Thank you, Sylvie. Good morning, and welcome, everyone, to our 2025 fourth quarter and year-end conference call.

With me here today is our CFO, Will Kalutycz. Hopefully, you've had a chance to listen to our pre-recorded remarks posted on our website this morning.

We will now take your questions. Back to you, Sylvie.

Hello,

morning, guys.

Hey, Martin.

I would like to start with your revenue guidance for '26. You're calling for revenues of $9.4 billion at the midpoint.

It represents a revenue growth of around 26% year-over-year. I was wondering if you can talk about what type of cadence do you expect on a quarter basis?

Is this revenue growth going to be evenly distributed, or is it going to be a little bit more front-end loaded?

Again, a lot of our growth is ramping up. You'll have a sort of a ramp-up across the year, Martin.

Then within that, there's obviously the seasonality, Q1 being the softest quarter of the year, and Q4 being the next softest, and then 2 and 3 sort of being our seasonally strong quarters.

Okay. Just to be clear, Will, does that mean that the revenue growth is going to be higher in Q2 and Q3 when we look at this on a year-over-year basis?

In dollar terms, absolutely. Okay.

Then,

what does the EBITDA cadence look like? Again, when we look at your EBITDA dollars growing on a year-over-year basis, when do you expect the biggest growth?

Is this going to be back-end loaded given the commodity cost pressure you've had in H2 of '25?

We're we're like on a product basis, by Q2, we're expecting And And And we're talking mainly two groups, our protein group and our lobster group, I'll I'll I'll separate those and talk about them separately. On the protein group, by the end of Q1, we expect their margins on a per-product basis to be back to normal levels.

All our final price increases will have impacted by the end of the quarter, so that that noise is kind of not going into Q2. On the specialty food side, then, the rest of the margin expansion is primarily driven by volume growth, which will be the the the major major driver.

In terms of the lobster group, 2025 was an incredibly tough year in in that that segment, with the Maine fishery. It's really going to be a factor of how the fishery goes.

We're a little more optimistic. Q1 will still be tough cuz we're carrying through the issues of 2025, but we'll be through all of our high-cost inventory by that point.

Again, on the Premium Food Distribution Group side or in the lobster group in particular, you should start seeing normalization of margins. Their margins getting back to more normal levels in Q2 and then being steady for the rest of the year.

What he meant, Martin, is Q1 will be tough for the lobster group, not Premium Brands.

Premium Brands Food Distribution. Which is part of that, yeah.

Okay. In terms of EBITDA cadence, a little of a slower start, but ramping up starting in Q2.

Exactly.

Because of seasonality mainly, Martin, right? That's what-

Seasonality and the beef cost is still going to be,

and the

lobster cost. The beef, yeah.

Which you've explained, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. Perfect.

Thank you for all the color and best of luck.

Thanks, Martin.

Good afternoon, guys, and congrats on the quarter given the volatility that's going on out there. George, I just wanted to hit on your comments from the call this morning.

You talked about a consumer shift to buying some of the lower-cost products. Could you maybe talk about that shift and how that impacted you and what product categories were you referring to specifically?

Derek, what specifically are you referring to in my prepared remarks? I-

No, I was-

I think that the point there is that there is definitely a shift away from purchasing ultra-processed foods. I think you're seeing it in all the stats that's coming out, and all, again, the new US Food Guide, obviously, and narrative from there talks a lot about it.

In the US, it's quite significant because a lot of the school lunch programs, the food programs for the military, and the SNAP program, as well, is changing. A lot of ultra-processed foods do not qualify under those programs.

Again, there's definitely a shift towards more wholesome foods with more natural ingredients, definitely a shift towards protein, particularly clean protein, which is where we play. We're seeing that with all the requests we're getting from different customers to provide them with innovation sessions around our products, right?

Which is what is driving our growth.

Sorry, George. Maybe I wasn't clear.

I'm talking more about the challenging consumer backdrop and if there's been any trade-down.

Again, Derek, as we've said before, from our perspective over the past year or so, we have seen changes in the channels that the consumers are shopping for their food, right? For example, there's been some transition from mainstream retail to club, for example.

Again, you're seeing it in some of the reported numbers from some of the publicly traded companies in the space. We're not seeing a lot of changes in regards to the way the consumer eats.

The trends that we've been investing in, again, what I mentioned earlier in terms of eating cleaner food, less ultra-processed foods, those are continuing. I was just at a conference in Washington, DC, which showed all the statistics from '25.

All of the trends, nine out of 10 leading growth categories in all of retail are protein and meat-related, nine out of the 10, right? Basically, the trends that we've been talking about are continuing.

Hey, so, and

Derek, I would add, it's interesting cuz where we're seeing the most in our business and that comment is on the food service side of things. We are seeing a much more price-sensitive consumer.

Our food service customers are looking for solutions, price-based solutions. That's historically what we have seen in economically challenged times.

Then, correspondingly, we generally see some pick-up or benefit on the retail side as people eat out less. The interesting part and what's driving all our growth, all our capital investment has been around the US, and at this point, it's primarily a retail strategy.

We're not exposed to that food service sensitivity in the US.

Okay. Except for maybe products like at the c-stores, right, the impulse buys?

Yeah. Although, our biggest exposure there is jerky, and you're not seeing that category do too well, as we called out in our MD&A.

I guess, that and where we are exposed in the food service side on the sandwich business and QSR, again, that unique part of the channel seems to be pretty economically solid, it's sort of that small luxury concept, and it tends to do fairly well, or fine through these more economics- times, and that's what we're seeing play out today.

Okay. Then maybe one final one for me before I requeue.

Good progress on the free cash flow. Feels like it's held back still a little bit by the working capital.

Looks like as you built up your programs mostly on inventory, can we be expecting a release in that cash in the coming quarters, and when?

It's the first quarter in a long time I can say I'm a little bit happy at the progress we made on inventory because when you dig into it, we built about $70 million of inventory for three key protein programs, our Bites program, our Sticks program, and our Kebab program, and it was purposely built to support us through the busy summer seasons. We're building inventory going in those seasons cuz we can't meet demand with our production capacity if we don't build in the off-season.

It's a very positive story, the inventory build. You strip that $70 million out, our days purchases in inventory is about 57, and that's starting to get pretty good, probably targeting closer to 55, but we're getting very close to targets.

In answer to your question, yes, we should see that free cash flow starting in Q2 as we start to liquidate that inventory.

Awesome. Thanks for the commentary, guys, and good luck.

Thanks, Derek.

Thanks, Derek.

Oh, hey.

Hey, Michael.

Hey. Maybe just to start, Will, can you just give some You made the comment for the earlier question regarding the beef price inflation, but are you comfortable I'm just trying to assess.

If you look at the USDA data recently, it looks like beef has been moving higher. What level of beef price have you embedded into the guidance, and are you comfortable with that level?

We're just trying to get an idea of all of that.

Yeah. We definitely expect beef to be inflationary this year.

It's the demand continues to be very strong when corresponding to George's earlier comments on consumer trends. At the same time, supply continues to be very tight in North America.

We are expecting it to be inflationary. That is built into our guidance.

The issue in the back half of last year and what shocked us so much was what happened with the tariff situation in the US with Brazil. That really created a tremendous amount of volatility that wasn't factored into.

Taking out those types of black swan events, we feel very comfortable with the pricing strategies we put in place at this point for 2026.

Okay. In the third quarter, you provided a figure with specialty gross margin excluding the higher beef price.

Do you have a similar figure for Q4?

It's interesting because what we did in that figure is we looked at our selling price increases in our protein group of businesses, and we compared that to the increase in beef prices, and we took that nominal difference, and that's what we used in the MD&A. What that does not reflect is the fact that that's just a cost recovery.

You're still not recovering your margins. In Q4, we actually made great progress on our pricing, when you do that math, it's actually slightly positive.

It's about $2 million positive, i.e. our selling price increases net of commodity and wage inflation was a positive $2 million.

The issue now is our percentage margins still haven't come back cuz the price increases weren't fully implemented. It becomes a little more difficult to come up with that number when you're now going from just a cost-recovery basis to what the margin should be.

That's why we didn't disclose it this quarter. Okay.

Then

just on the Shaw divestment. Does Shaw get netted out of the reported results at the time of sale, in 60 days, or does it get netted out as a discontinued op from the beginning of the year?

Because it's not material, we're going to argue it's not a discontinued op. It'll just be netted out from the day we sold.

There seems to be a little bit of confusion around the Shaw transaction. We've excluded Shaw for the three quarters of the year.

That's about $170 million in sales that we've pulled out of the guidance if you want to compare it sort of pre-Shaw to post-Shaw transaction. On the EBITDA side, for '26, we were budgeting before restructuring costs about $21 million, most of that being in the last three quarters, about $20 million of it being in the last three quarters.

We pulled out that $20 million from our guidance. Though, if you want to normalize the guidance for the Shaw numbers, it's $170 million in sales and about $20 million in EBITDA.

All the numbers that Will has mentioned, Michael, are in Canadian dollars. There seemed to be some confusion in terms of what's US or Canadian in some of the commentary I saw.

All the numbers you mentioned are in Canadian dollars.

Okay. Got it.

Thank you for those figures. I'll step back.

Okay. Thanks, Michael.

Oh, thanks very much. Sorry.

My note might have been the cause of the confusion. Apologize for that.

I was just wondering-

Hi, Chris.

Hi, there. Maybe I start with a question on the Stampede acquisition.

When the deal was first announced, I think you provided some EBITDA guidance for 2026 of around $98 million US. Just wanted to check in to see if that's still a reasonable outlook.

I just asked in the context of your earlier comments around the food service channel being a bit more sensitive. I think Stampede is a bit more leveraged to food service.

I know there's some unique advantages, obviously, to that business that maybe make it more resilient. Just wanted to check in to just see if the outlook for Stampede is still valid.

Yeah.

The actual number, total number, Stampede was $90 million, and then we had $8 million of synergies built into that number, a total contribution of $98 million, and we still feel very good about that. The food service exposure, you're absolutely right, that is a different characteristic of Stampede.

That was one of the reasons that attracted to us cuz it further diversified our cash flows. It's very interesting because whereas their customers are seeing some softness in their sales, which is no surprise, but what has been happening is their customers have been coming to them to more product solutions, more LTO-type transactions, which they do incredibly well on in terms of their ability to meet what the customer's trying to do.

That if you just looked at one SKU within the Stampede business, you might see some softness, but they're more than making it up in these other opportunities around LTOs and new product development.

The other comment I have, Chris, is that they're not just food service. They do a lot of business with club and retail.

This is the part of the business, their business, that's growing and will continue to grow in the future, and again based on some of the macro trends that I talked about earlier.

Okay. That's very helpful.

My second question is just again on your revenue outlook. If I look at just specialty foods excluding Stampede, just last year, very strong organic volume growth rate of almost 10%.

When you think about your outlook for this year, are you expecting the OVGR to be similar, like almost 9 9 to 10%, or do you expect it to accelerate given you have obviously new programs still coming through the year?

For the year, Chris, our organic volume growth rate in the specialty foods, I believe, is about a little over 8.5% for the year,

and

it accelerated through the year, by the end of the year, we're around the 10%, I believe, for Q4. For 2026, we're expecting an annual rate closer to the Q4 rate, going from 8.5% to about 10% for the year.

Right. Okay.

Thanks. I will just requeue.

Thanks for-

Okay.

Thanks, Chris.

Thanks. Good morning, guys.

Hey, Luke. Hey, Luke.

Hey,

I appreciate the added disclosure when it comes to ROIC, in the MD&A as well. I just wanted to follow up on, it's mentioned in there the ramp-up costs that were associated with Shaw.

Overall, do you expect that divestiture to be dilutive at all to ROIC in the near term just given the contribution of margins in Bakery and how much higher [unclear]?

No. It's interesting, Luke, if you separate out Shaw from it, when we look at the ROIC on the different groups within the platform, the specialty foods platform, for our bakery platform, you look at the ROIC on that business, and it was about 7% this year.

If you strip Shaw out, it's actually 17.5%. Our artisan bread business, which they were the first plant built in our most recent capex cycle.

They finished their plant in 2022, and that plant's now coming to close to capacity or at capacity. They're hitting it out of the park on ROIC.

Shaw is still in the early days of their ramp-up, a lot of startup costs, a lot of things to work out in the new San Leandro plant. Their ROIC has been suffering because of that.

Okay. Got it.

Thanks. Then, just for my follow-up here, on the thought behind keeping that minority stake, as it would seem like the intention would probably be at some point in time down the road for you guys to divest that as well.

Is that fair?

Oh, no, no, no. Let's be clear, that's a great question, Luke.

We only own 74% of Shaw. Our partner down in San Francisco owns the other 26%.

We will have fully exited our investment in Shaw with this transaction. That $114 million US in proceeds we received, that's for 74% of the business.

Yeah.

You need to divide that by 74% to get sort of a full value of the business concept.

Sure. Then so, following on that logic, then, rough math that say you guys got about 10x for that stake?

Yeah. If you take the $21 million in projected EBITDA for 2026, convert that to US dollars, that's about $15 million US in EBITDA.

There's still going to be some ongoing restructuring costs with the business. We're a little over 10 times the multiple.

Not only that, Luke, but, again, as we're not a financial investor here. We're a strategic investor.

We found an excellent buyer for the business, and, again, there's tangibles and intangibles to this type of transaction. We're going to work together with the buyer for mutual benefit in the future.

We will be partners with them in the future in our core business.

Got it. Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Luke.

Hey, thanks for taking my question. For my first one-

Hey, Tye.

Hey, Will. For my first one, I'm just wondering if you could provide a little more color around the gross margin decline in the quarter.

I know you guys called out a few factors in the MD&A, but I just want to understand what the biggest drivers were there since it sounds like commodity headwinds were actually quite a bit lower sequentially and just how we should think about that into 2026.

Now, Tye, are you looking at consolidated or in the individual segments?

I was referring to consolidated, but

happy to- Okay. Cuz if you're looking on a consolidated basis, the biggest single factor was in our lobster group.

Going back to my earlier comment of taking selling prices less commodity impacts and looking at what that number is, for fourth quarter, you take our selling price increases on our lobster products and take out the commodity cost inflation on the lobster procurement, that was about a $6.5 million hit in the quarter. That was the single largest impact on our gross margins.

Then if you look at the specialty foods group, it was my comment earlier, protein group's margins are still below where they should be cuz we're still in the process of realizing on our beef price increases. That was a contributing factor, but the single biggest one was the lobster issue.

Within Specialty Foods,

it's still more of a commodity issue rather than plant startup or any other sort of-

Oh, now that's a great point. We had about $10 million of incremental overhead costs associated with our Tennessee facility, our various Cook protein lines that have come on, and with one other new plant that came on I'm not recalling right now.

You're absolutely right, but partially offsetting that was we had incredibly strong organic volume growth in the quarter, right? When our US growth initiatives hit 18% organic volume growth, so that's helping to cover some of that plant overhead.

Got it. Then just for my follow-up, on the M&A pipeline, just based on the deck you put out this quarter, it looks like that's emptied out pretty significantly compared to what it was in Q3.

Is that because you're seeing fewer quality opportunities out there, or does that reflect more of a deliberate decision to kind of take a breath and focus on some other priorities in the near term?

We are in a number of discussions, Tye, with some excellent companies. I think we're cautious, obviously, there's a war going on, and we have some concerns around the impact of high gas prices on consumers and those type of things.

Certainly, we're very busy. We're always in discussions with companies that we think will complement our portfolio of food companies.

With regards to that schedule in the deck, we're always very careful because we're big player now, and a lot of times, when we disclose discussions as advanced, people speculate as to what companies they are. We're trying to be a little more cautious.

Again, we're obviously very acquisitive, and we're still looking at a number of wonderful opportunities.

Understood. Thank you, all.

Pass the line.

Thanks, Tye.

Hi, Nevan.

Thanks. Hi, guys.

You got Nevan on for Steve today. Just a couple questions from our team.

I guess the first is, are you able to provide an update on the major meat stick launch you guys had ramping up in Q4? How did that progress?

Are you fully ramped up now? Then if you're able to discuss initial margins relative to your expectations?

In terms of the launch, it's gone extremely well. It's exceeded our expectations and our customer expectations.

Very successful. It's using up a lot of our capacity, which is a good problem to have, I guess, because we're unable to, in some cases, launch other programs that are in the pipeline.

I won't comment about margins because we don't like to do that in terms of specific margins about specific SKUs for competitive reasons. Again, yeah, I think everybody is extremely pleased with the launch.

Only thing I'd add, Nevan, is it is a cost-plus structure. We are on that basis achieving our margins, obviously, because it's cost-plus, that we expected.

The challenge in the quarter with the program, though, it's such a big program, and it's impacting several different plants, including our new Hempler's expansion. You'll probably notice in the deck, it was by far our most significant impact on our restructuring costs in the quarter.

That was one of the challenges with the program cuz we made it very clear: every product that went into a store had to be 100% the best in quality, and so as we were ramping up the program and working through equipment issues and stuff, it resulted in a lot of waste taking such a strict adherence to our quality standards. The good news is we are now through that, you're going to see that restructuring cost for that program drop off dramatically in Q1.

Great. That's good to hear.

A follow-up, just on the investment income, looks like you benefited from a one-time $5 million valuation gain in Q4. Excluding this, it looks like investment income has been consistently in the $15 to $16 million range per quarter.

Is that a fair run rate going into '26?

Absolutely. You're absolutely right.

That was sort of a one-time gain that we're not expecting that on a regular basis by any means. That $15 15 million or so is a good run rate.

Great. Thanks for the questions, guys.

Thanks, Nevan.

Thank you. Good morning, guys.

Hey, John.

I'd like to get a sense of what level of pricing you've taken on beef products that we'll start to notice in Q1. Without sharing the numbers, I wonder, does it reflect the peak inflations that we saw in the middle of last year or the lower level of year-over-year inflation we saw in Q4?

Just wondering what the baseline is that you've based your pricing off.

It's not the peak, John. We didn't know the peak was the peak, but there was a lot of hesitation to price off the peak because it was just so high, and we weren't sure it could be sustainable, and, in fact, it wasn't.

We priced off below it for most of our business. Now, some of our businesses did price off that.

They set prices in that chaos, but the reality is our customers now see what's happened, and we'll probably, to the extent that the pricing was so high, give some of that back. Overall, we're priced at a nice point between sort of where we are today and that peak, leaving us some flexibility for, like I say, the expected cost inflation where we see for 2026 in the beef category.

The interesting thing, John, as I said earlier, is that despite high beef prices, and these are historically high beef prices, particularly with certain cuts, demand for beef, not dollar-wise, but volume-wise, is still going way up, right? This is something that we haven't seen before.

Normally, the price of bellies goes up substantially, it impacts the demand for bacon, those type of things. Even if beef prices are historically high, demand in terms of volume continues to increase.

Okay. Thank you for that.

Then thinking about inflation more holistically, the last time we saw a spike in oil at the start of the Ukraine war, beef costs surged shortly afterwards, and then inflation on some other commodities for PBH increased as well. I'm mindful of the comment in the press release of seeing some relief on beef inflation so far, but what's your expectation on commodity inflation for this year, and what are the implications to PBH if we do see a prolonged period of higher natural gas costs leading to higher fertilizer costs leading to higher feed costs?

It's an interesting question, John, because the supply-demand dynamics that drive the cost of the raw materials we buy they're indirectly, but not directly impacted by the freight, that more impacts the packers and the farmers' margins. We're far enough down the channel that it takes a long time till you see any of that kind of impact us.

First, what has to happen is there's got to be a cutback in production, cutback in process. Our expectations at least for the near to mid-term is other supply-demand dynamics are going to be more important than fuel at this point.

Generally, where we see most of the cost in fuel is at least in the short to mid-term is more in freight. Freight, if you go back to 2022, '23, we were talking a lot about freight costs as part of the inflation equation.

That hasn't been a story for the last couple of years. That's where we do see sort of the more short-term impacts, and it's just not as material to our overall margins.

The other thing, John, and you're making a little bit of a circular argument there because ultimately the best thing about high prices is high prices, right? There's a point where demand for beef will come down.

It hasn't happened yet. Ultimately, if prices for beef continue to go up, there will be a point where demand will go down, and that will bring prices down, right?

That's what I kind of wanted to explain earlier, right? The other part is that demand remains high, but beef comes from either domestic sources or from imports, right?

Imports tend to be cheaper, and the US now has opened up to more imports, right? The more supply, that should keep prices lower rather than higher.

There's a number of dynamics there that will impact price.

Okay. Thank you for that.

If I can squeeze one more in, I know you just sold one business, but I wonder if we can get an update on your plans to divest of other non-core assets. This is something that's been discussed in the past.

I don't know if there is anything you can say, but is there anything you can share about those plans or expected timeline for completion?

We we have a number of of we're in a number of discussions, John, with with regards to exiting, investments and and, businesses that that we deem, non-core. We expect to close some in in, some more, transactions in in '26.

We don't know exactly when, but we're definitely, in a number of of, advanced discussions in in that regard.

Okay. I'll leave it there.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, John.

Hi, thanks for taking my questions.

Hi, Vishal.

Good afternoon. Turn off sound.

Related to the Specialty Foods and the organic volume growth that you posted, my assumption based on discussions through the year was there was an anticipated acceleration through the year, culminating in Q4 as a meat stick program launched. We saw the growth kind of sequentially slow, albeit still strong, and within the protein group in particular.

I was hoping if you can comment on that, or if there was something that happened partway through the quarter that maybe changed its trajectory?

No, year if you looked year-over-year for quarters sequentially, it did get stronger every quarter, the organic volume group growth rate for the group. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, the only thing, without drilling into it a little bit more, is would be seasonality, Vishal.

That'd be the only kind of factor maybe to, to consider.

The other factor, Vishal, is the absolute timing of launches, right? These are big, big launches, and the timing makes a difference in terms of what we look for.

I see. Okay.

Regarding from Q3 to Q4, the seasonality would have been the impact that we should consider in terms of the change of trajectory?

Yeah. It's really the acceleration is sort of on a year-over-year quarter comparison.

Right. Q3 would not have had the large meat stick launch.

It started in Q4 partway through. Is that correct?

Correct.

Correct, Vishal. It was delayed to the fourth quarter.

Okay. In terms of-

It was partway through the fourth quarter that it launched. It wasn't the full quarter.

Was launched in Canada in Q1. It did not launch in Canada until Q1 '26.

Okay. With respect to, Will, the comments that you provided earlier on in this call, and you said you anticipate an acceleration of trends through the year, recognizing seasonality in Q2 and Q3, is the suggestion, then, that we should anticipate Q1 organic volume growth to slow before reconstituting through Q1 Q2 and Q3?

Q1 slow sequentially, albeit still growth?

Again, on a year-over-year basis, Vishal, it will accelerate. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, I'd have to go back.

I'm not sure what the answer to that would be.

Okay.

I would suspect so because they're both seasonally slow quarters, and, like I say, one of the biggest drivers of our growth has been the stick launch, and that was partway through Q4, we'll get a full quarter in Q1.

Right. Okay.

You commented on the restructuring costs, the $25 million. The restructuring costs were building through the year, and they were larger than they usually have been for PBH, and those are adjusted out, I understand.

In 2026, how should we think about the restructuring costs that are going to be incurred? Do you have a sense in your plan?

Yeah. Q4 came in higher than our original plan.

We had two major issues that caused the variance. We've got a slide in the deck that outlines sort of the individual initiatives.

Just the labor transition issues at our Shaw facilities in San Francisco, the degree of challenges around that wasn't anticipated, so that was about a $5.7 million variance in the quarter. As Shaw Bakers has been sold, we'll see some in Q1, but we won't see any more after that.

Then the other one was the product launch, the stick product launch, which, again, to keep our product quality standards at the level we wanted resulted in a tremendous amount of waste. That waste was higher than expected.

Those two issues are essentially gone now. Those are the big variances, the big numbers in the quarter.

We are expecting for 2026 a much lower number. You got a little bit of carryover on the sticks.

The Tennessee project is now complete. Our Pillars project is making some good progress now, we expect that's the only one to go out into Q2, and then after that is sort of a miscellaneous project.

It will certainly be a much much lower number in '26 than it was in '25.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you,

Vishal.

Oh, hello again. Maybe a quick question on leverage.

I think pro forma Stampede, your leverage is around 3.9 times, and you're still targeting that to get to the low 3s, I think by end of this year, early 2027. Can you just walk us through kind of what are the key drivers that will get you there, and how much visibility do you have to achieve that target?

Yeah. No,

in terms of getting to our targeted total-debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 3 or better, absolutely still targeting ended '26, early 2027. That has not changed.

Again, the key drivers are, first off, leveraging the capacity we've invested in, growth in our EBITDA. That's going to be the biggest single driver.

There will be some debt pay-down cuz you're going to see a nice improvement or a significant improvement in our free cash flow. The Shaw transaction takes our turns down about 0.2 to 0.3 turns, so that's an immediate benefit when we close that transaction.

Those are probably the big immediate factors driving it.

Some of the other non-core investments.

If those happen, if there's another transaction, that would only accelerate it. Just based on our modeling and our assumptions and status quo with the transactions that have happened so far, that's the plan, Chris.

Okay. That was my other question was, is it predicated on more divestiture?

It doesn't sound like it's not.

No, it's absolutely not. That would only accelerate it.

Okay. Then, George, thanks for the update on sort of your thoughts around non-core assets.

That was helpful. I know another group of businesses that you look at is you kind of call it strategic assets.

Any sort of update on that in terms of monetizing some of those assets this year?

Again, Chris, I would say that, as you could see, we are growing substantially in the US. We still think that we're in the early innings in the US.

In some areas now, we've added a lot of capacity, and we are looking for more capacity, for examples in sticks as we speak. We're always trying to sharpen our focus.

We like the opportunities we see in certain parts of the business. We're looking at our overall business a little differently.

I can't say more than that, again, really excited by some of the growth opportunities we're seeing organically and by acquisition in the US market.

Okay. I was not clear.

I was thinking more just in terms of you guys, maybe partnering up with someone, like a supply chain partner where it can allow you to take some of the capital out of some of your assets.

As I said earlier, Chris, that is part of what we view as some monetization of potentially non-core assets, right? That's one of the ways that we're looking at to basically take some capital from a part of a business where maybe the returns are not as high as the potential returns we could make by employing it in the US in our core businesses there, right?

Right, that's part of that process. As I said earlier, we're in a lot of those type of discussions.

I don't know at this point timing, but certainly there's a lot on the go in that regard. There's a lot of very good companies that are interested in partnering with us in some of our segments.

Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that.

Then my last question, Will, just going back to your comment about the free cash flow improving, can you just remind us or share with us what is your capex projection for this year and also maybe from a working capital perspective? I know last year there was a usage of about $300 million.

What is your expectation for 2026?

On the capex, we really talk about three buckets. One is our maintenance capex, which we're projecting $70 to $75 million for the year.

The second is our approved major capex projects, and we've got a slide that outlines those in the presentation. There's about $67 million left to spend on those projects over the next three quarters, Q1 through 3 of '26.

Then we have smaller capex projects, and generally we spend about $70 million-plus on those projects is our expectations going forward with Stampede joining the group. As of today, that's what's committed to, or that's the plan.

I mentioned earlier our Sandwich group is running into capacity issues. We may look at other projects in the future, but at this point, that's all that's in the pipeline.

In terms of working capital, like I say, we've made good progress on our core inventories. The issue at the end of the year was the build-up to support our growth.

Going forward, really the driver is just going to be our growth and buying opportunities. There'll be volatility around that, I can't give you a number on net working capital other than to say it will increase with the growth of our business.

Okay. No, that's helpful.

Thanks, everyone, and best of luck.

Thanks, Chris.

Thanks, Chris.

Hey, good morning, guys.

Hi, Ryland.

Just on the revenue guidance for 2026, could you unpack your assumptions there for growth in Canada?

We don't give specific guidance on Canada, Ryland, but in general terms, it's not a big piece of our expectations for the year. At best, it's probably 2 to 3% volume growth would be our general expectation on the specialty food side.

A little bit higher on the Premium Food Distribution Group, which is primarily on the distribution side of Canadian business. Again, the excitement in our business, the big growth driver of our volume growth is going to be or is our US initiatives.

It'll be interesting to see 2026 because 2025, it was our Protein, Sandwich, and Bakery groups. We've got a lot of exciting stuff happening in our Culinary group right now.

We built a new facility in Maine. We've made some investments here on the West Coast in our culinary capacity, and it's an exciting category with a lot of opportunities.

We expect them actually to be a nice driver of growth, start registering on our organic growth in 2026. Again, all of that centered around the US and the investments we're making in the US.

Great. Then just on the beef jerky sales within Specialty Foods, could you just remind us when that headwind began to emerge in 2025, and how have sales or the year-over-year kind of sales decline trended sequentially?

Are you seeing incremental pressure there, or is it generally stable?

Hey, it's a little volatile. It seems to go up and down a bit.

It was a tougher quarter in Q4 because, for last number of quarters, you've been seeing contraction in our jerky sales, and that reflects what's happening in the market. It's a very High-cost product that has been historically targeted at a young male consumer, and so a much more price-sensitive consumer in the c-store channel.

Correspondingly, you've seen that whole category come under pressure given the high beef prices. The other factor, though, that accelerated or made it a bit bigger in Q4 versus where it had been trending is we also have some very successful turkey tender programs.

They're like a turkey jerky almost, and turkey prices have just gotten so incredibly high that we've started exiting categories cuz the price point has just gotten too high. It was a little higher this quarter because of that, but outside of that, if you look at the category in general, that's kind of where our jerky sales have been trending as well.

Again, if you go back a few years when we partnered with Oberto's, Oberto's was a jerky company, effectively a national jerky company with very little business in sticks. At the time, we said that the opportunity for Oberto's and for us is to leverage the Oberto's platform to grow the premium stick business.

Today, effectively, it's a much larger company, but it's predominantly one of the leading stick companies in the US today. As Will said, we just haven't been focusing on jerky, jerky's a legacy-type of item, but really the big focus in terms of marketing, promotions, capacity expansions has all been in sticks, and we were right.

The stick industry has, particularly the premium stick industry, has exploded in the US.

Appreciate that color. Then just last for me, modeling question on corporate costs.

I guess is it safe to assume this kind of $30 million annual run rate is good going forward? I know it's consistently been in it's kind of $8 to $10 million range through the first three quarters and then drops quite a bit in Q4.

Just how should we be thinking about that?

The volatile factor there is employee discretionary costs, bonuses. Clearly, with the challenges in the protein group and the Shaw bakery group and the lobster group, discretionary compensation was down significantly.

That's one of the factors you see driving the decrease in the corporate costs and SG&A in general. You kind of have to normalize that for that.

Going forward '26, assuming we hit our numbers as we expect, you should expect a higher corporate cost because of higher discretionary compensation.

Okay. Perfect.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Thanks for the follow-up, and, by the way, I did see $20-plus US jerky prices at Logan Airport, I got that point.

Yes, no surprise there, Derek.

Yeah. Will, I just want to clarify the sales guidance, the 9.25 to 9.55.

To be clear, if it wasn't including the Shaw bakery, those numbers would have been $170 million higher?

Yeah, 170 to $180 million to reflect sort of the range concept. Canadian.

Canadian.

Got it,

and

the The same thing on the EBITDA, correct?

Correct.

Okay. That's it.

Thanks, guys.

Okay. Thanks, Derek.

Yes, I'd like to thank everyone for attending today. Thank you very much.