Allen L. Shiver
Analyst · Stephens
Thank you, George. We certainly are pleased to report such great results this quarter. It's important to remember, it wasn't by chance that our team was in position to capitalize on the opportunity presented by the Hostess exit from the marketplace. Through the decades, Flowers has continuously invested back into our bakeries, improving our product quality and enhancing our brands. Today, we continue to apply innovative solutions to our processes across the organization. Those certainly are very important to our ability to perform as we did in the first quarter. However, there is no doubt in my mind that our Flowers team is the most important contributing factor in our ability to deliver exceptional results. Using the systems and resources our strategies have created over time, our team is aggressively growing our business as we serve the needs of customers in this changing competitive landscape. The Flowers way is a proven solid approach. As we move forward, we will continue capitalizing on opportunities and building on the strategies that have worked so well in the past. First, let's look at the marketplace and how the fresh bread and roll category performed in the quarter. You will recall that from our past presentations, that 98% of households in the U.S. buy fresh packaged breads. For the total U.S., as reported by IRI, the fresh packaged breads category declined 0.8% in units but, dollars, showed an increase of 0.7%. This is a slight category improvement from our last quarter's call. The wholesale bakery department remains one of the most important product categories in the supermarket, contributing significantly to both sales and profits for our retail customers. Before we take a look at how Flowers' brands performed during the quarter, let's take a look at store brands and the market share in the category. For more than 2 decades, store brand has held a large share in the fresh packaged breads category with roughly a 25% share of dollars and a 35% share of units. In total, the store brand share moves a few percentage points up and down over time, but it has stayed in that range for many, many years. This past quarter, we did see a slight uptick in store brand share that we believe is attributable to the competitive changes taking place in the industry. You probably won't be surprised to know that IRI shows our sales volume increase translated into very good growth in our branded products. Our brands increased 20.4% in units and 21% in dollars. That's using the total U.S. multi-outlet data from IRI, and it includes fresh bread, buns, rolls. Remember, these IRI numbers do not include cake. In the most recent weeks, since the quarter ended, IRI reports and our internal data confirms that we're seeing a slightly stronger increase than the quarter's view with our Nature's Own brand and Sara Lee in California driving much of that growth. Looking now at Flowers' branded share. According to IRI, Flowers Foods' share of the fresh bakery category again, including fresh bread, buns and rolls for the total U.S., increased to 13.1% of dollars and 11.5% of units in the quarter. Looking at recent weeks, our share continues to grow, reflecting growth in our core markets as well as the Northeast, California and other expansion markets. As we have told you before, each share point in the total U.S. fresh bakery category equals about $103 million at wholesale. Now turning to the cake category. IRI data shows that in the quarter, the cake category declined 4.9% in units and 1.9% in dollars. We were pleased that our Tastykake and Mrs. Freshley's brands performed very well in the quarter. In fact, our Cake business was up double-digits. All segments of our cake business increased, but the strongest growth was our single-serve snack cakes. As noted in our release, net price mix was down 1.1%. This change was driven by our growth in single-serve snack cakes. Across both segments, DSD and Warehouse, foodservice sales were strong for the quarter. This growth was achieved from our existing customers as well as new business. Our growth in foodservice was not driven by the departure of Hostess from the marketplace. Our expansion markets delivered sales significantly greater than our goal of 0.5% to 1% of our total sales increase. New products also contributed more than our goal of 3% to 5% of sales. At our Analyst Day in March, we reported that we've added new business across all our channels. In fact, today, we are serving over 20,000 new store locations compared to last year. This is an increase of over 20%. That increase includes acquisitions along with new business throughout our core and our new markets. You may remember that we introduced Nature's Own and Tastykake in Lepage markets in the Northeast last fall. We are very pleased with how consumers are responding to these brands. Since February, we've been expanding our California sales operations and adding the Sara Lee business we acquired from BBU. The bakery category in California is one of the largest in the country, representing tremendous growth opportunities for our company. I like to give a special thank you to our West Coast teams. They're working extremely hard to successfully build our business in California. I'm happy to report that our California integration is on schedule. The improvements we've made in efficiency levels over the past few years have helped our bakeries absorb the substantial sales increase that we've seen in recent months. Congratulations to our manufacturing team whose efficiency increase has added the additional production capacity of 2.5 of our most efficient bakeries. Our newest bread line in Oxford, Pennsylvania started production earlier this week. This added capacity will help us serve the growing needs of our newer markets such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh while relieving some tight capacity in our bakeries currently serving those markets. These are exciting times for the baking industry and for Flowers Foods. Our DSD reach stretches across the country, and some of our greatest growth potential is in high population states like California, Pennsylvania and other markets in the Northeast. As we have expanded our reach over the last decade, Nature's Own has achieved tremendous growth and is in position to exceed our $1 billion retail target by year-end. With the addition of Tastykake and the expansion of this brand across the majority of our DSD footprint, we're seeing encouraging consumer acceptance and sales growth. Our retail sales target this year for our Tastykake brand is $400 million. I am truly honored to lead the best team in the industry. George commented on my new role as CEO, but I want to remind you that as Executive Chairman, George will continue to give guidance as we navigate our growth opportunities and work to stay true to our culture and proven operating strategies. As I move into my new role as CEO, I have tremendous confidence in our future. We have great bakeries, strong brands and the most experienced team in the industry. These are the reasons why I believe the best is yet to come. With that, I'm happy to turn the call over to Steve Kinsey for the financial review. Steve?