Operator
Operator
Good day everyone and welcome to the B&G Foods First Quarter 2018 Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded. You can access detailed financial information on the quarter in the company's earnings release issued today which is available at ir.bgfoods.com. Before the company begins its formal remarks, I need to remind everyone 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 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 statements, 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 adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, adjusted diluted earnings per share, base business net sales. Reconciliations of these financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in today's earnings release. Bruce Wacha, the company's CFO, will start the call by discussing the company's financial results for the quarter. After that, Bob Cantwell, the company's Chief Executive Officer, will discuss various factors that affected the company's results, select businesses highlights and his thoughts concerning the outlook for the remainder of 2018, and Ken Romanzi, the company's Chief Operating Officer will make some remarks. I would now like to turn the conference over to Bruce. Bruce C. Wacha - B&G Foods, Inc.: Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2018 earnings call. Our first quarter results were generally in line with our expectations and supportive to our full year guidance that we communicated earlier this year. During the quarter, we generated approximately $432 million in net sales, an increase of 4.7% compared to $412 million in the first quarter of last year. Performance remains on track for our recent acquisition of Back to Nature and this business contributed approximately $20 million for the quarter which was in line with our expectations. Our base business net sales increased by approximately $1.1 million for the quarter driven by pricing which is supportive of our full year target of a $15 million to $20 million benefit for pricing for 2018. We generated $89.4 million of adjusted EBITDA which, as a percentage of net sales, was 20.7%. $36.4 million in adjusted net income and $0.55 in adjusted diluted earnings per share for the quarter, all in line with our budget. We generated $73.7 million in net cash from operations finishing the quarter with $118.1 million in cash and net debt of $2 billion. We had voluntary prepayments on our term loan facility of $125 million for the quarter, reducing the balance to $525 million compared to $650 million at the end of fiscal 2017. We made an additional $25 million voluntary prepayment on our term loan facility at the end of the quarter, further reducing our term loan balance to $500 million. We also paid $30.9 million in dividends to our shareholders during the quarter. Our inventory reduction plan is ahead of schedule for the first quarter of 2018 and we have been able to successfully reduce inventory by $46.5 million to $455.4 million at the end of the first quarter compared to $501.8 million at the end of fiscal 2017. We expect to continue to reduce our inventory throughout the remainder of the year and expect to achieve the high end of our $75 million to $100 million inventory reduction plan by the end of the year. Now, I will walk you through some of the key drivers of net sales performance. We've come to expect big things out of our Green Giant frozen business and this quarter is no different. Net sales in Green Giant frozen products were $94.9 million, an increase of 12.8% compared to $84.1 million in the year ago period. Green Giant frozen products benefited from a strong launch of our new Green Giant Veggie Spirals as well as our Green Giant Riced Veggies, Green Giant Veggie Tots and our Green Giant Mashed Cauliflower which were all launched throughout 2016 and 2017. We had a very strong turnaround in the first quarter from Ortega. Ortega generated net sales of $37.9 million in the first quarter, an increase of 4.1% compared to $36.3 million in the first quarter of last year. Cream of Wheat had another stellar quarter with net sales of $18.4 million, an increase of 11.2% from $16.6 million. Victoria continued its strong momentum since acquisition generating $11.8 million net sales for the quarter, an increase of 11% from $10.6 million. Our portfolio of spices and seasonings brand inclusive of the 2016 acquisitions and other brands such as Mrs. Dash was essentially flat with sales in aggregate of approximately $86 million for the quarter compared to $87 million for the first quarter of last year. Pirate Brands generated net sales of $21 million, down $4.6 million from the prior year first quarter. However, the decline was largely due to the timing of promotional activities, and in fact, we had a very strong April for Pirate Brands where we made up for the Q1 shortfall. We saw some of these same timing issues last year when Pirates had very strong performance in the first, third and fourth quarters with a soft 2Q. We are also encouraged by the consumption data which showed an increase of standard sales of retail at 7.4% over the 13 weeks ended March 31, 2018. We had a series of pluses and minuses across the rest of our portfolio, ultimately contributing to base business net sales of $411.1 million, or as mentioned earlier, an increase of $1.1 million compared to the first quarter of last year. And as I mentioned earlier on the call, Back to Nature continued to perform as expected. The business contributed approximately $20 million in net sales for the quarter, and we remain confident in our target of delivering $80 million in net sales and $70 million in adjusted EBITDA for the business for the full year 2018. We are also pleased to note that we added several key professionals in the B&G Foods family through these acquisitions. In fact, these executives are not only playing important roles in the integration of the acquired business, but they are also taking on incremental responsibilities in adding value across the overall business. First quarter gross profit, as a percentage of net sales, decreased from 29.4% in 2017 to 23.9% in 2018. Excluding the negative impact of $16.1 million of non-recurring expenses, including the non-cash accounting impact of our inventory reduction plan and acquisition related expenses including Back to Nature integration expenses, gross profit as a percentage of net sales was 27.7% for the quarter. The non-cash accounting charges from our inventory reduction plan are driven by the allocation of certain fixed manufacturing, warehouse and other corporate overhead costs associated with inventory that have been purchased and converted to finished goods in 2017 and then sold in 2018. We expect to see an additional $15 million of non-cash charges or about $30 million in total for the year that will be incurred as part of the $100 million inventory reduction plan. The remaining 170 basis point decrease in gross profit percentage was attributable to industry-wide and anticipated increases in freight expenses which were partially offset by procurement savings, a decrease in warehousing expenses and an increase in net pricing. While freight costs are expected to remain high throughout the year, we have plans in place to offset these costs through our pricing strategy as well as other cost savings initiatives that Bob and Ken will touch on later in the call. SG&A expenses decreased $5.9 million to $42.6 million in the first quarter of 2018 compared to $48.5 million in the first quarter of 2017. The quarter benefited from a decrease in acquisition related and non-recurring expenses of $5.4 million, reduced customer marketing expenses of $1.8 million and reduced warehousing expenses of $0.7 million, partially offset by increases in all other expenses of $2 million. Expressed as a percentage of net sales, our SG&A expenses improved by 190 basis points to 9.9% in the first quarter of 2018 from 11.8% in the first quarter of 2017. Adjusted EBITDA although down from previous year, as we managed through industry-wide increases in freight costs finished at $89.4 million, generally in line with our expectations. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of net sales was 20.7% which is in line with our full year estimate of 20% to 21%. Moving quickly to the balance sheet, we finished the quarter with leverage at approximately 5.8 times net debt to pro forma adjusted EBITDA with approximately $118 million in cash. As I mentioned earlier, we generated $73.7 million in cash provided by operating activities and we prepaid $125 million in term loans during the quarter. We reduced inventory by $46.5 million and finished the quarter with $455.4 million of inventory, compared to $501.8 million at the end of fiscal 2017. We remain firmly committed to maintaining our dividend policy, at $1.86 per share our current dividend yield is more than 8% based on today's stock price. We paid $30.9 million in dividends to our shareholders during Q1 and another $31 million earlier this week. Now, I'll walk through our guidance for the remainder of the year before turning the call over to Bob so he can provide a little more color on some of the key drivers of quarterly performance and the remainder of the year. We are reaffirming our net sales guidance. We continue to expect net sales for 2018 to be in the range of $1.72 billion to $1.755 billion, which includes the full year impact of the new FASB revenue recognition standard. We are reaffirming our 2018 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $347.5 million to $365 million. And we are reaffirming our 2018 adjusted diluted earnings per share guidance of $2.05 to $2.25. In addition, for those managing your own models, we project 2018 net interest expense of a $110.5 million to $115.5 million including cash interest of $105 million to $110 million and interest amortization of $6 million. We project 2018 depreciation expense of approximately $36 million and amortization expense of approximately $18.5 million. We updated our expectations for the impacts of the tax reform legislation which, we believe, will have a greater than originally expected benefit for our business. We continue to expect an effective tax rate of approximately 25% in 2018 and we now expect our cash taxes for 2018 to be less than $15 million. We continue to expect approximately $50 million to $55 million in CapEx during 2018. Based on the midpoint of our adjusted EBITDA guidance, we expect that our adjusted EBITDA less CapEx, cash taxes and cash interest will be approximately $175 million. In addition, we expect our inventory reduction plan to positively impact cash by an additional $75 million to $100 million before dividends. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Bob Cantwell, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Robert C. Cantwell - B&G Foods, Inc.: Thank you, Bruce and thank you to the audience for joining our call today. As a reminder, when we laid out our vision for 2018 earlier this year, we expressed our belief that during 2018 we would return to the modest growth, stable margins and strong free cash flow generation model that the investment community has come to expect from us ever since we became a public company in 2004. We know that freight costs have increased for every company that puts anything on a truck and we are expecting these costs to remain elevated throughout the year. This is how we built our budget for the year. We hope that we are wrong and that these freight costs come down sooner. And we also hope to be more efficient than our competitors, but we have planned for these costs to be with us for some time and we have various levers at our disposal to help us deal with these costs. The first lever is pricing. As we told you last quarter, we have communicated price increases across the majority of our portfolio to all of our customers. These are not large increases and they are not just focused on a couple of unique categories. Instead, we have elected to go with a broader approach. In general, our strategy does not appear to be different than the majority of our competitors who are also wrestling with costs. Whether these competitors are selling frozen vegetables, canned vegetables or jars of salsa, they appear to be raising prices for their products in some form or fashion. We communicated our list and trade promotional pricing to our customers in February and we began to see benefits of these pricing actions in March. We expect to see these benefits begin to ramp-up in the second quarter and expect to see the majority of the benefits in the back half of the year. We anticipate the full year 2018 benefit from list and trade promotional pricing to be a positive $15 million to $20 million. The second lever at our disposal is on the cost side. Ken will walk you through some of our cost savings initiatives in a few minutes. But we already identified and have begun to implement several opportunities to reduce costs. Some of these include procurement savings on raw materials and other purchasing efficiencies as well as other opportunities to reduce costs by reducing our inventory by optimizing warehousing and distribution centers. And finally by taking a better look at the way we go about managing our freight and logistics network. We believe that there are real opportunities for us here and we are already seeing some of the benefits from these cost savings plans. We expect the combination of our modest price increases and our cost cutting efforts to offset the increased cost from freight that are impacting us and the entire food industry. Now before I ask Ken to walk you through some of these initiatives, I would like to provide a little more color to our performance for the quarter and discuss some of the key business highlights that we are so excited about. We grew our net sales in the quarter by 4.7%, which was in line with our forecast for 4% to 6.5% growth for the year. The majority of the increase was due to the successful integration of our newest acquisition Back to Nature, but our base business also performed well and was positive for the quarter with a slight benefit from our price increase implementation. In fact, based on Nielsen consumption data for the quarter showed a 3.4% increase in dollar sales and a 1.8% increase in units, which is a result, in part, of our ability to shift our portfolio over time to one that can drive modest growth. Over the last 52 weeks, consumption data for our portfolio was up 2.4% in dollar sales and 1.1% in units when compared to the prior 52-week period. Bruce mentioned earlier that we had another strong quarter for Green Giant frozen, our largest brand. This is an understatement. Net sales of our Green Giant frozen products increased by 12.8% in Q1 2018 marking our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit increases in net sales of Green Giant frozen products. Scanner data for the same time period actually shows an even higher number, up 17.2% at retail for the quarter. Our efforts are helping to grow the category with frozen vegetables continuing to be one of the hottest areas in the grocery store and category consumption being up 7.7% in the quarter. As a brand leader, we outperformed the category and added 1.2 points of market share in March versus the year ago period. We have now grown market share for 15 consecutive months. Based on Nielsen scanner data, Green Giant frozen remained one of the two fastest growing brands in the frozen aisle. As noted in the May 2018 issue of Consumer Reports, Green Giant Riced Veggie SKUs received the top four scores in Consumer Reports' ranking of top frozen vegetables. The key driver for our growth in frozen vegetables is the successful launch and adoption of our new innovation products, which now include Green Giant Veggie Spirals, Green Giant Riced Veggies, Green Giant Veggie Tots and Green Giant Mashed Cauliflower. Green Giant is offering consumers new ways to consume vegetables at home and they are responding positively to our products. It is still early days for Green Giant Veggie Spirals, our newest innovation launch, but we are very excited by the response from consumers and the enthusiasm by our retail partners in carrying these products so far this year. Looking across the rest of our portfolio, we now have a spice and seasonings business that, in the aggregate, including our legacy brands and the spices and seasonings business we acquired in late 2016, generated nearly $90 million of net sales across a number of brands for the first quarter, which is in line with last year's first quarter and we believe is on pace to generate approximately $350 million in net sales for the year. We're also very excited about the turnaround in Ortega thus far in 2018, with net sales up 4.1% in the first quarter and we remain very optimistic for the rest of the year. Pirate Brands, while down for the quarter in net sales, is showing nice mid-to-high single-digit gains in consumption data at retail, and is off to a strong start in the second quarter. Additionally, we are excited about an upcoming Disney marketing tie-in around the new Incredibles 2 movie, which we expect to positively impact Pirate Brands' performance this summer. And as Bruce said earlier, we had a series of puts and calls across the rest of the portfolio that generally balanced out performance. As we think through the rest of our financials, we are pleased to note that the quarter came together as planned with adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of net sales and adjusted diluted EPS all in line with our budget and support of our full year guidance. And we are very excited by the progress we have made with our inventory reduction plan. We set a target to reduce inventory by $75 million to $100 million this year, and stated in our last earnings call that we expect to begin to achieve these goals starting with Q1. And we successfully executed on this goal, reducing inventory by more than $45 million in the quarter. We also generated net cash provided by operating activities of nearly $75 million, which is more than 2.5 times our dividend payment for the quarter. As we said on the last call, we're very much in a deleveraging mode. We have already voluntarily prepaid $150 million of term loans this year, and expect to continue to use the cash we generate to repay debt throughout the remainder of the year. We also remain committed to our longstanding dividend policy of returning a substantial portion of our excess cash to our shareholders. Additionally, as previously announced, our board of directors authorized a $50 million share repurchase program at our last quarterly board meeting. Due to the timing of the quarterly board meeting, we received the authorization just as we were entering our quarterly blackout period and, therefore, have not yet purchased any shares under the repurchase program. But we are always looking to optimize our capital structure. And with our stock at these levels and a more than 8% dividend yield, repurchasing our stock is a very compelling proposition. Before we go to Q&A, I would like to ask Ken to briefly describe some of the cost saving initiatives that we are beginning to execute on. Ken? Kenneth G. Romanzi - B&G Foods, Inc.: Thanks, Bob. As Bob mentioned earlier, we're very excited about our portfolio, driven by the brands and product categories that we've added to our business over the last few years. These brands have given us a much better top line trajectory than we've had in the past. And quite frankly, our top line trajectory is better than some folks in the industry think we have today. And while growth is tough to achieve for any food company in today's environment, we think we're moving the product line in the right direction. However, there are other ways for us to add value to our company in addition to sales growth and we're spending a lot of time and effort on the cost side of the business doing just that. Over the near term, we're looking to save 2 percentage points in our $1.2 billion of cost of goods sold or approximately $25 million annually. And we've already identified several projects that are beginning to generate results. Our inventory reduction plan is a great place to start. There were valid reasons for the increase in inventory last year, but we had moved past this need now. We're fortunate to have been able to build a team that's focused on streamlining our operations, so that we can reduce our inventory levels without negatively impacting our ability to service our customers. This reduction has a couple of benefits, not only are we freeing up cash to optimize our capital structure, but we are also saving money. The inventory reduction is enabling us to consolidate our warehousing footprint and eliminate outside temporary storage facilities. As a result, we expect our full-year warehouse savings to approach $5 million this year alone, and we started to see some of these benefits in the first quarter. Separately, although freight costs are up industry-wide, we are aggressively identifying ways to save money on freight. Some of this is just being smarter about how we ship. For example, better utilization of trucks, using rail when appropriate and utilizing customer pickups to reduce our reliance on going outside our contracts and into the very expensive spot marketplace. But we're also realigning our distribution network to better match our new customer footprint. This will involve opening a new distribution center in California in the fourth quarter of this year that will move our inventory closer to our West Coast and Southwest customer warehouses, reducing mileage and cost of that most costly last mile, while also providing better customer service. This is an option that just didn't exist for B&G a few years ago when we were more of a regional business. But now with $1.7 billion in sales and a robust national footprint, we're better able to take advantage of opportunities such as this. We believe we will begin to realize benefits from this new distribution center realignment in the fourth quarter this year and will ultimately deliver another $5 million in savings annually. So as Bob said earlier, we moved quickly to protect our margins with a modest price increase, smarter procurement strategies to offset a portion of the cost increases we're seeing in freight. But we're also happy to report that we're working against many other levers to become more efficient. I'd like to now turn the call back over to Bob for his closing remarks. Thank you. Robert C. Cantwell - B&G Foods, Inc.: Thanks, Ken, and thanks, Bruce. As I said earlier, it's a pleasure to sit here today and report a solid first quarter to our investors. We were able to grow net sales and largely maintain our profitability in a challenging environment. More importantly, we had very strong cash flow performance, which is supportive of our efforts to generate returns to our shareholders through our commitment to a healthy dividend as we simultaneously de-lever our balance sheet. We look forward to executing on our stock repurchase program and we continue to actively monitor the M&A market, searching for the right opportunities to further develop our portfolio. With that, I would like to begin the Q&A portion of our call. Operator?