Thank you. Good morning.

Thank you all for joining us today for Post's third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings question-and-answer session. I'm joined this morning by Nico Catoggio, our COO.

Rob is unable to join us today as he is feeling under the weather, and Daniel is actually with his wife who is going into labor. Before I turn this call to Nico, though, I want to remind you that this call is being recorded, and an audio replay will be available on our website at postholdings.com.

During today's call, we make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that should be carefully considered by investors as actual results could differ materially from these statements. These forward-looking statements are current as of the date of this call, and management undertakes no obligation to update those statements.

The press release and written management remarks that support today's call are posted on our website in the Investors section. This call will discuss certain non-GAAP measures.

For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP measure, see our press release issued yesterday and posted on our website. With that, I will turn the call over to Nico.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.

Our third quarter results were slightly ahead of expectations driven by stronger than anticipated performance in food service. We are maintaining the midpoint of our fiscal 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance while narrowing the range.

From a capital allocation standpoint, we repurchased 4% of our outstanding shares, bringing our total fiscal year-to-date reduction to approximately 17% while maintaining leverage within our target range. Looking ahead, we believe it's important to provide early context for fiscal 2027.

After adjusting our fiscal 2026 outlook for approximately $80 million of items affecting comparability, we enter fiscal 2027 with a comparable adjusted EBITDA base of approximately $1.48 billion. While our fiscal 2027 budget remains under development, our preliminary outlook is for adjusted EBITDA that is relatively consistent with this level.

Despite normalizing food service earnings, the absence of divested businesses, anticipated inflation, and ongoing volume pressure, we currently expect targeted pricing actions, cost savings, and food service run-rate growth to support fiscal 2027 underlying EBITDA generally flat relative to the comparable adjusted EBITDA base of approximately $1.48 billion that I mentioned before. With that, Operator, please open the lines for Q&A.

Morning, everybody. Thanks for the question.

I think to start off, Nico, you highlight a shift from what's been very aggressive share repurchase activity to really more of a deleveraging posture. I was hoping you could delve into this decision a bit more.

Is it concern about the direction of EBITDA in the near term and some of the volume pressure, given your '27 outlook, or something else? Does this change your ability or desire to go after cash-accretive deals that may make sense?

Sure. I can take that one, Andrew.

Really it's consistent with how we've always thought about capital allocation when it comes to M&A versus debt reduction. That's less a function of a leverage number and really more a function of what we're seeing in interest rates and refinancing impacts.

While we don't have a bond maturity for four years, we factor in the cash flow impact of refinancing that debt now at higher rates. What would that do to free cash flow?

As we see rates continue to rise from a refinancing standpoint, that just weighs more heavily to say, "Hey, we've got to start allocating more capital to debt reduction to make sure we're bringing down debt so as we get to refinancing we're not seeing a deterioration of our free cash flow." Again, we'll still maintain the ability to buy back shares opportunistically.

It's just in the current interest rate environment, it's certainly going to be at a slower pace than the last couple years. I think on the counter, if we see rates somehow return and we're back at a 5% refinancing rate, then our view would change.

That's certainly the big driver and the primary lens how we look at it. Relative to the M&A points, I think another angle we view is where's a comfortable leverage level we could take leverage to, and where's a comfortable starting point?

That gets us to a similar spot. Hey, mid-4s is somewhere we're comfortable for, but we wouldn't want to see that number rise because that would deteriorate some of the flexibility for cash M&A.

I think that's where the preliminary outlook for next year is more of a consideration. Again, I'd say consistent with how we've always viewed it.

Got it. Thanks for that.

Then Post has been obviously very proactive in optimizing its capacity and its assets in categories like ready-to-eat cereal to sort of stay ahead, to speak, of sort of the structural decline in category and maintain solid margins and cash flow. Having already closed, I guess, three plants in cereal, given trends in the company's dog food business and maybe some of the potential elasticity impacts of some of the pricing actions that you're talking about here, I guess are there some similar actions that you can or may need to take in sort of the pet food space around asset optimization, sort of like you've done in cereal the past year or two?

Thanks, Andrew. It's a good question.

Let me start backing up. We are constantly assessing those opportunities across every business, and in particular in PCB.

Before I get to pet, and I will answer that one, we also just made the decision to shut down two peanut butter plants. That's, again, to your point, it's exactly the same playbook that we used in cereal.

That's as we integrated the 8th Avenue business and we streamlined that business and exited some businesses that we were literally losing money, we saw the opportunity to shut down two plants. That's in the works.

That's going to impact F '28. Order of magnitude it's similar to what you saw in cereal in the past.

That's on peanut butter. On pet, it's a good question.

Let me tell you that beyond footprint, we haven't even scratched the surface in cost in pet not the way we did it in cereal. That's because we wanted to wait until we had the confidence that we had a stable pet business.

We feel that we are getting to that point. We are now at a 30% market share.

What we are confident is if we can stay in that level, and we think we can because some of the initiatives that we pursued to turn around Nutrish and are starting to actually show encouraging results, if we can stay at that, call it 30%, 32% market share range, then now we can actually go after cost aggressively. It's more than just footprint.

There are opportunities to simplify the portfolio, harmonize formulas, a lot of the things that we did in cereal that when you do that, that will allow us to actually optimize the footprint. Back to your question, yes, we are assessing those.

We are very confident that we have a lot of opportunities in pet, and we are actually starting to now work on the pipeline of those opportunities.

Great. All right.

Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Hi, good morning. The narrowed guidance range for this year implies fourth quarter more or less in line with the performance here in the third quarter.

You call out food service continuing to move towards normalized run rate, suggesting it steps lower on a sequential basis. Can you talk about where you see a stronger EBITDA outlook as you look into the fourth quarter here?

Thank you.

The offsets to food service falling back in the quarter?

Yes, as we think about kind of the shape of the P&L in the fourth quarter and look ahead to '27. It's more of

we saw refrigerated retail pull back a bit more than anticipated out of the Easter benefit in Q2 in terms of results in Q3. We see some improvement in that business in Q4.

Really, for the rest of the portfolio, pretty flat, we're not talking about significant changes overall.

Thanks for that. Matt, the CapEx range moved a little higher at the low end for this year.

Can you talk about that incremental investment, and as you look ahead to '27, if you have a view of if CapEx remains relatively stable or moves perhaps even higher as you look at some of the supply chain work you're undertaking? Thank you.

Sure. I think just really a refinement of this year and the pacing we're seeing on the CapEx range.

This leaves us a little bit higher in the range from where we started, but no, that's definitely a bit of a moving target. Again, a lot of these capital projects, we're trying to work through as fast as we can because they're in the plan for a reason.

When you think about next year, a bit too soon to say. I think just to add on to Nico's comments, as you think about potential network optimization, that's an area where if we see clear opportunities, there could be some additional capital spend to clear the way for those.

Outside of that, would expect just continued investment in food service and pursuing growth as we get our plan together for next year and the following year thoughts, and then really more of a maintenance level across the balance of the business.

Appreciate that. I'll pass it on.

Great. Best to Rob and congratulations to Daniel.

Big day.

Just kidding. He's not kidding.

Yeah. I want to ask you about the EBITDA guidance just what's behind the $1.48 billion for PCB.

EBITDA down mid-single digits, should we assume that PCB organic sales down 3%, maybe mid-single digits down for PCB with that guidance? Is that reasonable?

Again,

I think we've got kind of a first look in ranges around our businesses, David. Just given the nonrecurring things we were seeing, we wanted to get some indication out there.

I think we were a little cautious to get into details around each business segment until we have a more formalized plan. Certainly, we've commented in our release that we see growth in food service next year offsetting some of these pressures we're seeing in terms of inflation and volume pressures.

I think fair there's probably a bit of pull back in overall retail offset by food service, but don't really want to get into the by-segment comments yet.

What I would add actually to Matt's point getting into the specific segments, but it's a comment that applies to all of retail, our retail businesses. We expect, as Matt said, inflation, and it's going to be a year where we will probably chase inflation.

Typically, to be able to price, we need to wait to see the inflation. That's how you have the discussion with the retailers.

That's what that kind of initial outlook actually reflects.

Sort of behind that is I'm looking at the long term here and volume trends for your all-in cereal business, including private label, and volume has been down mid-single digits basically the last two years now. I wonder

Yeah.

if that's just kind of how you're thinking about that business going forward, as an underlying assumption going forward, i.e., it's not going to get better anytime soon, or maybe you see some real, tangible reasons why it could get better over the next fiscal year. I'll pass it on.

Again, we don't have all the details of the plans, and what I can tell you is that I would expect the cereal volume to move closer to the category next year. The reason why we've been lagging the category a bit in the last year, it's a lot of decisions that we made.

One is we talked about it in the last two quarters, we adjusted the assortment to have better performance or efficiency in our promotions. That is worth 1 percentage point of the gap versus the category, it's significant.

It's 50% of the gap versus the category. The rest, as we mentioned, it's we lost some distribution in our Malt-O-Meal brand, and it's kind of the tail SKUs, the lower-velocity SKUs, but we lost that distribution.

Going forward, the rest of the portfolio is performing really well. Our premium portfolio, we are gaining market share in our premium portfolio.

That is great news. I wouldn't expect moving closer to the category.

Where the category is going to be, we don't know. The good news, it's actually slowly improving quarter after quarter.

It's getting closer to what we see as the long-term sustainable trend in the category of, call it, -1%, -2%. We are not there yet, but we're getting closer.

Got it. Thank you.

Good morning, and thanks for the question. Maybe just follow up on something you touched on earlier in the call related to Andrew's question.

The pet business, you made mention that you like the progress that you're starting to see. Could we maybe just get more of an update there on kind of the different brands and where we stand in terms of instituting changes and seeing those on-shelf changes?

Thank you.

Absolutely. Let me start with if you take the year-over-year decline for that business, 60% of that is our value brands, and most of that is 9Lives.

We mentioned last quarter, we relaunched a third of that brand that we were not making money on. We saw elasticities higher than what we anticipated, but at the same time, we like the margins, right?

Or we like the margins more than what we used to like that, I would say. We had to do it.

We are actually working as we speak, and we are seeing good progress on kind of resetting the value proposition for that. At the same time, the cat segment, because it's worth the growth is in the category, has been very very active in terms of promotions.

So 9Lives, that stands essentially for value in the category, has seen a lot of promotions, competitive promotions, and with two of our main competitor brands actually hitting price points below our brand. We are not going to follow them.

We are very disciplined when we think about promotions, we don't see that as something that will kind of remain like that over time. In the short term, that's a lot of the pressure that 9Lives is under.

Nutrish, the good news is where the brand is fully relaunched, and then we actively worked our assortment to what we call our core assortment, beef, chicken, and salmon, the brand is performing well. Our largest retailer is a good example of that.

We very aggressively manage our assortment. We have what we call our must-have SKUs there on shelf, and there the brand went from losing market share year-over-year to now over the last 13 weeks we are gaining market share.

In dry dog, that's what we measure. We feel good.

We are seeing in some other retailers where we are actually transitioning, we see a clear inflection point in the performance of the brand. Now, the transition has taken a bit longer than anticipated.

It's been a bit more messy. The other thing is there's a clear difference in performance between, again, what we call our core assortment and the flanker SKUs.

What we are working on is for the next reset is doing a lot more of what we did in one of the largest retailers, that is working the assortment to actually focus on that core set of SKUs that perform really well. Again, the good news is where we relaunched those, where they are fully transitioned, we are actually seeing a clear inflection point, and those SKUs actually stand in the top third of the category, and that's very encouraging.

All right. Thank you for all that detail.

I did have one other question on PCB. Just looking back over the past four quarters, a pretty meaningful pull back in marketing, A&C activity.

As you look forward, since you're going to start lapping that pull back, is there more to do, or given some of these on-shelf changes, especially in pet, does it make sense to maybe invest back a bit? Just kind of curious your views there.

Yeah. I would actually say there are two things behind that.

One is we constantly work to improve the return on spend and the effectiveness of spend. Almost 100% of our spend now it's digital and no linear TV.

We improve our returns. That's across the portfolio, but mostly in the cereal side.

We haven't pulled support out of the cereal brands. We just got more effective spend.

In pet, some of the A&C pull back, it's not necessarily A&C that we're pulling out, it's we are actually deploying dollars differently. There's more spend on in-store activation or select rollbacks and retailer support that is, again, dollars that move from A&C to call it trade spend to reset some of the equations that we talk about.

Do we anticipate some support back in some brands? It's brand by brand.

We feel really good about the returns in our cereal brands, really really good, and we're going to be selective in our support in our pet brands.

Understood. Thank you.

Hey, good morning, all. Thanks very much for taking our questions.

First thing I'd want to ask about is the food service business and specifically on the profit side. I think despite lapping the HPAI pricing adders and price realization being decidedly negative this quarter, you still put up a pretty pretty strong profit number actually in line with what you did in Q2.

Just wondering if you can help us understand the moving pieces there, why was it so strong, and maybe why shouldn't we believe that the actual annualized run rate is higher than the $500 million? Thanks.

Sure. Very fair question.

I think just to think about the $500 million run rate, it's really an estimate of what we see the current business earning power is under normalized circumstances. I think to kind of define a view of normalized circumstances is really I'd say three things.

It's our business being back in balance from a supply and demand standpoint, really our inventories back to normal, and then also underlying market versus grain-based egg pricing. Happy to say the first two, our internal supply and demand and our inventories, which we continue to build this past quarter, are back to where we'd like to see them and in balance.

We're really left with that third piece, which is a bit of imbalance between market and grain-based egg pricing. All three were a function of HPAI last year and throwing just the industry and our own supply out of whack.

Again, I think that the third piece, we believe will correct itself just when you have a situation of oversupply is where we believe we are from an industry standpoint. That is actually not going to survive long when you've got chickens.

The cost to feed them is greater than what you can command on the open market. We expect people will take some actions to bring that in line.

I think that collectively is how we really view the underlying run rate and how we view the business heading into '27. Again, we feel we can totally grow off of that number in '27 off the $500 million run rate, but that's our attempt to try and carve those pieces out and get to, hey, what we see in underlying volumes and balance of the business where it's running today.

Scott, one thing that I would add is in Q3 we probably took a bit more advantage of the market conditions than what we anticipated, we exited the quarter with really high inventories. That's part of what is reflected in that number.

Understood. Appreciate the color there.

Then maybe just as a follow-up, since you guys gave kind of preliminary fiscal '27 guidance, you kind of gave some tailwinds helping you, some of the headwinds that are offsetting. Just wondering if you can share any assumptions in terms of rate of inflation, where that's coming from, just any other building blocks you're willing to share at this point?

Thanks.

I think we're hesitant to get into any broad-based assumptions. We really just wanted to rebase '26 to make sure we were very clear on food service run rate where we're seeing that and then also the impact of the two divestitures we made.

I think beyond that, like I said, we're in the middle stages here and have some first looks and ranges, but really don't want to get into underlying assumptions. I think broad brush, we see those all balancing out, and that's why we're saying a stable, flat year to a rebalanced '26, but really not a position to get into a lot of details around those assumptions.

Certainly as we get to November, we'll be able to walk through much more specifically some of those assumptions.

Okay. Understood.

We'll leave it there. Thanks very much.

Hey, good morning, and thank you for the questions. Maybe just asking the last one a bit differently.

The flatish outlook into next year, are the inflation pressures and volume trends you're seeing consistent with your prior expectations that you sort of walked through on the last call? Where is that mostly flowing through?

I can touch on at least. Again, we're still working on the budget, we don't have all the details.

I would actually say volumes are consistent with what we're seeing. Inflation, I mentioned in the last call that we needed to wait to have a bit more visibility, and I think what we're seeing is coming in probably at the higher end of what we were expecting.

It's within the range that we were expecting, but at the higher end of that range. Again, that's part of what is reflected in that initial outlook.

Okay. Appreciate that.

Then on refrigerated retail, could you maybe help us understand some of the weakness in the quarter? The underlying was down.

I think that was mostly due to the pricing lap and holiday timing. Maybe just what does that business look like near term, and maybe quantify some of the impact from the Crystal Farm sale?

Thank you.

Sure. To your point, year-over-year, the Easter timing was a big factor.

Then also, as a reminder, in Q3 and Q4 of last year, we had pricing adders around AI that were beneficial for the business, and those just like our food service business had were taken off as we got into fiscal '27. Easter and those pricing adders are the big year-over-year drivers.

Then in addition to that, which is more of the current run rate of the business, certainly, as we've seen across the portfolio, but on a relative size basis, just more impactful for refrigerated retail has been the impact of higher fuel costs and freight costs that we've seen and we talked about on our prior call. Then the other impact is around eggs.

The dynamic there is we're selling on the market, we're a grain-based buyer of eggs, and you've got a dynamic where market prices have plummeted, it's a tough situation to try and take pricing and to equalize those when the Urner Barry markets are suggesting price of eggs from a market standpoint is much lower than what we're procuring at. That's certainly been the dynamic we've seen here in Q3, and that's really maybe the gap to expectations both internal and external for Q3.

Hey. Great.

Thanks a lot. You put in the release last night and some commentary this morning.

The ongoing volume weakness, but then offsets, and part of the offsets would be pricing. You're also saying, be kind of chasing the pricing a little bit because that has to come through first.

I guess just to clarify simplistically, would seem like if there's a little bit of pricing contribution next year, that'd probably be later in the year, maybe more back half in the year. Then secondly, if you could just touch on, broadly speaking at least, kind of where you think you might still see some ongoing volume softness and then where you also might think you might have a higher probability of sending that pricing, just kind of going through the different segments at least for purposes of modeling?

Thanks. Yeah.

I think you are spot on. Our assumption by now is that pricing will be more toward the end of the year.

Right now where we see more of that happening is in PCB, but, again, early on in the process. That's where we see most of the inflation and where we expect some pricing.

Volumes, I think it's going to be similar to what we're seeing. If you think about the categories, again, we don't know exactly where the category is going to be, but cereal expected to decline probably 2.5%, but, again, we don't know.

Then in pet, as a reminder, 2/3 of our portfolio, 60% of our portfolio is dry dog. That segment is underperforming the category.

If you think about dog is underperforming cat, dog is declining, cat segment is growing, and within dog, dry is underperforming. That's going to be a headwind.

That's where we see some volume softness. Again, it's more driven by the category than our brands.

We feel that we are going to be moving toward that category average but, again, considering the mix of our portfolio.

Okay. Great.

Very helpful. Then just quickly, back to the kind of leverage versus buyback perspective right now, I think you said, kind of comfortable in that mid-4 range around there.

Also said, don't really have any big maturities coming due, but clearly want to be cognizant of the rate environment and how that impacts interest and cash flow, etc. Kind of all that said though, is that what you're saying basically is kind of the cash allocated to buybacks, let's say over the next 18 months, just making it up, will be lower, and then the cash to incremental debt paydown would be higher despite having kind of no maturity coming due?

You're going to pay down debt, just not buy back as much stock. That's basically it?

Yes. I think you summarized it well.

That's given our current view, and we'll continue to look at where rates are going and refinance rates. Just in the last quarter as an example, our 10-year refinance rate, which is what we look at, has risen 50 basis points.

That certainly goes into the model and the factor. Assuming rates stay elevated over the next year, that's the right way to think about how we're thinking about capital allocation, favoring debt reduction over share repurchases.

Again, we still have a pool of cash flow that we can deploy against share repurchases. It's just in the balance, it's going to be more on the debt side in this interest rate environment.

Yeah. Okay.

Great. All right.

Thanks a lot. I'll pass it on.

Hi, thanks for taking the question. You mentioned in the prepared remarks about gaining some share in private label in pet.

I'm just wondering how you think about private label in that business. Is that a bigger opportunity, or is that something you're just using to fill in space, and kind of how you think about private label in general?

In general, in pet, you mean?

Yeah. Yeah.

If you remember, we lost some business 18 months ago. We were confident that we were going to recover some of that, and that's essentially what's happening.

We have a fairly unique position in that category. We are a premium private label player, we produce mostly premium products.

That's a segment that is growing in the category. We are well-positioned, we see more opportunities of that.

Then the other opportunity is as we continue integrating the footprint, we see more opportunities of actually expanding private label as we leverage the full footprint that we have. We feel good about that.

That business is actually performing really well.

That's great. I'm just wondering if you have any comments in terms of in pet where you're seeing the pockets of strength.

Is it mass, club, pet specialty? Any kind of divergence in trends by type of retailer?

It's a good question. The obvious one is e-commerce is outgrowing every other channel.

It's both the true pure players, and also the retailers.com businesses. All those are outgrowing brick-and-mortar.

Within brick-and-mortar, pet specialty still as a channel underperforming relative to mass. Mass is doing probably slightly better than the average of the category.

Pet specialty is underperforming, and e-commerce is clearly overperforming. Okay.

Great. Then can you just comment on SNAP impact, either on the quarter and how you're thinking about it for the year, or if there's a timing issue of when you expect the greatest SNAP impact versus when it may normalize?

SNAP, I wish I knew exactly the answer for that, to be honest. Most people see it as a headwind.

I personally have had this theory, and I think it's what we're seeing in the category, it's probably consistent with that, that it could be a tailwind for categories like cereal because of affordability. Cereal's still one of the cheapest categories for breakfast, and it's definitely the cheapest way to actually have the right nutrients in your breakfast.

Longer term, I still see it as an opportunity. The reality is there's a lot of noise.

I would add it's not only SNAP. There are changes in the WIC program, the Women, Infant, and Children program, that also impact the category because there were changes to the dairy allocation that impacts the category.

There's so much noise. I don't have the perfect answer for SNAP.

I see it as potentially an opportunity for cereal. The reality is if you think about when SNAP changed, that is in our Q1, that's when we started seeing the category starting to perform a bit better.

Okay. Great.

Thanks for all the answers.