Just take a minute to introduce the rest of my team, and there are some new faces there. First, introduce Ty Collin, who joined our team last fall and has launched coverage on a handful of consumer names with more to come. He's off to a great start and certainly a very valued member of the team, and he's going to take the stage and close off the conference at the end of the day. Also want to introduce Chantel Pearce, who joined our team last month, as well as Nishant Rathi, who has been on the team for—he's the seasoned veteran of the team, been on it for almost two years. Please don't hesitate to reach out to any of us for help today or in the future.
Of course, also a special thank you to the conference team for organizing all of the investor meetings and putting this event together: Janet, Riley, Lindsay, the rest of the events team, and of course, Steph and Laura and everyone else behind the scenes. Fantastic job as always, and I'm grateful for your support. You're not here to hear me ramble on, so let's get into the sessions, and I'll invite Saputo CEO Carl Colizza to join me on stage. Want to work? These things are fixed. All right, it's a pleasure to welcome Saputo back to the conference here for the first time in a few years, and the first time for CEO Carl Colizza. Carl's been with Saputo for over 25 years, coming up through the ranks in operations and then running each of Canada, Argentina, and the U.S. before being appointed CEO last August.
Welcome, Carl.
Thank you, Mark. Pleasure to be here.
I think maybe the best way to handle the Q&A is to sort of maybe just move region by region for the business. We'll start with the U.S. You guys have been on a bit of a journey with regards to capital investments for a few years now. Last quarter, you quantified the benefits of about $30 million. Maybe you can just sort of review the key milestones that you've reached and the key milestones from here.
Sure. In the U.S., absolutely, we're able to capture about $30 million worth of benefits from the investments that we've put into our business over the last couple of years, and there's still more to come. As we take a look at where we are in our journey, we're almost there when it comes to completing the cycle of network optimization, the investments in automation. More specifically, if I look at some of the cheese manufacturing assets in the mozzarella space, we're pretty much done. We are enjoying the benefits of the new technologies that we're employing, the capacity that comes with that, and that has been contributing to our bottom line.
When I take a look at aspects of our cut and wrap, and if we go back to the principles behind the cut and wrap investments, it was really to help us better respond to market needs and, more importantly, consumer needs. As we all know, consumers are regularly changing, if you like, or adapting to various needs, and we needed the assets to be able to bring those products to market. Our investment in our Franklin site was a consolidation of four other cut and wrap facilities, if you like, and that is ramping up as we speak. The last of the facilities, which is Green Bay, our Green Bay operation that needs to fold into Franklin, will happen by the end of the calendar year, and that will be what brings the largest amount of, I'll say, return for that investment.
The largest part of the contribution from Franklin is yet to come, and that will happen by the end of the calendar year. If we take a look going forward, we did say that we'd be targeting about $100 million this year from those investments. We're on track to deliver that by the end of our fiscal, and if we look into next year, there's certainly more to come. That's the U.S platform, but of course, there's benefits that have been rolling in from the investments we've made across the world. In Canada, for the most part, we're done. What we have and what's rolling into the business today, investments through network optimization and automation, is fully contributing. Australia as well, we're done with our network optimization, so what we're seeing today is more of a steady state.
The U.K., however, is one area where we're maybe two-thirds of the way through it. There's more to be done, but I'll say that there's some more upside in taking costs out of the U.K. business and improving the overall margin structure.
Yeah. Okay, we'll come around or back to the U.K. topic a little bit later, but maybe just sticking with the U.S., could you just talk a little bit about the commodity landscape? It's been a very, very volatile one. Some of the more recent moves have actually been maybe favorable or positive for Saputo, so could you just sort of walk us through what are the biggest impacts on the commodity market for Saputo today?
The reality is that the price of milk has been moving around quite a bit, and that is a function of the traded block commodity, if you like, so block cheese. Where we had seen, I'll say, in the past six months, a steady increase, if you want, in the block price and some stability in it as well, that does help the business. It helps with managing the spread, but we unfortunately also had, at the same time, a sharp rise in the whey price. As the whey commodity pricing increases, that also contributes to pushing up the price of Class III milk. At the end of the day, because we can go on and on about all of these components, I think the most important piece is the following. In the U.S. today, milk is balanced with demand.
In fact, demand in the U.S., although positive, isn't in the territory of 2%-3% like it was in prior years. It hovers between 0% and 1.5% depending on which category of goods, but milk off farm has also been flat year over year. That has helped keep that balance in check. Inventories of cheese and/or other dairy ingredients are also well balanced. Despite softness on the consumer side, despite all of these trade wars going on and the implications that it will have to the U.S. commodity space, inventories are not at all-time highs by any means. I think we're seeing something where we should be able to have some reasonable stability, but of course, traders are being very, very cautious. They know there's liquidity and capacity in the market, so they're not going out there and buying futures; they're buying for today.
You get what you get from a volatility standpoint.
Yeah, understood. Okay, not to get too technical, but I do want to just ask about the markets that you're sort of seeing in refined proteins, WPC 80 and the like, very important part of your value chain. How has that market evolved as you've seen this sort of play out with milk and whey and cheese?
Protein is top of mind for every consumer today in many respects, and when you take a look at what dairy does bring to that space, the value offering for that protein and how complete it is, it makes dairy sort of that one-stop shop for all sorts of proteins for food manufacturers. We have been riding, I'll say, a positive wave when it comes to higher fraction proteins. By that, in pecking order, we're dealing with sweet whey powder, which would be the lowest of commodities, to the highest concentration of protein in what we call WPI, which would be an 85% or greater.
For the most part, the full spectrum of protein has been in demand, including sweet whey powder, but we are enjoying globally a strong demand for our whey protein concentrates in that sector, and we do not see that demand slowing really because protein power is very much in the now, whether it is GLP drugs or other. One of the few things that people do complement, I will say, that diet or the choice that they have made with is protein. I think that as we move forward, we are absolutely going to continue to see strong demand for the byproducts, the value-added whey proteins, and we are going to see cheese manufacturers manufacture cheese in part to ensure that they have a strong whey stream for that market.
Yeah, understood. Okay, on that topic, I guess maybe you could just talk about the sort of supply landscape in the U.S. right now. There's been a lot of investment or some sizable investments with regards to capacity across the dairy industry, specifically in mozzarella, but in other categories where Saputo competes. How have you seen those come on board, and what's your sort of view about the overall competitive landscape?
Yeah, it is true. There has been an important quantity of investments made in cheese manufacturing and mozzarella as well. It is a split between mozzarella and cheddar, and you could argue that there is more mozzarella being put online than the market needs, but the reality is that from a mozzarella perspective, the reason people gravitate to it is it is also because it is the cleanest whey stream. It is also the best stream to be using to be making WPC products and the protein side. You can see where those two align very well with one another. Overall, when you think of the capacity that has gone online, it is not all a net new. There are going to be dilapidated and defunct assets coming out of the space. We are already starting to see it. We saw some in California and the Northeast that are decommissioned as these come online.
I think that despite the quantity of cheese capacity, physical capacity, the milk isn't there yet to fill all of those. It will do one of two things. You're going to see a slow ramp up from that that'll be closer to what demand growth looks like. The other thing is it may also accelerate the exit of smaller sites because as milk funnels to the larger sites, there will be some smaller facilities and entities that will be starved of milk.
Yeah, okay. Maybe a little bit related to that topic is this change to the U.S. milk price formula, which has an estimated positive impact to you guys. I think you quantified it at about $60 million or $70 million of EBITDA based on last year's prices and volumes, but it also has an impact on other parts of the value chain in milk, including the farmer. What is your sort of sense of how that milk price formula change will impact the industry?
The short of it is that this is the processor margin or allocation that's provided in the formulas for building the cost of milk, and it hasn't been changed in decades. I think it's about 17 years since the last time that that formula was tweaked, and of course, over 17 years, we've had numerous years of high inflation. This is really just correcting the past, if you like. Yes, we estimated that the benefit, should the mix of production that we have in the coming fiscal be that of what we had in arrears , we would estimate about $60 million or $70 million benefit from that. It's going to take several quarters. First of all, it only begins June to July in that timeframe.
It's going to take several quarters for things to sort of settle out, and by settling out is because at the end of the day, yes, the subsidization for that will come from other classes of milk. When we look at what that's going to translate to, fundamentally, some of the farm base may be looking at ways of capturing that value differently, and it's either going to come from two things. They're going to build more milk, so they're going to want to size up farms and look to capture that investment that they're making in the processor community through incremental volume. Happening with the actual availability of milk, you may end up in a scenario whereby their milk premiums will be increased.
It'll take a little while before this all kind of settles out, but fundamentally, we do believe that it's going to help the business continue to remain relevant with consumers, allow us to continue to invest in our business so that that cycle can continue. That's fundamentally how it was sold, if I can say it that way, to the farming community. This is about our industry as a whole. It's not about one part.
Yeah, understood. Okay, let's pivot a little bit. We'll talk about Canada. Obviously, been a market of meaningful strength for you guys, the market where you have a very strong representation in retail, so that's definitely been a tailwind. We don't need to go through necessarily all of the drivers of the strength exactly, but what's your general sense of the outlook for the Canadian market from here, and what are the dynamics that you're seeing in the consumer?
I will say that from a Saputo perspective, we're very well positioned to be able to capture any of the changes in consumer habits that are imminent. I mean, let's not kid ourselves. What's going on from a trade war is going to have an impact on our consumers, on all of us and our consumer base, and they're going to be making choices, whether that is trading down from full-service restaurants to quick service or more in-home, making choices at the retail space and all of what comes with it. The strength of Saputo, Canada, comes from its diversity and the diversity that we have in being able to supply all of those channels I just mentioned and the breadth of the portfolio in all aspects.
We have the fortunes of being able to interact with consumers at multiple times a day, so every meal event and everything in between, we have something that we can offer the consumer base. I think that from a Saputo perspective, we're very well positioned to react and adapt as we've shown during the pandemic. I think that that's going to be something that we're going to continue to lean on as the dynamics play out in front of us.
Have you been seeing much shift? Just I know it's all kind of relatively short timelines, but have you been seeing much shift in consumer demand over the last month or two?
We have, but to be honest, it isn't all related to the most recent trade war rhetoric or other. Prior to that, we started to see a bit of a slowdown in the, I'll say, the full-service or white cloth sort of food service space trading down, if you can call it that. We have been seeing some shifts in that space and, of course, value. Value is regardless of the channel that you're in, and for that, what we have been seeing in particular is an uptick in the private label, if you like, demand. Of course, we are absolutely suppliers to that space along with our brands.
Yeah, and have you seen much reaction globally, or is it really just Canada at this point?
No, it's everywhere. Yeah, we are seeing it, and interestingly, last night over dinner, we were talking about a number of things, but we were also talking about just the overall consumer sentiment, and we are seeing the American consumer as well making different choices. Once again, this has happened prior to the conversations around trade wars or other before even the change in administration. Yes, we have a close ear and more than that, a dedicated team on insights ensuring that we continue to bring to market and amplify our capabilities and capacity in the areas that we think are going to win the day.
I know this is somewhat of an impossible question to answer, and you've already talked about it publicly, including on the last conference call, earnings call, but yeah, any comments sort of about the regulatory environment, how Canada is positioned with supply management? Clearly, that's a topic that's come up from President Trump on numerous occasions over many years. What's your sort of general view on the status of supply management in Canada?
Oddly enough, flying in yesterday, I woke up and thought about Canadian dairy again. I think what we're going to see is we're going to continue to see dairy in the spotlight, possibly supply management, and I'll kind of separate the two because it isn't supply management necessarily that the Trump administration is looking to attack or dismantle in any way. First, the conversation is very disproportionate. The impact of what they feel to be unfair treatment in the dairy space is very, very small. It's just an easy subject matter for him to pipe up about. Having said that, when I take a look at what they're ultimately looking to resolve, they're looking to resolve a bunch of irritants that exist within the existing USMCA deal with Canada on the dairy side in particular, and the renegotiation will occur if not already started the review.
Before I talk about negotiations, I'll say review will occur in July. That process will happen, there's no doubt, but I think we're going to get to an end where the resolution will happen through USMCA or CUSMA, and when it comes to supply management as a whole, Canada will continue to enjoy the system that we have. Why I say enjoy is because this is a good example, and this moment is a good example where we talk about the resilience, we talk about food security, we talk about the autonomy and sovereignty that we have. The reality is that dairy has always been there. Have we missed anything on the shelves over the last several decades or other? No. The products are there. We're not seeing ebbs and flows in pricing like we see in the U.S., and they're focused on the Canadian market.
The flip side is in the U.S., depending on where the wind blows and where the opportunities are in the world markets, there's a greater share of sometimes a percentage of the milk that just moves over the exports, and you're kind of ignoring the domestic market. There are pros and cons to it all, but at the end of the day, I feel very strongly that the kind of territory that we cover here in Canada as a population, as a country, supply management serves us well.
Yeah, and it's not dairy related, but the egg experience in the U.S. right now is kind of a perfect case study for something like supply management.
It absolutely does, and there's a lot of correlation there, if you like, or similarities on the size of farms or other.
Yeah.
The diversity that we have in Canadian farms and farm sizes is actually a strength for us at this moment.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, a bit of a different topic. I want to ask about the appointment of Leanne as Chief Commercial Officer. That's a role that had not existed at Saputo previously, so maybe you could just sort of walk us through why you felt like it was an important position to create or office to create and what you expect the impacts of that to be and what you've seen so far.
For those who have followed the Saputo story, I think you can appreciate that over 25+ years, Saputo's growth has been in part associated to an assembly of regional and local brands that we've been able to be successful with in addition to the platform that we acquired over those years. I'll say with a lot of respect and pride in what we've been able to accomplish with the platforms that we've had, we spent a lot of time talking about our operations and being efficient, so on and so forth. The collection of brands and the strength that we have in that, a lot of it was, I'm going to use the word inherited in nature.
Now what we're looking to do fundamentally through the appointment of Leanne, considering that our growth and a lot of it will come organically, we need to do better with those brands. We need to have a more robust plan on how we're going to remain relevant with the consumers, and we all know that the consumers is changing, if you want, some of their habits and their expectations rather quickly. Leanne's role and her team fundamentally is going to be, if I look at it in a number of different pillars, one, we're going to beef up our consumer insights so that we ensure that we have brands and an offering that remains relevant for today and tomorrow. Furthermore, we're going to take a look at emerging markets.
We are absolutely well positioned today with the platforms that we have around the world and the milk sheds we operate in to be a broader supplier to the world. Today, yes, we sell to, I think it's over 70 countries, but we do that in different ways. Some of them is indirectly through brokers, but we're looking to establish more feet, if you like, in various territories to be able to be a long-term supplier and partner for that matter to a number of these areas. Part of Leanne's role is supporting our brands, getting the best out of what we can do in a focused manner, as well as helping us with emerging markets and expanding the territories that we offer our goods in.
Yeah, understood. Okay, maybe we'll talk about a couple of those markets in the time that we have remaining. Australia, I mean, you touched on it earlier. It's been a region with a lot of challenges over the last several years in terms of pricing and volumes, both on demand and supply, but it seems like, as you alluded to, it's in better balance today. What's the sort of general view on the outlook for Australia right now?
We did what we needed to do, so we did shrink our platform considerably so that we were not in a position where we were constantly chasing milk to fill up assets that were dormant. We did what we needed to do. The journey for that is all but complete now, and we find ourselves in a space where the Australian milk supply is fairly stable. Yes, it has declined, as we know, over the last 10 years or so, but we are at a spot where we have access to the milk we require to grow our domestic business as well as allowing us to, at a price, the Australian milk price is competitive today in global markets and allowing us to serve our Japanese and Southeast Asian markets from that platform.
We're pleased with where we're at, and now we're looking to be more of a normal state of optimization, everyday optimization, looking to continue to add value in the market space. One of the areas in particular that we're looking to ramp up in Australia is going to be the food service space because it's an area where we don't have as much of a presence as we do in our North American markets, and we know it's an opportunity.
Okay, and there's been some reports of assets for sale in that market. Where does Australia rank in sort of your priority list for international operations? Is that something you would consider?
To be fair, I'll answer the question sort of with all of our businesses. Each of our businesses today has a place in our portfolio, an important one for that matter, and diversification, especially today when you think about what's going on around the world and who's going to have preferential treatment with trade here and there, our diversification is a strength. We're very happy with what we have today, and for just about every region that we're in that is an exporting, so basically Canada and the U.K. are not real exporters per se. Everything else, we're in a very good milk shed to be able to continue to export from. If I go back to Australia and I say, where does it fit?
Australia is a great opportunity for us to continue to service the domestic market, which is very Canadian-like in nature, and continue to provide our customers in the basin that I described earlier with continued products in Japan and Southeast Asia, which is growing in their dairy demand. We are in a great spot there. When it comes to other assets being for sale or other, of course, if there is something, as I'll say, as large as what has come to market today and will transform what Oceania will probably look like from a dairy space, we have our eyes and ears open. We are doing our SWOT analysis to understand what that is going to mean and could mean for Saputo.
Yes, we have our hands in things, but just as we do across the world when we think about something of that size coming to market and what it could mean for Saputo.
Yeah, okay, let's talk about Argentina, where Australia has been sort of coming into greater stability. Argentina has been seeing quite a bit of volatility. It's now the whole FX situation, hyperinflation. You've talked about it quite a bit, but what's your sort of outlook on that market? What is the potential for those conditions to normalize or potentially even revert to what it was, or are those days sort of just gone given the changes we've seen in sort of the governance of Argentina?
I'm actually bullish, to be honest, about Argentina. For all of the years and the kind of devaluation that we have seen, the kind of inflation that we have seen, the hyperinflation accounting that we've had to come to master over the years, one of the things that has been very foundational for us in Argentina is first, we are the largest dairy processor in the country. We're also the most efficient dairy processor. That's a processor in the country. That's what's allowed us to kind of weather the storm and be successful through that because we're able to, it's probably the market where we can move between domestic and exports as opportunistically as possible. When you're talking about stainless steel assets, we can do that best in Argentina. I take a look at where the country is headed today.
The population of Argentina has certainly toughed it out and will continue to tough it out, but they're getting to a spot where when you look at the devaluation of the peso and you take a look at where inflation is at, that gap has narrowed. It is going to bring stability, in fact, to the country. It is going to bring stability, more importantly for us, to the farming community for them to have the confidence to continue to invest in their space and to continue to produce milk, and that will continue to bring the opportunities that it has always had. Argentina's milk shed is very strong in price, and Argentina, and I take a look at the Argentinian government today, they are more open than ever to have trade agreements built around the world.
If I were to go back and talk about the biggest barrier impediment to Argentinian export growth, it's historically been the lack of trade agreements with other countries. Today the government that's in place is very much looking to expand Argentina's reach, and I think that, and I know that we're very, very well positioned to be able to capture that should those opportunities from a government policy perspective come to fruition.
Yeah, okay, and I want to just finish with Europe, and it's okay if we go a minute or two over just as you look at the time there, but you took a pretty sizable write-down with that business last quarter, sort of the deferral of expectations on a margin recovery. Maybe you could just walk through sort of the dynamics of that, and then what are the key steps or milestones that need to happen in order to get that back to the sort of mid-teens EBITDA margin level that you've talked about?
Yeah, so I think we kind of qualified that the mechanics of the write-down was really a function of the line of sight to the kind of cash flow required to justify the valuation that we had. When you take a look at what's occurred over the last four years since the pandemic, in five years now, I guess in the U.K., there's been a heavy level of inflation. Whatever we had here in North America, double that, and that's pretty much what the U.K. population has been faced with, and that's put a lot of pressure on the cost of milk fundamentally. The cost of milk and the selling price of cheese as a whole, that's compressed over the years.
Our ability to maintain the margin that we have, even in the high single digits, we'll call it 10%, came from some of the cost-out initiatives that we've put in place. As we look at the next couple of years, how we're going to grow that margin structure in the U.K. is going to come more so off of further cost-out scenarios. As I mentioned earlier on in the conversation, we're about two-thirds of the way there. We still have some cut and wrap operations to deal with. We're revisiting, I'll say, some of our whey operations and the choices that we make around the value stream that there is there, and we're going to continue to support the market-leading brand that we do have in Cathedral City. It is still the number one cheddar brand in the U.K.
We're in a strong position, but a lot of that margin structure will come from removing costs than it is going to be about lowering necessarily the overall milk pool cost.
Yeah, understood. Okay, appreciate your time, Carl. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for the time.
Yeah.
Thank you, that's great.
Thank you.