MGP Ingredients, Inc. (NASDAQ:MGPI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Certainly, it hasn’t year-to-date, and I personally wouldn’t anticipate it having a significant impact on our business going forward, to be honest. Our customers continue to want to forward book commitments with us, because what they are trying to do obviously is, make sure they have certainty of supply around liquid for their brands. So we really — the biggest change we have seen there is not necessarily in customers committing but more — I am going to say more on the craft side of things is trying to push payables out because of the higher interest rates and impact that has on their businesses. But overall, the demand that we are seeing remains pretty solid for the new distillate and aged.

Bill Chappell: Great. Thanks so much.

Dave Colo: Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question will come from Vivien Azer with TD Cowen. You may now go ahead.

Vivien Azer: Hi. Thank you. Good morning and I’d like to echo my congratulations to Dave. My first question is on the Distillery Products segment, another very nice quarter of price mix realization in premium beverage alcohol, of course, volumes are under pressure. I was wondering whether you could offer some commentary on kind of the volume dynamics between brown goods and white goods in the quarter, please? Thanks.

Brandon Gall: Yeah. Vivien, this is Brandon. So, yeah, in our Q, we do break out premium beverage alcohol, which includes both brown goods and white goods, and within that, we share that sales are up 13%, but volume to your point is off 15% and that 15% downdraft is all directly related to white goods and industrial alcohol. So our demand for our brown goods from a volume standpoint remains intact, but I will share the majority of the 28% growth in brown goods in the quarter was price driven.

Vivien Azer: Got it. That’s really helpful. And then just kind of thinking about the brown goods category and the whiskey category more broadly, we have the access finally to TTB, which is publishing its data again. It looks like inventory building. We are hearing anecdotally that the third-party whiskey pricing might be under pressure. So I was wondering if you could just comment at all on what you are seeing in terms of other whiskey pricing in the market? Thanks.

Dave Colo: Are you speaking to our distilling, our bulk whiskey business in particular…

Vivien Azer: Yeah.

Dave Colo: … or the — yeah. Yeah. I think from our perspective, on our inventories, et cetera, what we try to do is balance particularly on our aged side. Our inventory needs and build of inventory with our anticipated future customer needs and demand. And we still are in that position today, we make our laydown decisions based on those anticipated needs and we are not seeing anything today that would tell us that we, as a company, are imbalanced in that particular regard. As far as pricing pressure in the market, what we are seeing is we have continued to attract pretty healthy pricing, as Brandon just discussed and the majority of the increase in our brown goods revenue this quarter was driven by pricing versus volume. Going forward, I think, what we are anticipating, and I think, a lot of our competitors are anticipating is that the global demand for American whiskey is going to continue to remain strong as will domestic whiskey.

But as you look at the rest of the world, the share that American whiskey has globally, it’s still very underpenetrated. So through the combination of continued demand domestically and the significant potential that we feel is available globally, we still feel like we are in a solid position and to continue to grow this business.

Vivien Azer: Got it. Thanks very much.

Dave Colo: Yeah.

Operator: It appears there are no further questions. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Dave Colo for any closing remarks.

Dave Colo: All right. Thank you for your interest in our company and for joining us today for our third quarter earnings call. We look forward to talking with you again after the fourth quarter.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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