving existing customers up the product value chain, but also by converting the 40% of foodservice industry volumes still using shell eggs. Our value proposition has never been stronger or more evident as wage rates drive operators to seek more efficiencies. Rounding out the discussion of foodservice, although we continue to see cases of avian influenza, including cases found in dairy herds, we have not had any additional outbreaks within our owned or contracted farms. Lastly, we continue to ramp our RTD Shake co-manufacturing for BellRing with improving production performance in the quarter, albeit well behind our initial start-up plan. We expect to hit our targeted profit run-rate for shakes exiting fiscal Q4.

Turning to Weetabix, U.K. Cereal category volumes declined 3%, but we outperformed the category given our participation in private-label. From a supply chain standpoint, our overall service levels showed improvement. Outside of cereal, Ufit continues to be a volume bright spot, providing an attractive source of growth. Our Refrigerated Retail business had a solid quarter, driven by continued manufacturing and cost management. We are focused on driving demand and pulling all levers to do that, including advertising, promotion and innovation. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Matt.

Matt Mainer: Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. Second quarter consolidated net sales were $2 billion and adjusted EBITDA was $345 million. Net sales increased 23%, driven by recent acquisitions. Excluding acquisitions, sales declined 5% driven by lower overall volumes and the impact of our Foodservice pricing pass-through model, partially offset by hire and retain pricing across our businesses. Supply chain performance and fill rates remained strong while inflation persisted in areas such as sugar and labor costs with some offsets from better freight and grain costs. Finally, SG&A increased as we continued targeted marketing investments in our retail businesses. Excluding the benefit of Pet Food acquisitions, Post consumer brands, net sales increased 1% and volumes decreased 4%.

Average net pricing excluding pet food increased 5%. Volumes declined primarily in non-retail cereal and peanut butter. Segment adjusted EBITDA increased 74% versus prior year as we benefited from the strong contribution of pet food and improved grocery performance. Weetabix’ net sales increased 10% year-over-year. Sales benefited from the Deeside acquisition and a 440 basis point tailwind from a stronger British Pound. On a currency and acquisition neutral basis, net sales were flat and volumes increased 3% while mix shifted to private label products. Segment adjusted EBITDA decreased 1% versus prior year as increased volumes and favorable FX were offset by private label mix shift and increased marketing costs. Foodservice net sales and volumes declined 12% and 2% respectively.

Revenue reflects pass through of lower grain costs and a reduction in pricing due to the removal of avian influenza price adders from last year. Volumes reflect decreases in our liquid egg products, partially offset by growth in our precooked egg and potato products. Adjusted EBITDA decreased 8% as the removal of avian influenza price adders from last year and lower egg volumes were partially offset by favorable mix shift to higher margin precooked eggs and customer renewal pricing. Refrigerated retail net sales decreased 8% and volumes decreased 5%, both were driven by distribution losses in egg and cheese products. Segment adjusted EBITDA increased 3% led by improvements in plant cost — I’m sorry, plant, cost performance and SG&A. Turning to cash flow.

In the second quarter, we generated $250 million from operations driven by increased profitability and improved working capital. Our net leverage decreased 0.2 turn to 4.3 times. Capital expenditures in the quarter were approximately $100 million, driven by continued investments in our pet food business and the expansion of our Norwalk, Iowa precooked egg facility. Outside of internal investments, we focused on refinancing and building capital capacity in Q2. Our refinancing significantly added to our debt maturity runway as we cleared out three years of near-term maturities. In addition, we added to our overall liquidity as we increased the size of our revolver by $250 million to $1 billion. Finally, given the strong first half of the year, we again raised our guidance.

Within this new guidance range, we see the remaining two quarters of the year as fairly balanced to each other. Relative to Q2, we see seasonal lows for Refrigerated Retail in Q3 and Q4, with some additional investments around our pet integration being the biggest sequential drivers. With that, I will turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Andrew Lazar with Barclays. Your line is open.

Andrew Lazar: Good morning, everybody.

Robert Vitale: Hey, good morning, Andrew.

Andrew Lazar: Good morning. Rob, I wanted to start — just thinking through what pet margins might have looked like in the quarter and sort of where we go from here. If we put a low to mid 20s EBITDA margin on legacy PCB and adjust a little bit for the Perfection deal, maybe we get around $50 million or so in EBITDA contribution from the larger pet asset, or maybe about a 12% EBITDA margin. And in the last couple of quarters, I think margins were also in that range. But you’ve kind of warned it might be a bit transitory due to some benefits such as a pipeline fill. And obviously, you’ve talked again today about the need or plan for some incremental investment moving forward. So, it sounded like margins would revert back a little, but we haven’t seen that yet.

So, I guess I’m just wondering if my math is reasonably accurate. And then, what maybe drove the strong performance, because we’ve got a couple quarters in a row now with this sort of low to maybe a little bit higher teens EBITDA margin in pet. I’m trying to get a sense of what you see is the sustainability of that.

Robert Vitale: Well, if anything, you’re a touch on the low side in terms of the contribution. So, as you rightfully point out, margins have been running reasonably attractive and consistent with some of the top down talk we had at the outset, the margin structure was just inappropriately low and needed to be addressed. So that’s largely been addressed with better execution through the plants, filling the unmet need, coming off allocation with the exception of some certain products where we remain with some capacity issues. So I think that the foundation that you just articulated is accurate, but so is the historical comments that we need to make some investments. But what I would tell you is those investments are not going to dramatically change the margin structure. It will be within that range of low teens where we think this business should operate on an ongoing basis.

Andrew Lazar: Got it. Thanks for that. And then in the prepared remarks just now, you talked about how you think the restaurant slowdown you’ve seen in restaurant traffic you think will be temporary, and also that you expect the cereal category sort of to normalize in the fiscal second half as you lap some of the — the changes to SNAP. And so, I guess if I just take those two sort of together, it suggests a little bit of a brighter outlook potentially for sort of the industry trend as we move forward. And I don’t know, maybe that’s a little bit more optimistic than I’ve heard from some others in the space about maybe the timing of this recovery and just trying to get a sense of if I’m reading that right or, and maybe it’s just that you are starting to see some of this play out which gives you that sort of level of improved visibility. Or maybe I’m over planning.

Robert Vitale: Yes, I think — I think the question is timing. I don’t think we’re significantly different in our outlook than most of our peers. So maybe it was more in articulation when we said temporary, I didn’t mean to apply, it was an immediate turnaround. I think we’ve got some inflationary issues, have hit food service that already hit in retail, and we’re seeing some shift back to retail. Volumes in retail are a bit more difficult to parse through because in addition to having some shift from away from home to in home, we have the SNAP lapping to contend with. So parsing out causation is a bit more challenging. The comment about temporary away from home was more if you look at historical context, these things occur.

We’ve had some significant customers with some food traffic issues. I’m very confident with strong channel partners we have that those will be corrected and that we will go back to growth in food traffic. Whether that’s in one quarter, two quarters, I couldn’t tell you.

Andrew Lazar: Got it. And then very quick last one just you mentioned the aseptic plant being up to full capacity really towards the end of the fiscal year. It sounded new to me and a little bit pushed back, and maybe I have that wrong because I also haven’t heard that on the flip side at least yet from the folks over at BellRing being an issue. So, I guess where’s the disconnect there? Or has something changed?

Robert Vitale: Yes. I don’t think there’s a disconnect. I think you’re reading it right. From a Post perspective, we’ve had some startup challenges that we’re working through very methodically, not unusual for a startup. One of the reasons this is such an attractive category to be in is it’s not easy. So, we’re overcoming some of those startup issues that everyone contends with, and maybe we should have planned more of them. And in my dual hat role at BellRing, anticipated more of the problems than Post did because they’ve had more startup experiences. So their numbers are already factored into the run rate that we are now achieving. So there’s no disconnect from the perspective you just outlined.

Andrew Lazar: Great. Thanks so much.

Robert Vitale: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Lavery with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Michael Lavery: Thank you. Good morning.

Robert Vitale: Good morning.

Michael Lavery: You mentioned that despite the pretty sizable recent avian flu outbreak, you’ve protected your volumes. Just can you help us maybe handicap the pricing outlook? Just having been through — having seen some of this before, is there any early signs of how that might be evolving and just have some visibility on supply and demand for the more broadly that you can share, in terms of what we might anticipate as far as how that evolves?

Robert Vitale: A little bit like trying to predict the direction of a tornado. What we focus on is making sure we have effective biosecurity over our facilities, and obviously we can’t control what other participants in the market do. And then price becomes the independent variable. So, we would simply be hazarding a guess as to what direction something like HPAI will take. And I wouldn’t want to try to guess. What we would tell you is that we are prepared for multiple contingencies around no breakouts, breakouts that disproportionately affect us, and breakouts that disproportionately affect our competitors. So, it’s a multi option tree scenarios that we game rather than trying to plan one scenario.

Michael Lavery: Okay, thanks for that. And just on pet, as far as the sort of the pet parent consumer, it seems to be a bit more trade down and maybe value conscious, like in so many other categories. Can you just give a sense of how beneficial that could be or what you’re seeing in terms of brand positioning for your side and how it all fits together?

Robert Vitale: Well, it’s something we’ve been speaking to fairly consistently, that we baked it into our assumptions that there would be a trade down and it has been occurring, and we expect it to continue. So nothing different than we’ve previously talked about. And that, when I mentioned the meeting unfilled demand, that was primarily in the segment that benefits from the trade down.

Michael Lavery: Okay, great. Thanks so much.

Robert Vitale: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from David Palmer with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

David Palmer: Yes, Thanks. Good morning.

Robert Vitale: Good morning.

David Palmer: Good morning. Question on Pet and particularly things that would drive the topline, your growth plans there, you have Perfection Foods. In the past, you talked about repositioning some of the brands like Rachael Ray. So, any thoughts about what your plans are and how it’s going so far?

Robert Vitale: Sure. When we bought the business, I think we articulated, we viewed it as two segments. We had a premium segment with Nutrish and Nature’s Recipe, and then we had a value segment with the balance of the brands. And the key to the value segment was stabilizing capacity and making sure we were meeting unmet demand, as that demand migrated from more premium to less premium. Within Rachael Ray and Nutrish, we see that as more of a marketing issue and positioning the brand to make sure the consumers are clear on the value proposition that’s being done. But that’s a longer process than is fixing the plans and making sure we’re meeting the unmet demand. We are focused on it. Of course, we are being patient to make sure we have the right creative and the right brand positioning.

But this investment opportunity was not predicated upon being able to grow those brands, it was predicated upon maintaining. So growth specifically in those brands is the additional upside to our investment case.

David Palmer: And then with Perfection, is that — is there a distribution opportunity in the near term? And what are your thoughts there?

Robert Vitale: I would say that Perfection provides more of a rebalancing of our manufacturing as we now have a western plant than it does a distribution opportunity. There may be some distribution opportunities, but that was more about capacity than growth.

David Palmer: And then just the last one on Food Service. Are you still comfortable, generally speaking, you mentioned the multiple option tree with regard to avian influenza, but are you still generally comfortable with that $95 million run rate per quarter on EBITDA?

Robert Vitale: We certainly are.

David Palmer: Got it. Thank you very much.

Robert Vitale: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ken Goldman with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.

Ken Goldman: Hi, thanks. Can you remind us maybe what some of the key risks are that are embedded into the lower end of guidance? And I’m asking because I think maybe some of the lower end included some risk of headwind from HPAI. Maybe it still does. Just want to get a sense of kind of what’s baked in there, just in case avian flu does not end up being a headwind for you, and making sure I’m right in the first case there.

Robert Vitale: Well, I think the two key risks are volume trajectory and HPAI. HPAI is just very difficult to predict, as I mentioned earlier. And then volume trajectory is uncertainty. We’ve seen some improvements, we’ve seen some degradation in other channels. As I mentioned, it’s a bit of a confusing consumer environment right now. So, I would put those as the two big risks.

Ken Goldman: And you said 2Q, I think you meant 2H, just to be clear.

Robert Vitale: I did.

Ken Goldman: Okay. And then quickly, just on the M&A environment, hoping to get a little bit of a better sense for what you’re seeing there, just in light of your maybe calling out a little bit more flexibility that you have, but also just digging in a little bit, has your experience with the pet business changed at all? The type of business that you’re looking for maybe opened you or your eyes to a little bit broader of a variety of opportunities? Just given how successful you’ve been in terms of turning the margins around here, I know there’s not — every opportunity won’t be quite that juicy in terms of your ability to improve margins, but has it really just expanded the, like I said, the opportunity set in your eyes longer term?

Robert Vitale: Well, I would say not because we have always had a very broad outlook with respect to where we could take our M&A opportunities. As we have grown and our portfolio has become more focused on areas where we were able to deliver synergies that has somewhat narrowed our focus to where we could deliver those synergies. At the same time, we continue to look more broadly at things that would be new platforms. So, I would say from an internal perspective, because we’ve always looked at things that with a very broad lens know from an execution perspective, do we feel confident in doing something a bit further afield? I would say yes, and we previously have. So, I mean, previously have felt that confidence. So I think the M&A environment is interesting right now because the pure volume of opportunities has increased.

Whether those convert to anything or not is a, remains an uncertainty. I think the volatility in the high yield market continues to create some choppiness in the M&A market. So we’ll have to navigate that.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Robert Dickerson with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Robert Dickerson: Great. Thanks so much. Maybe just kind of a easy question around Q2. I think you said the next two quarters on EBITDA side should be fairly balanced, but I think that’s what you said coming out of Q1 regarding the next three quarters, and then clearly you had a great Q2. I just got on the call a little bit late. So excuse me if you already stated this, but I was just curious, kind of what changed obviously through the quarter relative to the original perspective?

Matt Mainer: Yes, I think a little better performance on PCB for sure, than expected. Just strong cereal performance, given the backdrop of the environment there. It was probably the biggest outlier relative to our expectations and continued really strong performance in Pet, but it would be the biggest mix. And then obviously we’ve got some puts and takes in the second half of the year. Biggest driver, like I mentioned, is really Refrigerated Retail, has significant seasonality in the second half to the downside, versus they have their benefit of seasonality in the first half, especially with Easter all being in Q2. And then we’ve got some additional investments we’re going to make around PCB for pet integration, G&A, and also some of those distribution investments will be sequenced through.

Robert Dickerson: All right, super. And then I guess just going back quickly to Refrigerated Retail, I realized a little pressure there on the distribution side. So as we think forward, maybe not even just back half, but longer than the back half of this year, kind of once the — what’s kind of the overall net strategy to kind of resuscitate performance?

Matt Mainer: Sure. I mean, it continues to be investment around the business and in particular around the dinner sides. We’ve got some new innovation that Jeff mentioned that’s hitting the market just recently. So too soon to tell there. But certainly the strategy continues to be innovation or combined with additional marketing investment. And we’re leaning into promotion a bit more given some of the benefits we saw in Q1.

Robert Dickerson: All right, great. I’ll pass it on. Thanks so much.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Marc Torrente with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Marc Torrente: Hey, good morning. Thank you for taking the questions. You just touched on promos a little bit, with regards to Refrigerated Retail, we’ve seen promo activity more broadly across food and beverage pick up in recent periods. Is that sort of consistent with your view on the market? How rational is activity in your categories, and how do you expect that to progress through the year?

Matt Mainer: Yes. I think it is consistent with our view and what we think needs to happen, obviously, from a Refrigerated Retail is a little bit different segment for us because we don’t have a value alternative or a private label like we do in cereal, for sure. So we don’t get that change in mix benefit. So we’re continuing to see investment in promo. And like I said, we had a case in Q1 where we got the benefit of some promotion a little more sponsored by one of our customers and saw some significant benefits. So I think we’ll continue to take targeted bets there, but remain rational.

Marc Torrente: Okay. And then on M&A, you called out increased activity or opportunity on that front. Maybe some perspective on what is driving that. Have valuations moved at all? And is the environment allowing you guys to be more aggressive there?

Robert Vitale: Well, we don’t know if valuations have moved yet, because what we are first seeing is an increase in opportunity flow. So we need some more transactions to occur in order to gain the sense of a market. I think what’s driving it is there has been a relatively low period of M&A, specifically private equity exits that have aged some of these opportunities, such that I think they will come to market and more of a group. And that, combined with some of the movement in the debt markets, both positive and negative is all impacting the way the market forms. So we need a little bit more time before we can really answer where the equilibrium is on multiples. But what we can say with a fairly degree — fairly high degree of confidence is that the number of opportunities is really significantly ticking up.

Marc Torrente: Okay, thanks. I’ll pass along. Operator Thank you. Our next question comes from John Baumgartner with Mizuho Securities. Your line is open.

John Baumgartner: Good morning. Thanks for the question.

Robert Vitale: Hey, John.

John Baumgartner: Maybe a first-off in food service, in eggs, the coffee chain segment has been a big driver of growth in precooked these last few years. But as you highlighted, about 40% of foodservice volume is still shell eggs. So, in light of these comments about the demand weakness now, how do you think about diversifying the customer base further with new capacity, opening more outlets in areas such as leisure, hospitality? And then I guess, how does the bulk of the outlets with this 40% of shell eggs volume still sits? How does that overlap with your current channel exposure right now?