Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Utz Brands, Inc. Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. I would now like to turn the call over to Kevin Powers, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. On the call today are Howard Friedman, Chief Executive Officer; Ajay Kataria, Chief Financial Officer; and Cary Devore, Chief Operating Officer. Howard and Ajay will make prepared comments this morning, and all three will be available to answer questions during our live Q&A session. Please note that some of our comments today will contain forward-looking statements based on our current view of our business and actual future results may differ materially. Please see our recent SEC filings, which identify the principal risks and uncertainties that could affect future performance. Before I turn the call over to Howard, I have just a few housekeeping items to review. Today, we will review certain adjusted or non-GAAP financial measures, which are described in more detail in this morning's earnings materials. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures and other associated disclosures are contained in our earnings materials and posted on our Web site. Finally, the company has also prepared presentation slides and additional supplemental financial information, which are posted on our Investor Relations Web site. And now, I’d like to turn the call over to Howard.

Thank you, Kevin, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be here today. I'll begin our discussion this morning with an overview of our second quarter results and consumption trends, and then Ajay will discuss our financial performance in more detail. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Starting with our second quarter results, we delivered another quarter of strong organic net sales growth, as we execute against our growth strategies and as our salty snack category trends remain resilient. In addition, our margins continue to recover through our pricing actions and productivity programs, which enable us to again raise our full year adjusted EBITDA outlook. In the quarter, our organic net sales increased 4.3% even as we lapped 13.6% comparable growth in the prior year. As we expected, our sales growth was led by pricing with our volume trends improving relative to the first quarter, led by our branded volumes which increased in the second quarter. As a reminder, our non-branded volumes this year are being proactively impacted by our aggressive actions to better optimize our product mix into non-core and lower margin private label and partner brands. As we move throughout the second half of the year, through a combination of distribution gains, new product innovation, increased marketing spending, and lapping prior year SKU rationalization, we expect our total sales volume momentum to build each quarter. From a consumption perspective, in the quarter, our power brand momentum continued and increased 10% on top of 18% growth last year, which was our seventh consecutive quarter of double digit growth leading to share gains for Boulder Canyon, Zapp's and On the Border. Our adjusted EBITDA margin recovery continued with our second consecutive quarter of year-over-year expansion, led by prior year pricing execution, higher levels of productivity…

Thank you, Howard, and good morning, everyone. Our second quarter results reflect the resilience of our salty snack category. Despite again lapping significant growth in the prior year, we delivered organic growth of 4.3% while proactively optimizing our portfolio. In addition, we expanded adjusted EBITDA margins as we are executing our margin-enhancing programs. I would like to thank the entire Utz team for their contributions, and we remain well positioned for a strong 2023. Turning to our second quarter results in more detail, net sales was in line with our expectations and increased 3.6% to $362.9 million. Adjusted gross margin declined 100 basis points to 35%. And this includes an approximate 70 basis points of negative impact from our IO conversions. Excluding this impact, our adjusted gross margins contracted about 30 basis points versus last year. As Howard mentioned earlier, the gross margin decline in the quarter was larger than we expected primarily for two reasons. First, last year's potato crop yields were lower than normal in the Western part of the country that supply our Washington and Arizona plants. Given the growth we are seeing in this region, we decided to source more potatoes from the Midwest to support production in these plants. This drove both inbound freight costs and potato cost higher, but was temporary in nature as we have now transitioned into a new crop harvest out West and are fully sourced. Second, during the second quarter, we experienced larger than expected transitory volume deleverage associated with our network optimization program. As a reminder, we announced the closure of our Birmingham plant in April. We ramped down production in the facility quicker than we originally anticipated to shift production to more efficient plants in our network. As a result, we experienced higher than expected standard cost. The…

The floor is now open for your questions. [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Andrew Lazar from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks. Good morning, Howard and Ajay.

Good morning, Andrew.

First off, you mentioned that you're still looking for flat volumes on a year-over-year basis for the full year. And I guess this would suggest a pivot to a year-over-year volume growth in the back half. Just want to make sure I have that right. And if so, what are the key drivers I guess to delivering volume growth in the second half? And I guess what gives you that confidence also in light of a little bit of I guess a broader food industry malaise when it comes to sort of volume recovery?

Hi, Andrew. It’s Howard. I appreciate the question. First of all, I would point out that one of the nice things that we've been seeing across our second quarter is a sequential improvement in our volumes overall, which is largely what we had expected, as we were building through the quarter. I think if you turn to the back half, there are a couple of areas where I think that give us confidence. First, our drags actually become less impactful. We're seeing that in the second quarter, and we'll see that continue. Drags like our SKU rationalization gets less of a net taker on our trend as we go into Q3 and Q4. We are seeing some of our brands like Golden Flake that are actually the trends are improving. And we're seeing better momentum, both in our mass channel, which we talked a lot about last year as being a challenge, and our club business also as we move through some of our prior year laps. Second, we are experiencing incremental distribution gains, specifically in mass and grocery. They really kind of started in May of this year and we're starting to see the benefits of those drives. Third is one of the areas that we're continuing to work on is the multipack variety pack segment of the category, which is a piece where the consumer interest is high as is the retailer opportunity. We've improved our packaging structure. We've added incremental assortment and we've got our price points in a place where we would have expected them to remain competitive the rest of the year. And then the last thing is incremental sales activity, but also we'll start to step up our marketing investment. I talked earlier in our journey together that being thoughtful about how we start to increase marketing year-on-year really starts to step up as we build confidence in both our capability to actually deliver the message but also the partnerships with some of our customers. So all those things together I think roll up to a positive back half volume trend.

Great. And then can you talk a bit about what you're seeing I guess in the competitive environment in salty snacks at the moment? I guess some players have finally sort of solved some of their own capacity constraints from a year ago, and maybe are back to more normal levels of sort of merchandizing in in-market activity. So I'm just trying to get a sense for that and sort of where your merchandizing levels stand currently, and where you think they either need to be if that's different from where they are sort of right now?

Yes. I would say, overall, really not a lot of surprises. One of the great things about our category obviously is the consumers’ resilience. The customer likes to sell it. And our competitors are all typically very rational even as they have cycled back into better supply chains. So from our perspective, it's largely what we would have expected to see. You're right that year-on-year, it is -- the promotional environment’s higher. But I would just point to, if you went back to 2019, overall promotional activity in terms of both frequency and depth, so how often and how deep do we go on pricing, we're still as a category well below those levels as we turn both currently and we would expect into the future. Obviously, the biggest issue for us will always be around maintaining our price gaps where we expect them to be across all of our key PPGs. And as of right now, we only make adjustments if we need to. But right now, I feel pretty comfortable with where we are.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Rupesh Parikh from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thanks for taking my question. So I just wanted to dive deeper into gross margins. So just want to get a sense of your confidence in the second half gross margin expansion, and if there's anything to think about from a cadence perspective between Q3 and Q4?

Hi, Rupesh. I'll take that. This is Ajay. So really second half gross margin, you look at second quarter, what we are expecting is headwinds of second quarter, which were temporary in nature are behind us. And the tailwinds we experienced in the second quarter will get stronger into the second half. To elaborate on that a little bit, we experienced some crop issues and our demand went up for Boulder Canyon out West and we shipped potatoes from the Midwest. So that was temporary. We are into the new crop in the second half. That's behind us. And we talked about in our prepared remarks about Birmingham plant closure a little sooner than we expected as well. So all that is behind us from a headwind standpoint. And then from a tailwind standpoint, our volumes are trending up. And we show those trends, and you can see that in the retail data. And our margin mix is improving as we work through SKU rationalization program. That's been coming through. It's going to continue into the second half. And our productivity program has really ramped up. We are close to 4% of COGS. That's our new baseline. And our actions around network optimization, in-sourcing of production from co-manufacturers where we have capacity, all of those things are driving cost out in our plants and our logistics network. And finally, as these volumes ramp up, plants are seeing better leverage on fixed costs as well. So all that will continue and actually step up. We'll continue to make investments in the business. We did so in the second quarter. We'll do some investments in the second half as well. But these positive drivers and the lack of negatives gives me a lot of confidence we’ll step up margins.

Great. Thank you. And then maybe one follow-up question. So one of your competitors called out some channel shifting out there. Just curious if you're seeing consumer shift to dollar amount or anything else of note during the quarter?

Hi, Rupesh. It's Howard. I'll take that. Look, I think we remain very fortunate in our category. The consumers overall price outlay for the products that they buy from us tends to be relatively small. So we're an affordable indulgence. That said, one of the things we always see in this cycle is consumers will start to value shop. So for some consumers, that's an absolute price point. And they may go to more EDLP classes of trade. And in some cases, they're looking for lowest price based on volume, and they'll move up the price ladder. So you'll see -- we do see consumers doing a little bit more shopping and spending a little bit more time on both ends of the price ladder, which again not terribly surprising in any given market, and I call it relatively normal. Our assortment meets all the demands from the consumer, and we feel pretty good that we will continue to have the offerings that they are going to find wherever they shop.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Lavery from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning.

Hi, Mike.

So, Howard, you’re around nine months in and came in with good momentum. So there wasn't a broken business to fix. But as you have settled in now, what if any changes do you see as appropriate, and maybe specifically any shifts in marketing approach as well?

Thanks for the question, Mike. So yes, and I think I am probably the most grateful that the business was on a good footing when I got here and that it remains so today. Look, I think there are a couple of areas that I continue to look at and observe and believe that we can accelerate on the foundation that was established in the previous basically century of growth. The first is increasing our marketing spending thoughtfully, and that is largely from where I sit building brands both where consumers want to shop, whether it be retail media, or where they want to receive the message, which is primarily more in digital and performance based. So we will start to increase in those two domains over time. The second thing is in order to do that you need to really understand your consumer. You need to understand the analytic rationale of what they're doing and making sure what you're doing is working. And probably the biggest change that I've made was the introduction of Jen Bentz to the company in innovation, insights and analytics. She brings a tremendous amount of capability in building that perspective for this company so that we can continue to invest where we want to be. And then the third area is I think that we are getting to the point where as we think about expansion, as we think about the role we play with consumers, we have businesses that consumers are very excited about in Zapp’s and Boulder Canyon and Utz, and making sure that those businesses get the appropriate level of attention while we manage the rest of our portfolio over time. I'd be remiss to not mention Boulder Canyon as well. But making sure that we're driving our drivers and being thoughtful about where we focus our time and energy. I think those are the big themes I would offer.

That's great. And the marketing spend especially kind of segues perfectly into the other question I had on just the cost savings opportunity. I think you've mentioned in the past, but it looks like there was even a little bit more of an opportunity than you might have first imagined. You've got the accelerating productivity over the last few years, now this near 4% of COGS run rate in 2023. Could there even be more upside to that? Is that kind of the right baseline to think about as an ordinary year? Maybe what's ahead in terms of if productivity can step up any further to help fund some of the marketing initiatives as well?

I'll take that. This is Ajay. So you're correct. I think we are very pleased that our productivity program has stepped up and it's running at about 4% of COGS right now. I think that's our new baseline for at least a few more quarters, definitely for 2024. And with 4%, it should generate higher dollars in the next year. What gives us comfort that this program is going to stay elevated is the type of opportunity that we are seeing in several areas. So you've seen us do some network optimization work in sourcing, there is more to do there. Procurement is an area which we are just starting to explore, a huge opportunity for us. And we are doing some more work in that area. The team has built out the capabilities. Now they're just getting started with the work stream itself. And logistics, plants, all the opportunities within the boxes and within that network, that will continue. So huge amount of work going on in that area, lots of cost out opportunities. I will shamelessly do a plug. We'll talk a lot more about it on December 15 when we meet for our Investor Day, so more to discuss on that.

Okay, great. Thanks so much.

Our next question comes from the line of Peter Galbo from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, guys.

Good morning.

Ajay, maybe just a quick clarification. You talked about improving free cash flow in the back half. But did you give an actual updated target on free cash flow for the year?

We did not. We are still at the same target. I think we said about 50 million.

Okay, cool. And then, Howard, just kind of going back to Andrew’s question around -- maybe less so around branded competitors, but more so focused on potato chips. We've seen a pretty meaningful uptick in the private label penetration on potato chips in particular. Understanding that you have volume growth baked in, just how are you thinking about that dynamic? Again, it's off of a low base, but it has been a notable uptick here over the past couple of quarters. So just the interplay you're seeing between branded and private label maybe in that subcategory?

Yes. So I appreciate the question, Peter. Look, I think it's very normal in this environment that we start to see private label come back into the conversation. They play an important role for retailers. We are fortunate that they're still only about 5% of the overall category. So a relatively lower base to build off of, but again not terribly surprised to see them -- to be in the market. I think for us, it actually highlights the need for us to continue to do brand building and innovation. When we launch something like Mike’s Hot Honey, there isn't an obvious corresponding competitive item. So you're competing on value as opposed to price. And so that's where I think we tend to stand out. I feel good about where our potato chip portfolio is overall. Utz is doing -- continues to perform. We obviously had a very heavy lap to do versus prior year in our core. But overall, we continue to be pretty comfortable with where we are. And I think ultimately, our path to success in that sub-cat and all of the others is brand building, driving consumer demand and value beyond just price.

Great. Thanks very much, guys.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Jim Salera from Stephens, Inc. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.

Hi, Jim.

Howard, if I look at the geographic distribution, it looks like power brands did particularly well across your expansion geography. What would it take to lift the performance in the core market so that we see that kind of more in line with expansion?

Yes, Jim, I appreciate the question. It's a conversation that we continue to have to make sure that we are growing our core -- we're holding in our core and then obviously expansion be our net growth driver for market share. And so when the core does not perform quite the way we would expect it to, it's an area that we spend quite a bit of time. I'd offer you a couple of things. First, part of the challenges we've had in the core more recently are really around our foundation brands versus our power brands. And so as those brands fulfill their role in the portfolio, we obviously have a little bit of a drag there that can become a little bit more challenge. And those are things like we've got to get Golden Flake right footed. We're seeing good progress in the activities that we have. But as Golden flake trends improve, that should naturally start to help the core. More importantly, the core is the place where our marketing and innovation should be the most impactful, because we're not introducing the brand and we're not trying to build brand awareness. We're trying to drive ultimately interest in consumption. So as we continue to invest in the brands, we would expect that our core would -- our power brands would naturally lift even more than they even would in our expansion geographies. Second is our hybrid DSD, DTW model. We are continuing to work those two businesses together, and we are very happy with how that has been unfolding. But doing more collaboration between those two pieces of our route to market I think will also help. And then the last thing, ultimately for us as we do start to lap SKU rationalization, some other things, we do have greater time and energy to focus to make sure that our power brands fulfill their role while our foundation brands fulfill theirs.

Great. That's helpful. And then maybe to follow up on that, you guys talked about Mike’s Hot Honey and Zapp's flavored pretzels as well had been very well received. Can you just talk about the one way for innovation using those to kind of help springboard the portfolio, whether its new distribution wins or helping propel the core market with those additive SKUs?

Yes. Look, I'm very happy -- what Mike's Hot Honey and Zapp’s both have in common has been having on-trend flavors and being trend right. Spicy is an area of the category at the moment that is growing quite quickly. And I think for us an area where I think we can continue to innovate, finding on-trend flavors, partnering with them, we know we make a great tasting chip and we know consumers like the product we deliver. And so driving some interest there is one place in our innovation strategy that I think you'll see more from us as we go forward. Second is to be honest, I think at times we need to be a little bit more focused on some of the innovation that we do and really putting our shoulder into a couple of bigger ideas. And that I think is a good example of what made Mike's Hot successful. We had better points of disruption. We had better display activity. We had better execution. And we were, therefore, able to support it with marketing. And that formula works for us. So we'll continue to drive more of that as we go forward. And then ultimately, rotating those items into our permanent assortment should be a place where if we have an item, we're excited about it. The consumer loves it. Making sure that it stays in our fleet of SKUs to be able to keep consumer interest and repeat is an area where we also I think are going to get better at, and I think Mike's is a good example of we started out, put our toe in the water, on-trend flavor, worked really, really well, incremental for us and the consumer. And so now we're going to bring it in and we're going to continue to offer it every day.

Great. Thanks, guys. I’ll hop back into the queue.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.