Post Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:POST) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris Growe: Hi. Obviously, you had nice EBITDA guidance here and increased early in the year and obviously, it predicts a lot of confidence in the business. And Rob, you had mentioned that Foodservice is obviously performing ahead of expectations, which clearly is in our model as well. I think you indicated that was probably the main driver of the higher guidance for the year. I just want to get a sense of any other businesses that you would cite whether it be PCB or even refrigerator retail where you’re seeing the potential for a little stronger EBITDA performance for the year than what you initially expected?

Rob Vitale: Yes. Well, I would say there’s three items. One is the Q1 beat, so we want to make sure to reflect that, but then we also increased our expectation for the remaining three quarters. The second is that we have revised our estimate for currency translation given the fairly significant move in the pound sterling in the first quarter. And then the last would be, we have still taken a meaningful amount of pricing that it’s yet to hit the P&L. The uncertainty of course is ongoing elasticities, but I think the potential upside/outside of the — outside of Weetabix and Foodservice, Weetabix specifically in U.S. dollars would be the relationship between incremental pricing and elasticity. Chris?

Operator: And we’ll take

Rob Vitale: All right. Go ahead, operator.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Jason English with Goldman Sachs.

Jason English: Hey, good morning, folks. Thanks for Couple of quick questions. So the — thank you so much, by the way, for the color on Foodservice, very helpful. And sticking with Foodservice, you mentioned incremental source of growth coming from the shake capacity. Can you bring us up to speed on how that’s progressing? When do you expect it to be up and running? How long will it take to get to run rate levels? And most importantly, like how much profit do you expect that business to throw off for you?

Rob Vitale: In reverse order, we’ve talked about it being $15 million to $20 million of incremental EBITDA. The expectation currently is that we are going to be online right around the very end of the year, so September 30-ish or so. We are building a factory in times that are challenging. We’ve met every horizon, every milestone so far. But I’m going to hedge that a little bit and say that give it to the end of the calendar year and that will be up and running at full capacity by early 2024, early calendar 2024. Hope we will do a little bit better than that, but I want to hedge that a bit.

Jason English: Yes, yes, I appreciate why you would. And the private label launches into refrigerated side dishes. It sounds like that’s sort of a new and mounting threat to your business. Can you put more context around that? And talk about how you’re looking to defend, what we should expect from a P&L impact and whether or not there’s going to be some price get back more promotional intensity, et cetera? Thank you.

Rob Vitale: Well, our first levers would be more traditional continued innovation, continued revisions of pack sizes and expanded advertising, all of which we think the brand would warrant irrespective of the presence of private label. Private label has been tried a number of times in the category and not worked. We’ve been quite successful in managing that. We are highlighting it because we’re in a bit of a different environment than we’ve ever been in this category with inflation as widespread as it is. So we would expect to be successful in managing that incremental competition, but we wanted to highlight it because it is relatively new.