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B&G Foods, Inc. (BGS)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 18, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to the B&G Foods Fourth Quarter 2014 Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. You can access detailed financial information on the company's quarter and the full year in the earnings release issued today which is available at bgfoods.com. Before the company begins its formal remarks, I need to remind everybody that part of the discussion today includes forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and therefore undue reliance should not be placed upon them. We refer all of you to the company's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact the company's future operating results and financial condition. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The company will also be making references on today's call to the non-GAAP financial measures, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, adjusted diluted earnings per share, base business net sales, and comparable base business net sales. A reconciliation of these financial measures to the most direct comparable GAAP financial measures is provided in today's press release. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Bob Cantwell, CEO and Interim CFO. Bob? Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining today. I'll begin the call going over a few financial highlights then get into details on the quarter and finally what we see going forward. So with that out of the way, net sales for the fourth quarter of 2014 increased 12.5% to $238 million. Net sales of Specialty Brands, which we acquired in April of 2014, contributed $32 million to the overall increase.…

Operator

Operator

And we'll go first to Farha Aslam of Stephens, Inc.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

Good evening. Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Good evening, Farha.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

A question on your guidance for next year. Ortega is not going to be fully back on shelf in that first quarter. How much did you take off for the fact that Ortega will not be in full distribution for that first quarter? Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: There is approximately $1 million of EBITDA for that. It's back in most distribution and it's been accepted back by a pretty much all the customers, but we still fight the daily fight of getting it back in at store level, store-by-store. So, even though at customer corporate, it's back in and it's back in many customers as we speak. We're still across the country making sure every store within that customer has the product back on shelf, and that's going to take through the end of the first quarter here.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

Okay. And you are very confident about the brand coming back in terms of consumer market share. But others in that time have introduced kits that include standup tacos that were doing so well for Ortega. Do you anticipate the momentum with consumers to be back pretty quickly after it's on the shelf? How long do you anticipate that to take? Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: We're seeing where we're on shelf and we started shipping kind of the second to last week of December, and where it's back on shelf, we're seeing no consumer shortfalls. Again, this was a peanut allergy. No consumers, we had no serious illnesses from any consumers. It's back on shelf. We didn't have a lot of bad consumer reaction and we had actually lot of positive consumer reaction from consumers coming inbound to us, asking us when we'll back on shelf. So, we're not seeing that, the momentum of Ortega was very strong before this recall. Again, it's our biggest brand and we've really put a lot of emphasis on making sure everything was done 100% properly through the recall process and we expect a very strong Ortega 2015 year, once we get through kind of February, March timeframe here.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

That's helpful. And my last question is regarding your CFO search. Could you just update us on where you stand with that? Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Sure. We are actually in the conclusion of the search process, almost done and we expect to have the new CFO in place by the end of the first quarter. So, I'm looking forward to that person joining our team. And we should be there here in the next number of weeks here, but before the end of the first quarter.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

I'm sure. You're doing double duty. Thank you very much. Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Yeah.

Operator

Operator

And we'll go next to Sean Naughton of Piper Jaffray. Sean P. Naughton - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): Hi. Good afternoon, Bob. Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Good afternoon. Sean P. Naughton - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): Just a question for you from a high level on the gross margins. If we just step back, looking at the business today at a high level, assuming no future acquisitions, how should we be thinking about the gross margin in your business over the medium, kind of the longer term as the – it has been a little bit volatile over the last couple of years? So just trying to think about how you are viewing the business based on all the different moving pieces that you have had come in on the snack business, et cetera? Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Well, we're rolling over against all the snack pieces. We certainly have rolled over against all of that. As we go forward, we're looking at kind of a gross profit number a little bit above 31% for the business and EBITDA margins close to 23%. And more importantly, we're refocusing this organization on all of our product innovation to be margin accretive going forward. We've launched a number of products over the years that within the brands, we're actually a little margin dilutive for the brands, so we've changed that focus kind of right off the bat as we headed into 2015. And so, margins and managing margins and growing margins are extremely important message that this organization has heard going forward. But we're looking at today in steady state of business that's approximately 23% EBITDA margin and a little bit above 31% gross profit margin. Sean P. Naughton -…

Operator

Operator

And we'll go next to Karru Martinson of Deutsche Bank.

Karru Martinson - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Management

Given the lessons learned with Rickland Orchard, have you given any thought to the change in terms of the scale of a business, that you would like to buy whether it's in terms of top-line contribution or is it still more of these type kind of plug into the distribution network? Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: It's still – the model that we have built here is that $100 million or less sales business, and certainly we'll look at bigger things and if the opportunity avails, I mean, we certainly can handle much bigger than that. But we have found over the years that $100 million or less works. I think as we look at the Rickland decision, that was a brand that was really in business and a business that really started kind of 12 months prior to us buying it. So it was absolutely brand new. I think we would hesitate on doing that again, but we are very comfortable with buying center of the store dry grocery, and very comfortable with buying snack brands that could ride along with Pirate's Booty, because Pirate's Booty has been a big success for us, and so has TrueNorth in a smaller way, it's a smaller business. So, if we can buy brands like that and continue growing both snacks and grocery, that's really where we want to play. And typically those brands are going to be $100 million or less, because it keeps away a lot of the bigger strategics when we look at those size brands.

Karru Martinson - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Management

And when you guys look at the overall consumer, I think I asked a similar question last quarter about the pressure on that center of the store, consumer. There had been a lot of talk that as gas prices came down, more money in consumers' wallets, they would kind of return to traditional shopping patterns. Given the guidance and the challenges that you guys see, where is the health of the consumer today? Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Well, I think from – I think historically, I've been doing this a long-time and the one thing history has always shown, and it's early in the game to see what the consumer is doing, with the money they now have in their wallet that they're not spending at the gas pump. Historically, those consumers went back into grocery stores and treated themselves. It could have been, I buy pasta and a cheap jarred sauce for my family, now I buy a better sauce to go along with my pasta. And so, those treats happened at family level in stores. It's a little early to see. I think from the – as we look at our brands and certainly in the second half of this year, except for the Rickland issue which is kind of behind us now, and hopefully, the one and only recall we ever had, and this was the first recall we really ever had of any significance. The rest of our business was up in total, as far as volume and price. So we're very happy with that, and we've seen a steady state on volume here in the last kind of six to nine months, and we've fixed a price. So we're feeling good about our business. I mean we don't expect huge volume increases, we expect strong volume increases on our key brand, such as Pirates and Ortega and a few others. But if we can kind of hold our own on the rest of the businesses, we're setting ourselves up for a very successful 2015.

Karru Martinson - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Management

And how should we think about cash flow usage here, obviously opportunistic if acquisitions arise, is that correct to kind of assume the dividend and debt repay down – debt repayment for the rest of it? Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Absolutely. The dividend is a very important part of who we are, and I'm a very big supporter of giving back our cash flow to our shareholders and how we run that model. So, yes, we're going to take our cash flow and pay down, any excess cash flow is going to pay down debt on an annual basis. But we think M&A is a very important part of our strategy, and we're very willing buyers, you got to have willing sellers and we're always looking. So, the better use for our cash for shareholders is to buy accretive acquisitions that fit our model that we can buy for lower than we're trading at and increase to shareholder dividend. And that's been the B&G model, and that's our preference to use of cash. But again, our leverage today is a little over 5 times. And we don't really want to take that leverage up. We would do that in the short term for an acquisition. We go up 5.5 times tomorrow for a good acquisition, but we would probably be back into the equity market soon after that to take a turn leverage down after we did that acquisition.

Karru Martinson - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Management

Thank you very much, guys. I appreciate it.

Operator

Operator

And there are no further questions from the phone lines. I'd like to turn the conference back to Mr. Cantwell at this time for any additional or closing remarks. Robert C. Cantwell - President, CEO, CFO & Director: Okay. I want to thank everyone again for joining this call. As I look forward in my new position here, I expect 2015 to be a positive year of change for B&G as we refocus our efforts to maximize sales and margin growth. And again, I truly look forward to hitting and beating consensus numbers as we go forward. And thank you again for today.