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Conagra Brands, Inc. (CAG)

Q3 2020 Earnings Call· Tue, Mar 31, 2020

$14.24

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the Conagra Brands third quarter fiscal year 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Kearney from Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Brian Kearney

Management

Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us. I’ll remind you that we will be making some forward-looking statements during today’s call. While we are making those statements in good faith, we do not have any guarantee about the results that we will achieve. Descriptions of the risk factors are included in the documents we filed with the SEC. Also we will be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures. References to adjusted items, including organic net sales, refer to measures that exclude items management believes impact the comparability for the period referenced. Please see the earnings release for additional information on our comparability items. The reconciliations of those adjusted measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in either the earnings release or in the earnings slides, both of which can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website, conagrabrands.com. Finally, we will be making references to total Conagra brands as well as the legacy Conagra brands. References to legacy Conagra brands refer to measures that exclude any income or expenses associated with the acquired Pinnacle Foods business. With that, I’ll turn it over to Sean.

Sean Connolly

Management

Thanks Brian. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining our third quarter fiscal 2020 earnings call. On behalf of Conagra Brands, I want to start by expressing my heartfelt hope that you and your families are staying safe during this unprecedented time. Today I’m going to address two main topics: our response to covid-19 and its impact on our business, as well as the underlying trends that we saw in the third quarter which ended just before the impact of covid-19 started. Rest assured that we’re taking all necessary precautions to protect the health and safety of our employees and our ability to safely and reliably meet consumers’ needs. For the most recent status of our efforts to respond to covid-19, please visit conagrabrands.com. We’ll continue to provide updated information on our site as the situation evolves. As I’ll describe in more detail in a moment, we’ve taken a number of steps to ensure our supply chain continues to operate well. We’re incredibly proud of our teams who have been producing and delivering without disruption. While we all remain focused on executing through this rapidly evolving situation, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that we’ve made significant progress against the operational objectives we established for fiscal 2020. In many ways, our progress against these objectives is enhancing our ability to navigate this crisis. Recall at the outset of fiscal 2020, we set out to execute on integration, synergy capture and deleveraging, drive strong consumption growth in frozen and snacks, improve trends in Hunt’s tomatoes and Chef Boyardee, bend the trend in the legacy Pinnacle business, and drive innovation and growth in Gardein. I’m proud to say that through the third quarter, we remain squarely on track with all of these objectives. From a financial standpoint, the…

David Marberger

Management

Thanks Sean, and good morning everyone. I hope you and your families are all staying healthy and safe. Before I get into the details, I want to remind you that Q3 has been the first full quarter following the anniversary of the Pinnacle acquisition. As a result, Pinnacle’s full quarterly results are now reflected in our organic figures. I’ll start my remarks this morning by calling out a few highlights from our performance for the quarter, which are outlined on Slide 23. As Sean discussed, our Q3 performance was consistent with the expectations we provided at CAGNY. This included broad-based category softness early in the quarter and a return to consumption growth in February prior to the covid-19 related surge in demand. I’ll unpack these results further in the slides to come, but overall for the third quarter, reported net sales were down 5.6% versus the same period a year ago with organic net sales down 1.7%. The organic net sales decline was in line with the updated expectations that we provided in February. Adjusted gross profit decreased 10.5% and adjusted operating profit declined 8.9%. We continued to operate efficiently from an SG&A perspective, capturing strong synergies. Adjusted EBITDA, which includes equity method investment earnings and pension and post-retirement non-service income, decreased 7.1% in the quarter, and adjusted diluted EPS decreased 7.8% to $0.47 for the quarter. Again, this was in line with our updated expectations. Let’s jump into net sales a bit more. Slide 24 depicts the 5.6% change versus the same period a year ago. As you can see, the broad-based category softness that we discussed at CAGNY drove our volume down 1.3%. Also, our price mix was unfavorable 40 basis points as we continued to support many of our brands with incremental promotions. As I mentioned on…

Operator

Operator

[Operator instructions] The first question will come from Andrew Lazar with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Andrew Lazar

Analyst

I’ve got two questions, if I could. First, Sean, I wanted to dig in just a little bit on your comment around the potential maybe over a longer period of time for some stickiness, maybe, in light of the very significant, unanticipated trial that you and a lot of your peers are getting in relation to the current crisis. Is there any data, maybe, that can add a little context around this? I know it’s early, but maybe from some of your panel data that you track around some of the increases in either household penetration that you’ve seen, with some of the quality enhancements you’ve done particularly in the frozen space, maybe what some of the repeat rates look like or the ability to gain some of the new trialers that might not have, let’s say, tried this product in the last several years or so? Any perspectives there would be really helpful, and then I’ve just got a follow-up.

Sean Connolly

Management

Okay, sure Andrew. Let me tackle that. The concept you’re raising is that because we’ve got this crisis situation and people are eating much more at home and not away from home, products like ours are getting levels of trial that were not anticipated and that could turn into consistent users over time as that trial converts to repeat. I would tell you that makes sense to me, both intuitively and in terms of the very early data we’re beginning to see. There has been a massive amount of transformation in our categories in the last five years, frozen in particular. It doesn’t even closely resemble the category that it used to be. The quality of the food is in a completely different place and we’ve seen consumers so far who have tried that new food respond extremely favorably to it, and large established brands that had long been forgotten are growing strongly again. Now because of this crisis situation, people are at home. As you know, everybody can see it, they’re stocking up and they’re stocking up with foods of all kinds, across all temperature states including categories like frozen, so just logically we know we are getting higher levels of trial here during this phenomenon. In terms of data that backs it up, quite frankly it’s just too early to point to a lot of data points. The one place I can tell you that we do look, that tends to be a leading indicator, is ecommerce. In the world of ecommerce, what we are seeing is that we are reaching a large number of new triers that we had not reached previously. Now, as you think about how that might convert to repeat, you all are probably accustomed to looking at national average repeat rates. Repeat rates will vary depending upon the user, so early adopters, super heavy users will have higher repeat than light users. When you get new triers like this, you tend to be getting lighter users, so it may not be the kind of repeat rates we get from super heavy users, but the point of all of this is it should help categories like frozen, it should help some of our other categories that people may have forgotten about, but it’s just too early to quantify the impact of that. I would also tell you that we do expect as this thing gets behind us that we’ll see a return to people eating out. Americans love their restaurants, they love to eat out, and obviously the food service space is hurting badly right now, and so we’re rooting for that side of the business to bounce back as well.

Andrew Lazar

Analyst

Great, thanks very much for that. Just a quick follow-up. On the margin and profitability side, I just want to make sure I heard it right, it sounds like you’ve got a number of puts and takes. On the positive side, of course, all of the increased volume leverage that’s coming through from running at very high levels of utilization and whatnot, maybe some of the--if there’s a reduction in assortment and focusing on the longest run length SKUs to maximize output and things like that, I would think would be on the positive side of the ledger. On the other hand, there are some increased costs, as you’ve talked about, whether it be for employee benefits and things like that, and just the simple inefficiencies of maybe running at, you know, whatever - 100% utilization and such. It sounded like you may not know the exact magnitude in the way it all comes together, but that the balance of those things, at least of what you’re seeing so far, are more to the positive than the negative. I just want to make sure I heard that right. Thanks so much.

Sean Connolly

Management

Dave, you want to take that one?

David Marberger

Management

Yes, I will. Thank you Andrew. You summarized it very well. I think right now, obviously with the volume we’re seeing in our domestic retail business, you do get benefits there from operating leverage, but fixed costs are fixed over relevant ranges, we’re always taught, and the significant volumes resulting in incremental costs that we’re incurring in the form of overtime, higher spot freight rates, expediting certain supplies, and then additional costs. When you net it all together and you factor in the significant declines in food service as well, we do expect an increase in gross margin year-on-year for the quarter but we didn’t want to give specificity around that.

Andrew Lazar

Analyst

Thanks so much, and stay well.

Sean Connolly

Management

You too.

David Marberger

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Ken Goldman with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Ken Goldman

Analyst · JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for the questions. Two for me, if I can. One, I didn’t hear you mention this but I’ve been jumping around a little bit - forgive me. Can you talk a little bit about the shelf resets that were happening in May, what your current expectations are for those and how they might affect you? The second one is in terms of your promotional strategy, can you walk us through a little bit tactically how you can change some things, whether you want to pull back a little bit? It’s been such a big part of how you’ve driven some growth recently. I’m just curious how you think about that in this kind of environment. Thank you.

Sean Connolly

Management

Sure Ken. Let me try to tackle that. Dave, if I miss anything, by all means chime in. The priority right now is producing the maximum amount of food that we can possibly produce, and we are running our plants seven days, as you might imagine, to do that. We have pared back on some of our SKUs so that we can continue to serve the highest velocity SKUs. Keeping food in stock so that we can feed America is our top priority right now, as it is the priority of our retailers. That has caused us to reprioritize in terms of SKUs, and in the case of the innovation resets, I would tell you the word that comes to mind for me is fluid. We are hearing different things from different customers. Many customers, most customers are just trying to keep products on the shelf right now. Some customers, big ones have said to us that they want to continue with the shelf set timing; others had said we’re going to push that back a bit, just so we can ensure that we don’t have any complexity and anything going on at the store shelves that’s going to be a distraction from keeping products in stock. We are trying to respond to all of our customers’ requests so we can do whatever they want. In terms of our philosophy on innovation overall, it hasn’t changed. It is a central part of the Conagra Way that we’re going to keep building our innovation pipeline so it’s industry leading, and we’re very confident we’ve got that and we’re, as you know from CAGNY, incredibly excited about the innovation slate that lies ahead. How it flows into the marketplace now will probably be a little bit more customer by customer than all in a tighter window as we previously expected, but I think it will be good news overall because we’ll have the benefit of that innovation and the pipeline fill helping us next year. With respect to promotional activity, as you know, we’ve cut more promotions in the last five years than just about any company in food, as we pursue value over volume. We have gotten more aggressive in the last year, where we’ve seen competition act irrationally and we needed to defend our market share, but that has not been in a broad-based way. What I’d tell you on promotions right now is we’re honoring all the contracts we have in place, but the tactical dynamic is that we’re in daily discussions with our customers on how to help them meet the needs of their shoppers, and many customers are looking to pull back on promotions as they try to manage the basics of just keeping their shelves stocked. Running promotions can exacerbate out of stocks, which is clearly not their goal right now, so we’re seeing some cutback on that and that will just be more of a timing issue than anything else. Anything I missed there, Ken?

Ken Goldman

Analyst · JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

No. I know you used the word fluid to describe the situation. I think that’s the understatement of the day, but thank you for that color, Sean.

Sean Connolly

Management

Great, thanks.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from David Palmer with Evercore ISI.

David Palmer

Analyst · Evercore ISI.

Thanks. Just a follow-up on that. Where the retailers are not doing new shelf resets, what happens exactly? Are you just keeping some of the more standard items going that are really solutions, like the frozen vegetables, and holding off on the Gardein Healthy Choice power bowls that might have been coming, and that’s more of a back-to-school item? Then I have a follow-up.

Sean Connolly

Management

Well David, it’s customer by customer, so some customers at this point are articulating that they will move ahead as planned. We’ll see if that happens. Nobody really knows what tomorrow looks like or next week looks like, and right now everybody is literally trying to get as many items of all the foods they sell in stock. But if what they’re saying plays out, I think you’re going to see some customers take it sooner, some customers take it later, and it’s not as if those who take it later would be in a deficit position if this pandemic does not abate anytime soon, because as we’re seeing right up until today, the consumer pull remains extremely strong across the board.

David Palmer

Analyst · Evercore ISI.

Then if there are any changes that you’re making in terms of your marketing spending or any sort of reinvestment from this period or that you’re planning in the next couple months, what are those changes? Thanks for those comments on service levels, that 90%. How differentiated is that in some of your key categories; in other words, are key competitors keeping up with you on that? Thank you.

Sean Connolly

Management

In reverse order, I don’t really want to comment too much on our competitors other than to say that I’m just incredibly proud of the food industry in general. I’ve spoken to my colleagues - everybody is rising to the occasion here to do the thing which matters most, which is keep our consumers fed and keep our employees healthy, so I would say everybody is operating at the top of their game right now. I think we’re certainly fully competitive in that regard. With respect--David, hit me with the other part of your question?

David Palmer

Analyst · Evercore ISI.

The other part was just simply what changes are you making in terms of your marketing, given that you’re obviously in a new world in terms of demand.

Sean Connolly

Management

Yes, not a lot other than some of the in-store activities that we would plan in support of new items hitting the shelf, so you get a new product on shelf, you want to sample it, you want to do some promotion. We’ll sync that up to what’s going on at that particular customer. As everybody knows, we’ve been putting more emphasis on retailer level investments, so those are very turnkey. If a product will go into market later, we’ll turn that later. Our base A&P programming remains highly digital and it also remains extremely easy to curate. As you might imagine, with people eating at home now at a level they haven’t done in a long, long time, if ever, we are trying to provide them with cooking ideas and recipes and things that will help them understand how to use our products at home in a way that their family finds not only healthy but delicious as well. Digital and social is a perfect place to do that. It’s kind of a utility for our consumers.

David Palmer

Analyst · Evercore ISI.

Thank you again.

Operator

Operator

The next question will come from Steve Strycula with UBS. Please go ahead.

Steve Strycula

Analyst

Good morning everybody. Dave, just wanted to touch base on the balance sheet and the debt pay down that you guys have had to date - impressive so far, but wanted to understand a little bit how to think about free cash flow generation as we look forward to address both maturity schedule and liquidity. I think through nine months, your slide says you’ve paid down $641 million of debt, but guidance is greater than $950 million, so you should be doing $300 million to $400 million of free cash in the fourth quarter, ex-divestitures. Can you just help us think through what we should be thinking about to understand the maturity schedule and kind of a numerator and denominator effect of how you get to that 3.5 to 3.6 leverage? Thank you.

David Marberger

Management

Sure. As we’ve consistently said, Steve, our financial policy has been consistent, that we remain committed to solid investment-grade credit rating. Since we’ve closed on Pinnacle, we’ve paid down over $1.5 billion in gross debt. For Q4, we expect to be cash positive at a higher level than we previously anticipated, and that additional cash flow we’re going to use to pay down debt, so we don’t expect--we’re going to be net cash flow positive in the fourth quarter at higher than expected levels, so as we finish the fiscal year, we’ll have our full $1.6 billion revolving credit line, which will be undrawn, and we don’t have any debt maturities in Q4 this year. As we look to fiscal ’21, we have $1.1 billion in debt maturities for the full fiscal year. Our August maturity of $127 million, we expect to fund that from cash on hand. Our next maturities of $775 million are in October, and we’ll have flexibility to fund that from the higher expected free cash flow from the business, and we’ll just have to see where we land with that given the upside that we’re seeing right now. We can access our revolver where we can refinance in the form of either term loans or investment-grade notes, so as we’ve been doing every day with our advisors, we’ll continue to monitor the markets and evaluate the best structure for Conagra and stay in a position of readiness, because if you look at the markets today, as you know, the bank markets are significantly different than they were two weeks ago, and I expect that they’ll be significantly different a month from now, so we want to constantly see what the markets are saying. But the good news is that we’re cash flow positive, we’re generating cash and want to use that cash to pay down debt, and we have our full revolver, so I think our liquidity is very strong.

Steve Strycula

Analyst

Thanks David, that’s very helpful. A very quick follow-up question to that would be on gross margins. When we met with you at CAGNY, at the time you commented on taking an inventory reserve for the fourth quarter. I have to imagine inventory for all grocery stores want product right here right now, so is there any chance that that gets reversed out into the fourth quarter as we think forward? If I heard you correctly, were you commenting that the retailer trade investment really becomes de minimis from this point forward and kind of like a rounding error as we think forward to fiscal ’21? Thank you.

David Marberger

Management

Yes, so you’re right, at CAGNY given the softness in volume, we had expected inventory write-offs, and in Q3 we actually did experience both inventory write-offs and some negative operating leverage. That impacted our Q3 gross margin that we reported. As we look forward--I’m sorry, Steve, what was the second part of your question?

Steve Strycula

Analyst

The reverse out was part one on the accounting piece as a comeback on Q4, and the second piece was just on the retail trade investments, does that become de minimis at this point or a rounding error as we think forward? Thank you.

David Marberger

Management

Got it, yes. As part of our Q4 information, we talked about we expect gross margins to improve in the fourth quarter based on all these dynamics. To the extent that inventory that we thought may not be sold has now moved through, that will be a benefit as part of Q4, so that would be reflected. In terms of the retailer investment, yes, it’s really de minimis, so a lot of the slotting and other investments year-on year, it’s just not as significant, so we’re just going to show price mix in total as oppose to break that out now.

Steve Strycula

Analyst

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

The next question will come from Robert Moskow with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Robert Moskow

Analyst

Hi, thanks for the question. Sean and Dave, I would argue that the pantry loading period is probably coming to a close in terms of consumers loading up their houses, so what are you telling your manufacturing facilities to do for the next 30 days or 60 days? Are you telling them that the hours still need to be at a highly elevated level because you want to keep up with--you want to expect consumer demand to remain at elevated levels, even though shelves are full? How do you communicate to your plants what to make and how specific does it get, brand by brand?

Sean Connolly

Management

Yes Rob, we’re telling them to make everything they can right now and to keep themselves safe and healthy as they do it, and we’re helping them to do that. But simply put, until we’re on the other side of this pandemic, sales growth is likely to remain elevated because you’ve got most of the food away from volume is moving to food at home. We’ve got obviously lots of experience with how pantries and warehouses get filled by customers and consumers around situations like hurricanes, and you always see big volumes move into warehouses at the customer level and into pantries and freezers and refrigerators at the consumer level. But how long the pull remains in this particular case is directly a function of how long does this thing last and how long are people sheltering in place, and I don’t think anybody can predict right now when that is going to end. Obviously the latest thinking here is that we will go until a minimum the end of April with people really spending lots and lots of time at home, and who knows how much further it can extend beyond that, so the way this works is the initial surge of volume is volume that is going to fill warehouses and to fill pantries, but with people not eating out away from home, I think a reasonable person could conclude that they’re then in the mode of consuming that volume aggressively, and as they work down those pantry levels and warehouse levels come down to normal levels, then it just becomes a just-in-time replenishment as long as the elevated level of consumption remains. It’s just too early to pin this with any accuracy, but that’s kind of the mechanics of how this works.

Robert Moskow

Analyst

I totally agree, and if I can ask a follow-up question, have you tried to dive any deeper into single-serve entrée demand characteristics versus frozen vegetables, because what I remember from the last recession is that single-serve entrees, they didn’t do that great. Consumers were making meals for the whole family to try to save money, so that probably benefit vegetables in an outsized way. Do you expect that to happen again, or is just too soon?

Sean Connolly

Management

Well in this particular case, I don’t think there is any comparator to what we’re experiencing right now, because people are eating at home right now breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacking, dessert - I mean, it’s all being consumed at home. When you think about all those departs and you think about the family being together, you’ve got departs like dinner where you’re probably going to be leading on multi-serve products, which his very different from how our normal society has been operating because everybody is together. But if you think about lunch, it’s very much a single-serve occasion because kids have online classes, moms and dads have video conferences, people are eating individually, and people continue to snack throughout the day, so I see--and we see it in the data, we see incredibly high velocities across multi-serve, single serve, snacks. You name it, right now it’s moving.

Robert Moskow

Analyst

Yes, okay. Thank you very much.

Sean Connolly

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from Rob Dickerson with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Rob Dickerson

Analyst

Great, thank you so much. First question, probably some would consider it lame but I’ll ask it anyway, because it’s something we’ll be going through for the next few weeks or few months. In terms of forecasts for us, whether you’re on the investment side or on the sales side, we have to plug something into our models for Q4 and think about Q1 and the progression throughout fiscal ’21. I feel like in general, people haven’t been comfortable punching in plus-40% retail growth expectations and down 50% on food service, but just to be clear, we know what the guidance is now. Obviously it’s a fluid situation which is completely understandable that you can’t pinpoint how Q4 plays out, or even Q1. But just in terms of consensus and how we’re all used to looking at that as a benchmark, I guess the first question is how do you think we should be modeling the forecast for your business in terms of top line? Is it a, I don’t know, yeah, given March is up 40%, a retail consumer, if that were sustainable, then I would take that piece of the business and say up 40%, and given our guide on food service, take that down 50 and then we’ll just have to see how that plays out, and maybe that reverses next year if there’s a pantry load, or maybe not. There’s a lot in there, but I just kind of wanted to hear what do you want us to do in terms of if there is no specificity that can be provided, basically at this point the guide is almost irrelevant to an extent, as is consensus if we don’t model it correctly. Thanks.

David Marberger

Management

Sean, do you want me to take a shot, or do you want to go?

Sean Connolly

Management

Let me just make one general comment, Dave, and then you can take a shot. I would just say that the unenviable task that you all have coming up with consensus is very similar to the unenviable task we have of things like trying to contemplate fiscal ’21 annual operating plan. As you might imagine, if it’s business as usual, it’s one set of assumptions. If this thing were to continue, if it were to come back in the fall as I read this morning, that’s a whole other ballgame, so it’s an almost impossible thing to predict. Nobody has a crystal ball, but I think what you guys are going to be looking at is scanner data. What we look at is the scanner data. To understand takeaway, what we look at are our shipment patterns, and of course we follow any--all the health news on the national news every single day, multiple times a day. I think we’re in one of these times where we will endeavor to be incredibly transparent with what we’re seeing, what we’re thinking, so that we can provide the best perspective we can provide, while fully acknowledging that it’s an impossible task to be precise right now. Dave, you want to add to that?

David Marberger

Management

Yes, you pretty much hit it. Rob, I would say we feel your pain on this forecasting. In my whole career, I’ve never done daily forecasting where you’re going out quarters and years and all these things, and so the way we approach it is almost a kind of high-medium-low type scenario, and that’s why we laid out what we did today. We wanted to tell you what do we know right now and what don’t we know, and from there you can then make some assumptions on different scenarios. Sean said it - since quarter to date on the retail side of the business, domestic retail which is 80% of our business, shipments and consumption are in line, so what I would say is consumption could be a good proxy to try to forecast quarter to go the retail business, since they’re in line. There’s no guarantee there, right, because you do have ebbs and flows with shipments versus consumption in a short amount of time, but that, I think, would be a proxy to be able to at least try to figure out how this is trending as we move forward. There’s no silver bullets here, unfortunately.

Rob Dickerson

Analyst

That’s all very helpful and makes complete sense. Okay, then just quickly in terms of your shelf stable products, I feel like even at CAGNY the focus here going forward, the strategy is more frozen snacks. Shelf stable can have a place within the portfolio, but my feel at least is that you might look at some of those brands more proactively in terms of divestment potential. Now I don’t know - I mean, it seems like you piloted today on the slides, said [indiscernible] was doing incrementally better before covid-19 hit. Now there’s a pantry load, my feel would be that those areas would actually now do better, maybe, than some other areas. In terms of the tax asset that you have and the entire thought process around divestments and shelf stable, what have you, is it fair to think that at least for the time being, given everything that’s going on, that you step back from that and say, let’s just see how things settle, keep the business as is, we’ll reevaluate as we get through this a bit more, but yes, we still realize that we have a tax asset that’s expiring at the end of next fiscal year? Thanks.

David Marberger

Management

Let me take that, Sean, and then you can jump in here. I did make some comments, Rob, on our prepared comments. The way that we look at divestitures hasn’t changed. It all starts with our strategic rationale and then the financial rationale, and the point I made today was financial rationale means that the valuation for any potential divested asset must exceed our intrinsic value for the asset, and given the growth we’re seeing in our business, given the sales and cash flow at higher levels than they’ve historically been, that factors into how we view those assets. They’re generating a lot of cash for us right now. But my comments were meant to stress that we’re going to continue to identify assets for divestiture, but if the potential price doesn’t exceed the value to Conagra that we see the brands are worth, then we don’t feel pressure to move forward. We have our capital loss carry forward, it doesn’t expire until the end of fiscal ’21, so as Sean said earlier, it’s fluid. But we wanted to make sure that point was clear.

Sean Connolly

Management

The only thing I would add to that, Rob, just to cover a little bit of a different perspective on what you call the shelf stable business, I would call it the staples business, and that’s how we talked about it at CAGNY. We’ve got a decent sized chunk of our portfolio in what we’d call staples, and these are products that people rely on. These are products that drive a lot of foot traffic to our retailers, they’re very important to the retailers, they tend to be high gross margin, good cash flow businesses. As I pointed out at CAGNY, just a small handful of them add up to a big, big chunk of our total staple sales. These businesses are very important to us when they are reliably contributing, and most of them have been reliably contributing and they do a lot of good for our portfolio. On occasion, we’ve seen competitive activity or other dynamics drive weakness, and our philosophy historically has been, look, if we don’t have a line of sight to stabilizing something on the top line and the bottom line, then we’ve divested it, and we’ve always been open to that. What Dave is pointing out is these are just different times, where everything is moving, so it takes any kind of compulsion to want to move and do that and reduces that, because these are contributing a lot to us right now. But in general the point that I wanted to make is our staples business across the board almost are very strong, valuable businesses to us, and we’ll continue to monitor them to make sure that they are contributing reliably once we get through this pandemic, and then we’ll go from there.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Brian Kearney for any closing remarks.

Brian Kearney

Management

Great, thank you. As a reminder, this call has been recorded and will be archived on the web, as detailed in our press release. The IR team is available for any follow-up discussions anyone may want. Thank you for your interest in Conagra Brands.

Operator

Operator

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