Okay. All right, well, it's a pleasure to welcome Maple Leaf Foods here to Whistler for the first time. You all know the business as the owner and steward of the household name brands Maple Leaf, Schneiders, and many others. We're joined by CEO Curtis Frank, just crossed, if I'm correct, 25 years with Maple Leaf.
That's true.
Initially in sales, then operations, and was named CEO a few years ago. We're also joined by Dennis Organ, who came to Maple Leaf, I think, a couple of years ago, and has extensive experience in the U.S. protein industry. Today, he's President of the Pork Complex, but you will become the CEO of the soon-to-be spun-out Canada Packers business, which is going to be its own publicly traded entity. So thank you to both of you for being here.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks, Mark. All right, let's start at a very high level. You guys provided some comments about 2025 in a press release a couple of weeks ago. So maybe it would just be helpful if you could sort of run through that and sort of the most important key takeaways.
Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to. Thank you. I think I'd start by maybe commenting on our performance in 2024. We've had a year of pretty significant progress and building, I think, some pretty important momentum in the business. Essentially exiting 2024 with a pretty substantial improvement, as we expected, in our Adjusted EBITDA, profitability of the business improving, a significant decline in the capital that we're investing in the business as planned, free cash flow generation that's improved pretty significantly throughout the course of the year and building momentum, and of course, a balance sheet that's coming more in line with our kind of targeted levels of leverage maybe two to three times. So pretty significant improvements within 2024. The release we put out was really meant to reflect our confidence in what we see moving forward in 2025 in terms of sustaining that momentum.
There were maybe, I think, four elements inside of that particular press release that were important and meant to inspire some level of confidence in our 2025 outlook. The first would be revenue growth, essentially guiding towards mid-single-digit levels of growth next year, just given the resiliency of our growth strategies and kind of the more normalized market conditions we're seeing overall in the business. The second being an Adjusted EBITDA of in and around CAD 634 million. We had just completed the presentation of our operating plan to our board late in December, and analyst consensus at the time was sitting in and around CAD 634 million.
And we thought the alignment of those two things coming together. We thought it was an important time just to reinforce and reinstill our confidence in the analyst consensus of CAD 634 million and reinforce the fact that we felt the business in 2025 had the potential to perform there or better. So that was the second most important element, the revenue growth, the Adjusted EBITDA outlook. The third most important element was related to capital allocation, and we provided some level of clarity with respect to our outlook from a capital allocation point of view. First, returning cash to shareholders in the form of our 10th consecutive year of annual dividend increase. Second, again, reinforcing kind of our leverage target in and around two to three times our investment grade levels on the balance sheet.
The outlook for Canada Packers being between two and a half and three times once it's spun out as its own separate entity, and language that was intended to reflect the fact that we would like to be more active on the NCIB at some particular stage we historically have been would be our intention to be more active in the future. There are a couple of things that, from a timing perspective, that probably are preventing us in the short term from being more active than we'd like to, but intend to be in the future, so we thought it was important to clarify that as well.
And then the fourth and final element, we had been getting, understandably, a lot of questions with respect to the spinout of Canada Packers in particular, and we thought it was a great moment to kind of clarify some guidance for 2025 in that area related to timing, which obviously we expect to close in 2025, and some of the other elements that I've talked about.
Yeah. Okay. Excellent. Thanks for that. I'm going to follow up on all four of those sort of pieces, and maybe we'll start or just go in the same kind of order that you did. The mid-single-digit revenue growth, I think, is something that we've seen from Maple Leaf for a number of years now, but also somewhat difficult in this current environment. So maybe you can just sort of help us understand some of the building blocks to be able to deliver that at a time when growth has been harder to come by for a lot of CPG-type businesses.
Yeah. Well, I commented earlier, Mark. We've been very happy with the resiliency of the growth strategies. The pork market conditions kind of clouded that in the last 12 months. But if you look at our last six or seven-year CAGR, we've been 4.5%-5% growth on the top line, and certainly expect that to resume next year. The combination of some repatriation work we did in poultry this past year and pork market conditions kind of clouded the fact that underlying all of that, our prepared meats business actually had pretty, on a relative basis, had pretty strong levels of growth. I think next year we'll see some combination of volumetric growth and inflationary growth. I do expect to have some inflation and cost increases in the business in 2025, but in more normalized levels of kind of inflationary values as we work throughout the year.
Volumetrically, we do think we'll have some volume growth in the business between Canada and the U.S., mostly tied to, again, the resiliency of our growth strategies and our brands, leveraging our number one and number two brands in the market in what we're doing in sustainable meats in Canada and the U.S., building on our U.S. growth platform and some of the plans we have from an innovation point of view. Feeling pretty good about the revenue growth in the business.
And you mentioned sort of observing normalizing consumer behavior, I think is how you phrased it. How does that manifest? What does that mean exactly for you?
The consumer environment in the last couple of quarters in particular has been challenging. I think we were a little late to the party on that, meaning we didn't feel it as quickly as some other North American consumer packaged goods companies did. But the last couple of quarters have been challenging. We're already starting to see signs of improvement. I wouldn't describe it as "back to normal," but we are seeing signs of improvement. That shows up for us in our mix in particular, headlined by sustainable meats, where we're starting to see a little bit more demand building, particularly in the poultry category, which has been most affected.
So I think when you look at our guidance for 2025, you can backsolve into kind of a mid-12s Adjusted EBITDA percentage, not all the way to our North Star, 14%-16%, but I think reflective of that consumer environment being kind of the biggest gap between there and achieving our strategic target.
Yeah. Okay. And you highlighted you were sort of impacted maybe later than some other CPG brands. And then your reaction as a result, because the impact wasn't there, was also somewhat later. Could you just help us understand, when it comes to, I guess maybe specifically with poultry, but it doesn't need to be, the mix piece, that's obviously a very important thing to get right for you guys and sort of getting the yields out of the different brands and getting out of the portfolio as a whole. What are some of the adjustments you've made specifically, and how much of it is sort of consumer-facing in the way you present to the consumer, and how much of it is on your production side, how you've sort of rebalanced production?
Yeah. Always important to note, our portfolio is very much tilted to the premium end of the category, premium brands in the category. Over the fullness of time, that allows us to earn more premium margins. When there's a trade-down impact in a category, we're the first to be affected. And how we redirect our promotional spend and our advertising activity becomes really important in those environments. Having the number one and number two brands means we tend to invest the most, particularly in the Canadian market, in our brands. In recent times, we've been really working hard to transition our consumer spend, particularly towards our sustainable meats portfolio, because frankly, that's the one that's needed the most help. That's not always increasing investment, but redirecting on the consumer side.
On the revenue management component, we've had to adjust our pricing in certain areas to get the volume response that we want. Been pretty happy for the most part in the last couple of quarters with the volumes, but the promotional intensity, meaning the cost, the investments that were required to get there, were a little bit more than we would have liked to see, and that's what we're looking for in terms of a normalization as we head into 2025.
And so are all of the adjustments then on the sort of consumer-facing side, or is there some element of readjusting production and how you think about processing?
Less so in terms of production and more so in terms of cost management. I mean, we talked a little bit in our communications around some of the cost reduction initiatives we have at stake. Heading the fourth quarter, we took some pretty material actions, and over the next 12-24 months, I think we'll be pretty active on the cost side of the business. But no, predominantly consumer-facing.
Yeah. Okay. I want to ask about the U.S. You touched on it. It's been an area of pretty strong growth, generally speaking, and it's about, I think, 10% of sales, give or take. What's the opportunity there now, and is that sort of product innovation? Is it just more doors? What are the drivers?
Both. So we have a business in the U.S. now that's in and around $500 million of revenue. It's about nine-ish percent of our overall portfolio. The platform we've built in the U.S. now, I think, is really exciting for us. We've combined our meat and our plant protein business in the U.S. We've got an office in Chicago, an innovation center in Chicago. We've got a distribution network that's up and running. We're in every one of the top 10 retailers in the U.S. So we've got a really nice platform to build around. The point of difference has been our sustainable meats offering. Always important when you're going to a new market to have a distinct point of difference. We have that in the sustainable meats business, so that's insulated us a little bit in the U.S. market. The growth opportunity is enormous.
Organically, you think about in Canada. We have just over 100 items on average in any grocery store in the Canadian market, Maple Leaf Foods, broadly defined Maple Leaf Foods. In the United States, we have something like 14, so expanding, the good news is the trucks are going there. The relationships exist. There's a selling and marketing organization, and they're supporting on average 14 items in a grocery store in the United States. And closing the gap between 14 and 100 is very lucrative for us, and then inorganically, of course, over time, there's opportunities in the U.S. as well for us.
Yeah. Okay. London, bacon, Winnipeg, London, poultry, Winnipeg, bacon. I think they exited 2024 on track with their targeted contribution. I think $130 million of EBITDA, about 250 basis points of margin. Just given sort of the timing of sort of some of the ramp-up there, how much incremental benefit will we see in 2025 from those two facilities?
Great question, so it's very good news after investing over a billion dollars in capital in two very important and strategic projects for us. It's a big milestone to be exiting 2024 on a run rate of fully delivering the contributions we expected from an operational point of view, so that's a big checkmark. When you think about the guidance we provided to $634 million, that's a little over $110 or $15 million improvement, maybe over our LTM last 12 months. The heavy hitters in that are two items. I think there are four maybe that would bridge most of the gap, but the heavy hitters are two items in terms of materiality. Number one, a return to more normal pork market conditions, kind of the full year benefit of a return to more normal pork market conditions.
We're there now for the most part, but hadn't been for all of last year, obviously, and the contribution from those two capital projects. So when you think about the materiality of going from A to B and a pretty significant uptick again next year, it's the full year benefits of those two large capital projects. It's a return to more normal market conditions in pork. It's the work we're doing in profitably growing our brands, of course, and the innovation plans for 2024 and 2025 taking hold, and then the cost reduction work that we're starting to talk about.
Yeah. Okay. And we'll get to that in a second. I want to ask, though, when you were talking about the sort of ramp-up of facilities in the latest communication, you also mentioned the Walker Road facility, which I don't think has been as sort of clearly honed in on by the market as London and bacon. Maybe you could just talk about what was the investment there, what was done, and what's the EBITDA benefit?
Yeah. One of the consequences of having two big projects like that is you tend to stop talking about the other ones. And one of the investments we made was in our Walker Drive facility. It's further processed poultry. And we basically put a new line into the facility, so new capital, new equipment. And it was done to support a very material and important food service relationship to us in the Canadian market as an anchor tenant, which is great. What's really exciting about it is it's in a lot of ways related to or tied to our London poultry investment, meaning the raw material that comes from London poultry shows up at Walker Drive. In this case, it's RWA. It's converted to a more value-added further processed poultry product shipped out and shows up on a menu of one of our food service customers.
So that's a really cool outcome. We took the two big capital projects and we broke them out. We haven't kind of done the same on the Walker, on some of the smaller ones. And I don't think we will, but it is a contributing factor to CAD 634 million next year. So when you start to think about having confidence that we have the building blocks in place to get there, that's one more capital project with great returns attached to it that gives us a pathway to get there.
Yeah. Okay. You also mentioned sort of a strategic manufacturing review that's also sort of underway. And clearly, there's been massive investment and overhaul to the manufacturing base over the last sort of decade or so. So what would that entail?
We've kind of branded it Fuel for Growth, and that's exactly how we see it playing out in terms of either a cost reduction that flows to the bottom line or fuel for us to invest in the balance of the business. And I'm sure over the course of the next 36 months, there'll be both. There are three components to our Fuel for Growth initiatives. The first is getting the SG&A right, and we've done a pretty significant reorganization in the fourth quarter of last year, mostly in the commercial and operations functions of the business. Downsized our executive team, downsized the next level below that, and kind of realigned the headcount in the organization in a way that will provide some benefit for 2025 and moving forward.
There'll be a second phase to that, Mark. That's naturally aligned to the spinout of the Canada Packers business, so more of the enabling functions in terms of optimizing the SG&A at that time, so the first component's SG&A. The second is in the area of supply chain and probably procurement most notably. We brought in an outside partner in the fourth quarter and did a pretty extensive kind of sprint project in optimizing our transportation, packaging, ingredients, spices, corrugate, all that good stuff. Procurement buy, kind of leveraging our combined scale in the fourth quarter. That will yield some benefits in 2025 as well, so we're pretty happy with a successful outcome there. That's number two, and number three is the manufacturing component that you talked about. Important to note that like all manufacturing networks, we have capacity utilization opportunities.
The best way to tap that is to sell it out. And that's certainly priority number one. Unlikely that we'll be touching the big investments that we've more recently made, London, the Bacon Centre of Excellence, although undoubtedly in the work, I'm sure we'll uncover opportunities. More so those smaller peripheral plants around the edges haven't been invested in the same way. So there's either technology and automation opportunities, capacity utilization opportunities, footprint reduction opportunities. I'll give you one real quick maybe example because it's public now. We have a manufacturing facility in Brantford, Ontario. It's more than 100 years old. It makes further processed poultry products. We're retiring it. I think closing would be too harsh of a word. After 100 years, we're retiring the facility. It would require a very significant amount of capital to continue to run.
And more importantly, we can take all of the production that's there and move it to other Maple Leaf manufacturing facilities today that make further processed poultry products. So we boost the efficiency of those facilities, and we shed the overhead and have a redundant property at Brantford. So that's a pretty good outcome in terms of cost savings that will contribute. And I'm sure we'll find all kinds of opportunities from a manufacturing point of view. But I would think of that as more of a multi-year journey and less so of a Q1 or Q2 2025 item.
Yeah. Okay. Dennis, I'm going to ask you a question in a second, but one more for Curtis just to sort of wrap this up with regards to the SG&A and sort of these other sort of pillars of the fuel for growth. You sort of touched on it there. Some of it is sort of longer tail, so maybe not necessarily impacting '25, but the SG&A clearly will. So just to clarify, the materiality of that is down the list from commodity, London, and bacon. And then would SG&A sort of be the third piece?
Yeah. I think the one plant closure I talked about, the Walker investment and the returns, the SG&A components, those are all the balance of the building blocks that help us get to the 634 and why we had confidence in providing that as an outlook.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. Dennis, we, I think, have had some more clarity about the timing of the spinout and targeted leverage. I think that was well received by investors. Those were a lot of questions that we were getting. But maybe you could just talk at a high level about the sort of strategic priorities for Canada Packers and how you expect the sort of first 12-18 months as a standalone company to play out.
Sure. Yeah. Thanks, Mark. Yeah. Like Curtis said, two and a half to three times debt to start. And in our business, the balance sheet will sort of lead the way. One of the things I think that's missing just a bit is just how much cash this business can generate. And when we get to the prospectus in May, in summertime, people will see that. So the ability to generate cash. And then what we have is some internal organic opportunities. Our manufacturing facility is underutilized today. So capital light to no capital at all abilities to tap into that, which will grow top and bottom line. We also have what I've been calling shovel-ready projects, simple from CAD 500,000-CAD 5 million projects that as cash comes in, we can enact those projects that will also help us operate more efficiently.
And then as we look into the future, it's sort of three years down the road. When we get through that, those years, what are we going to do with the cash? Right? And so it's share buybacks and dividends are sort of maybe the easy default. But when we think about M&A, one of the things I think is appealing about for Canada Packers is the types of assets that we would look at tend to be the types of assets that people are willing to sell. If we're going to be sort of that mid-single digit multiple that we think we can find some really attractive businesses, we're really more focused on cost synergy opportunities than revenue synergy opportunities that could plug in and just continue to help us grow as we go forward.
Yeah. Okay. Understood. And I'm curious just knowing that the spinout is in progress and in process, and there's sort of a clear timeline on it, how does that affect how you run the business, the Pork Complex business today?
That's a good question. For a while, it took a while to figure out exactly how to operate. I mean, I think Curtis and I have a great relationship. So working through this real-time has been a learning experience over the last couple of years. This is, it might be new to the folks in here, but it's been talked about in this company long before I showed up, so for over the last two years. And what happens is you end up running double duties. You have to run the business and then also set up the new entity.
But we have a great team, whether they're the remaining folks that are going to stay with Maple Leaf or the people that are going to come to Canada Packers, just a phenomenal sort of flight of talent that have been able to do that double duty and really set us up in a good position to launch and be successful. The heavy lift, obviously, is in the sort of IT and financial areas, and it's been admirable. It's too early to congratulate everybody, but I can tell you we're both really pretty proud of the work that's going on.
Yeah. Good. Good. And Curtis, what do you think the spinout means for sort of Maple Leaf and the remaining business? I mean, on the one hand, they've sort of been running somewhat separately, but now it's fully separate. Does it make a difference for Maple Leaf, do you think?
Well, I mean, I'm excited for both companies. At the end of the day, Maple Leaf will be a shareholder in Canada Packers. So a pretty important business to us, one we believe in. And I'm personally excited to be a shareholder on behalf of Maple Leaf Foods in the business. The supply agreement in particular is a very important strategic element to Maple Leaf Foods, meaning protecting the security of high-quality Canadian supply. That's good for both Dennis and I. That supply agreement is positive and constructive for both of us. For Maple Leaf Foods, where I'm probably the most excited is in the area of focus.
Dennis talked about the distractions that naturally come with a couple of years of knowledge of a transaction of this size and the disruption that creates in a company, all happening at the same time as a pandemic, a post-pandemic economy, some of the things we've endured over the past couple of years, so I'm excited for focus. I think focus is very healthy for all companies, but certainly will be for ours, and clarity around capital allocation, having two companies with two very exciting strategic agendas for the next number of years, having the ability to deploy capital in their own way, I think is pretty exciting.
Yeah. I wanted to just ask about tariffs, and you mentioned about the supply agreement between the two companies, but more broadly, how do you think about sort of the impact on Maple Leaf and the agricultural complex overall with risk on tariffs?
I think it's a very important moment for Canada. I'm hopeful that we'll be courageous. In terms of Maple Leaf Foods, as I said earlier, we have about a $500 million business in the United States. There are three components to that. The first is a plant protein made and sold in the United States, so no impact in any material way from a tariff point of view, made and sold in the United States. The second is in our fresh pork business. I think Dennis would concur tariffs would likely force us to redirect that meat somewhere else in the world. That's very manageable, but function of time, but somewhat manageable, would be a way to describe it. The third is our consumer-packaged goods business that goes south of the border.
CAD 500 million in revenue, 9% of our business, one part plant protein made and sold in the U.S., one part pork can be redirected over the course of time. And the CPG business, that would be problematic. The financial implications of tariff are almost entirely related to our Canadian government's response. For example, if we lose access to the U.S. market with a 25% price increase, essentially, and we don't impose dollar-for-dollar, like-for-like counter tariffs, that means the Americans would have full access to our Canadian economy, but we wouldn't have access to theirs. That would be a problem. And I think one we'd be disappointed in as an outcome. If there was a kind of a matching effect, I think you probably would see a relatively neutral situation. We'd have more opportunities in the Canadian market in terms of backfilling sales that maybe didn't flow over the border.
And over the course of time, I'd like to think that those things would even out. So, there's the old saying, plan for the worst and hope for the best. I think that's exactly where we are. We've built a pretty detailed SKU by SKU, customer by customer preparedness plans for, in the event that something should happen here in the next short little while, which we wouldn't be surprised if it did, but we're hopeful that it won't.
Yeah. Understood. Fair enough. I want to come back to poultry just because that's such a, it's been a very, I mean, it's clearly a material part of your business. It's been an issue and a pressure on the profitability through 2024. I know some of the action is from a regulatory perspective to sort of balance out supply and demand. How close are we to that being sort of enacted and what needs to happen for that to get into balance?
Yeah. I'll answer your balance question shortly. I should have noted on the tariff file: no impact in our poultry business given poultry supply management in the Canadian market. A frequent question we often get from investors is what's the impact of tariffs on the London investment, for example, and that would be virtually zero. No poultry gets exported to the United States. On the issue of markets and kind of balance in the poultry portfolio, seeing some was an issue, particularly in the first half of last year, the imbalance in the supply-demand equation in poultry markets. That's for the most part evened out as the year progressed. We left 2024 in a better place, more closely in line with the balance. We are expecting allocations to grow at around 2%-3% in 2025. That's about in line with like a 10-year average.
You can kind of historically count on 2% or 3% growth. That supports the revenue line, which is good. As long as the consumer demand is there, I think you'll see more normal levels of balance in 2025, or at least that's the early outlook.
Yeah. Okay. And I want to finish with a question just with regards to the 14% to 16% because that's what you've talked about for a long time. For this year, you're talking about sort of 12.5%. That's with the full contribution of London and bacon, and that's with a normalized commodity environment. So how should investors think about the bridge from there to 14%, and how can we sort of get confidence in that?
I'll start by saying we're equally disappointed we're not there today. That goal was set in 2017, and there's been a few external factors that have influenced the timeline. Didn't plan for a pandemic, didn't plan for a war in the Ukraine, didn't plan for a few of these things. So that's a complicating factor. The fact that we've guided to the mid-12s with a North Star that remains 14%-16%, I think is encouraging. The reason I say it's encouraging is there's nothing that I've seen in the potential of the business that would prevent us from getting there on a forward-looking view function of timing. We thought it was appropriate to put out the right marker for the progress we would make in 2025. It's really marked the consumer element is the last of the difficult to accurately predict.
I'm certainly not an economist, so I won't nail that one perfectly. But that's really the last of the kind of the remaining gap, the implications of the consumer environment and the pace of recovery. I think that's probably our number one complicating factor next year, number two being how the trade environment works out. Certainly, not planning for a material disruption in terms of our outlook, but being mindful of the external factor there too.
Yeah. Good. Well, I look forward to seeing the progress.
Yeah, me too.
Thanks for your time, guys. Appreciate it.
Thank you.