Welcome to the Post Holdings second quarter 2026 earnings conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two.
Others can hear your questions clearly, we ask that you pick up your handset for best sound quality. Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to turn the call over to Daniel O'Rourke, Investor Relations for Post.
Good morning. Thank you for joining us today for Post Holdings second quarter fiscal 2026 earnings question and answer session. I'm joined this morning by Rob Vitale, our Chairman and CEO, Nico Catoggio, our COO, and Matt Mainer, our CFO and Treasurer. This call is being recorded and an audio replay will be available on our website at postholdings.com.
During today's call, we may make forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that should be carefully considered by investors as actual results could differ materially from these statements. These forward-looking statements are current as of the date of this call.
Management undertakes no obligation to update these statements. The press release and written management remarks that support today's call are posted on our website in the Investors section. This call will discuss certain non-GAAP measures.
For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP measure, see our press release issued yesterday and posted on our website. We hope you had a chance to review our management remarks. The key highlights are that our diversified portfolio had strong performance in Q2 and delivered Adjusted EBITDA above expectations.
Given new headwinds from the conflict in the Middle East, we maintained our previous Adjusted EBITDA guidance. We continued aggressive share repurchases, and fiscal year to date we have reduced our share count by 15%. Our strong cash flow, liquidity and credit metrics continue to afford us significant flexibility for opportunistic capital allocations. With that, I'll briefly turn the call over to Matt.
Hey, thanks, Daniel. Setting aside the business performance, I'm sure you all saw our announcement yesterday on our CEO succession plans. First of all, on behalf of our whole team, congratulations to Nico. Really well deserved.
You've done a fantastic job leading PCB, and we are confident that will translate to more of the same as you transition into leading Post. To Rob, we have all learned from the best and truly appreciate your leadership over the past 12 years. As much as Rob is respected by so many on this phone call, it is even more so within the walls of our company. With that, I will turn the call over to the operator for Q&A.
The floor is now open for questions. At this time, if you have a question or comment, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question is answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Again, we ask that you pick up your handset when posing your questions to provide optimal sound quality. Thank you. Our first question comes from Andrew Lazar with Barclays. Your line is now open.
Great. Thanks so much. Rob, congratulations to you on a terrific run as CEO, and glad you're staying on as Chairman. All I can say is I think many other packaged food names would benefit mightily from taking a page from your operating and capital allocation playbook. Nico, congratulations to you on being named COO.
Thank you.
To start, yeah, sure. Just a question maybe on pricing for the industry and Post. I mean, I realize there is still quite a bit of uncertainty, but should the industry face another round of more significant inflation, do you think pricing could be one of the levers used this time around given consumers have been kind of already pushing back on price points where they are today and some are actually lowering prices with, you know, less than stellar results thus far? I'm just curious on your view on that and how does Post sort of think about that?
Thanks, Andrew. What I would say is it depends on where inflation falls. If it is in the low single digit, I think we'll see more of CPGs trying to absorb that within their P&L, and that could be in the form of maybe lowering promotional intensity. If it is more than that, we will probably see more targeted pricing.
Maybe just on pet food. I'm trying to get a sense of what our expectations should be going forward in pets. Because I think this quarter, the current quarter, I believe, is when the restage really happens in earnest in the marketplace. How do you think about turning a brand around in a subcategory of dry dog food that's, you know, sort of struggling a bit right now relative to some other parts of pet?
Yeah. On pet, I think about it in kind of three big buckets. One is a bit out of our control. That is the category has been slower than what we anticipated, and especially dry dog food. 60% of our portfolio is dry dog food. As we shared in our remarks, that was 4% down in pounds. That's about 20% of our kind of gap to the category. The rest you can think about it is half and half in two buckets. One is what we shared on 9Lives. 9Lives.
We raised prices on a third of the brand that is more functional. As we raised prices, we saw higher elasticities than what we anticipated. We lost exclusion in a couple of retailers. That in our mind is fairly straightforward. It's if you remember less than a year ago, we were having the same conversation about Gravy Train.
We raised prices. Remember that these brands have lower margins, and that's why we do what we do. We focus on profit. We remember Gravy Train, we raised prices, we saw the same elasticities. We fixed that with rollbacks in the short term, and now we've fixed it with price pack architecture. That brand in one of our largest retailers is growing at 40% in pounds now.
We see it as the same playbook, right? We tried price point. Elasticity was a bit higher. We can solve it in the short term with rollbacks. Longer term, call it, 2 quarters from now, we should fix it with price pack architecture. It's fairly straightforward. The third bucket is Nutrish.
We are in early stages of the relaunch, that will take probably the entire Q3 to actually fully hit the market. It's happening, it's flowing in, it's still, especially in the food channel, taking a bit longer to be fully reflected on shelf. That one, if you remember, we commented on that one. It's a full relaunch with new positioning, new packaging and new price points.
What we feel encouraged about is where it's been fully relaunched, one of our largest retailers, we are already seeing sequential improvement week after week. The last week of April, we already saw the brand flat to last year in a category that is again declining. That's a positive, but it's still early on and we probably need a couple more months. By Q4, we should actually start seeing the category kind of showing at least flat slight growth versus year ago. That's how we think about that.
Great. Thanks so much for the color. Congratulations again.
Thanks so much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Smith with Stifel. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning. You had another strong EBITDA and cash flow performance in the quarter, and the guidance reiteration referenced caution around new cost pressure and uncertainty. Are there specific areas of the business where you're seeing these higher costs? Are you seeing an impact from a more cautious consumer, or is the uncertainty more focused on the cost side?
Yeah, I think directly we're seeing the cost impact, Matt, really around fuel charges and surcharges. We've got some coverage or hedges in place, but this is exposure beyond those coverages and just given the dramatic increase in diesel that flows through to across the company, especially in North America. That's really the key driver.
Thanks, Matt. Just a follow-up. The cash flow performance has been strong and supported the share repurchases today while holding leverage flat. You called out the strong liquidity position Post maintained. How would you characterize the M&A environment? Are you seeing an increase in asset availability? Do you think seller expectations are reasonable? Has there been an impact to deal flow from Middle East disruption and uncertainty? Thank you.
Yeah, I think it continues to be a bit of more of the same. You know, you certainly have some assets, some private investments that haven't come to market yet, and I think that's a nod to just where public multiples are and, you know, where a clearing price might be. There's still some potential transactions sitting on the sidelines.
That aside, you know, you continue to see some of our larger competitors talk about maybe separating portions of their portfolio. We've seen it happen already in a couple of cases in the last year. I think those are larger, more transformational transactions. Again, we look at everything, but something we would evaluate. I think it's a bit of a barbell.
You have the smaller tuck-ins, that are available that are, for us, more synergistic, obviously easier to digest. I think the backdrop for us is really where our share price is trading and implied multiple. Again, we laid that out in the prepared remarks, and that's really our benchmark, our comparison. It continues to be a high bar. We continue to look at all that's out there.
Appreciate it, Matt. I'll pass it on.
Thank you. Our next question comes from David Palmer with Evercore ISI. Your line is now open.
Thanks, and congratulations on your career, so far, Rob, and all the value creation.
Thank you.
back to you, Nico. Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you. I want to ask a first question on food service profitability. You know, clearly, there was a moment of a lot of trade into, you know, higher margin value eggs since egg prices were higher and egg prices have come down, and it's been a darn good profitability run here.
I'm wondering how you're thinking about profitability evolution going forward. Maybe, you know, rising on, you know, sort of a mid-cycle profitability rising from here as you see some of your accounts doing better lately. In other words, I'm trying to figure out if $125 million a quarter is really gonna be the right run rate into fiscal 2027 or if you see upside to that. I have a follow-up.
We still see that as the run rate, again, in the quarter there were so many puts and takes between lapping HPAI, supply constraints and pricing and cost in excess of pricing last year. But our supply and demand are remaining balanced, so while we don't provide guidance segment by segment, we see us going back to our run rate.
Got it. Then similar to the previous question on pet, you know, I just wanna get a sense on cereal of your confidence in getting what I think would be your goal of a low single-digit decline rate just to really have that pull its own weight. Cereal has been rough.
Yeah.
What is the confidence in getting to that, and what's the outlook there? Thank you.
Let me start with the category. The category, as we shared in the remarks, has been better compared to where we were a year ago. For the quarter, the category was down 3% in pounds, and if you have a look at April, it's 2.5% down.
It is improving. It's still not kind of where it was pre-pandemic, but it's getting there. That's the category. Our portfolio, you are seeing some of it. We are extremely pleased with where we are. Q2 was another quarter where we were still working through the transition assortment, especially in the food channel, to actually be better prepared or have a higher return on promotional spend.
Our promotional spend was down a bit versus prior year and still, we were the only large player that actually held flat dollar market share year-over-year. We feel really good about our portfolio, and we feel good about the improvement in the category.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Thomas Palmer with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.
Good morning. I'd like to echo my congratulations to both of you and appreciate all the help, Rob, as I've ramped on Post.
Thank you.
wanted to maybe follow up on David's question on the food service business, just some of the egg dynamics. Obviously in the quarter, falling egg prices seem to be a tailwind for earnings, especially based on some of the disclosures about input costs.
I did wanna ask one on kind of the prospect of either lowering prices in your view here or whether you are seeing any maybe shift by customers given how cheap whole eggs are to kind of shifting in the direction of the more labor-intensive side of starting with whole eggs instead of buying prepared egg products. I just wanna make sure that neither of those is something we should be looking out for. Thanks.
Sure. On in terms of the switching, I think that's obviously a risk we evaluate. Honestly, given the value proposition and what we found, especially in the larger operators, is once they switch to our value-added products, they're able to take that labor out of their system and they see the benefits of the consistency, food safety, other things of the product, it's quite sticky.
I'd say the, you know, maybe the risk is around some of the smaller independent operators, which is a much smaller component of our business, where they have a little more flexibility in the back of the house to make that switch. Again, I think by and large, the majority of the portfolio sees that change as quite sticky.
Okay. Thanks for that. Wanted to ask on Weetabix, just the commentary about the license and how maybe that reported sales were a bit worse than underlying consumption trends for the broader business. How big is kind of a license impact that we should be thinking about? To what extent is 2Q reflective of the kind of the full magnitude we should be thinking about in the quarters that follow? Thanks.
Sure. In terms of what that was, that was related to Oreo O's licensing agreement that we have, and I believe we have another quarter before we fully lap that going away. In terms of just when we think about from a volume standpoint looking out the balance of the year, would expect better year-over-year performance as we lap that in the second half.
You know, I think as a reminder, we've seen the category come back to more flat, which is historically the right spot or what we've seen out of cereal in the U.K. When I say Weetabix, the yellow box product in particular has some very strong momentum behind it and continues to outperform. I think as we lap the Oreo O's and that comes away as we get into Q3, we expect you start to see better performance overall out of our portfolio with that.
Okay. Thanks for that.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Scott Marks with Jefferies. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning. Thanks so much for taking our questions and again, congrats to Nico and Rob.
Thank you.
Wanted to, you know, touch on Weetabix off the back of Thomas' question there, just more so on the profitability side. Obviously, margins on that business are still significantly below what they had been. Just wondering if you can help us understand the path back towards that, you know, 30% level and how we should be thinking about opportunities within that business.
Scott, I think first of all, just a reminder, UFit continues to grow nicely within the portfolio. It's a co-managed business, but as it grows in sales it's lower margin business, given the co-managed nature of it.
I think that's realistically taken the top off of reaching 30%, which is, you know, which is a good thing 'cause we're still growing profit dollars. In terms of just sequential improvement from where we're at now, we were able to execute some network optimization at the end of March and close a facility on the private label side, given our Deeside acquisition 2 years ago.
That was part of that plan. We were able to execute it, and that will lead to better profitability in the second half. Would expect as you look at EBITDA margins, sequential improvement, that's noticeable in Q3 and Q4 relative to the first half.
Okay. Appreciate the thoughts there. Just maybe shifting over to refrigerated retail, obviously very strong volume performance in the quarter. I know you called out a little bit of Easter, the timing benefit. Just wondering if you can help us understand the magnitude of benefit there and how we should be thinking about run rate for that business kind of in the back half. Thanks.
Sure. We saw the, you know, pretty significant lift in dinner sides or sides for the business at 12% growth. The biggest driver certainly was Easter and, you know, we see that as you look historically, when Easter falls, it's a big lift. I'd say that's a majority of that year-over-year movement given Easter was in Q3 last year, it was in Q2 this year.
The other contributor was certainly the new private label products that we've rolled out at the beginning of the fiscal year. Those continue to do well. Arguably, they probably had a little Easter momentum behind them as well, those are really the two drivers. Obviously Easter will fall away, we'll be left with continued, you know, lapping of private label introduction until we get to the end of the year.
Scott, I would add that there was some underlying volume growth for our rounded portfolio. It's just, of course, it's I mean, if you had two As, it's call it a third, between underlying volume growth, private label and Easter, you would say.
Okay. Appreciate it. Thanks. I'll pass it on.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Marc Torrente with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning, and thank you for the questions. Rob and Nico, congratulations as well. I guess just first on the incremental cost impact from energy that you are expecting, has that started to flow through the P&L yet? Is it more of a ramping dynamic through the back half? When would you decide to take pricing action if needed, and how quickly could that provide some offset?
Sure. We certainly are seeing the impacts as we got to the end of Q2 and into the beginning of Q3 here. Pretty consistent, I would say, depending on the level of hedges we had in place through the balance of the year. I think you can think of it about as a pretty average run rate, assuming the war extends to the end of the fiscal year, which is what's in our base assumption.
Pricing. Again, that one is business by business, but for the most part, right now we are assuming that we'll absorb that through the P&L. If this extends beyond this fiscal year, we will probably then consider about pricing. Again, it really depends on where inflation falls. I mean, right now we're seeing it in fuel and a little bit in packaging. If these things actually get worse, we will have to think about pricing and it's probably gonna be in the new fiscal year. But again, way too early to say.
Understood. Thank you. Maybe just an update on the performance of 8th Avenue since folding in the business. What was the contribution in the quarter since this was the first quarter of just having the ongoing business? How is the integration and synergy capture progressing? Thanks.
The underlying business performance is in line with the deal model. We are pleased. We put some takes and kind of some categories slightly better, some categories slightly worse, but for the most part, it's in line with the deal model.
We feel really good. The integration is going extremely well. Synergies are a bit ahead of the plan. We should be hitting run rate toward the end of this fiscal as we anticipated. We feel really good about the combination of both, right? The team stay focused, no distractions, the business is performing and we are probably over-delivering on the synergies.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from John Baumgartner with Mizuho Securities. Your line is now open.
Good morning. Thanks for the question. Maybe, you know, first off, just to Rob Vitale, you know, really fun ride for the past decade and just, you know, many thanks for all your insights and interactions over the years. It was a really, you know, great learning experience. Thank you and all the best in your future endeavors.
Thank you.
you know, Nico, yeah, Nico, congrats on the opportunity as well. Thank you both, you know, so much.
Thanks so much.
Relating to the ready-to-drink protein shakes, you understand this category very well. You made the capital commitment to the manufacturing facility. I'm curious, you know, first, your perspective on the sustainability of category growth and your participation as a manufacturer, just given the influx of new brands coming in, how do you think about the competitive environment through a manufacturer's lens?
Second, you know, given the B rating of public equities in RTD, and maybe that also goes for private assets as well, how do you think about re-engaging in RTD as a brand owner again? I mean, presumably it's growth accretive, free cash accretive. You get synergies from repatriating volume with a vertical operator. How do you think about your position in that category right now and going forward?
Yeah, I mean, I think that we have to be careful about questions that we answer from a perspective of BellRing. I think it's entirely appropriate to answer questions from a manufacturer, but not as a brand owner. I'll let you talk about the.
Yeah. Again, I think, you know, in terms of the shake business, you know, I think we continue to see, you know, opportunities there to grow with BellRing, we're a key supplier of theirs. We've gotten our house in better order in terms of just volume on the shake side. I think we're feeling better about that business.
We've talked about just some higher costs that we're trying to work through in terms of higher than anticipated around just the manufacturing process and some of the costs we're absorbing. On the volume side, we're seeing better performance, and there's certainly demand for the volume that we are pulling through on the BellRing side.
Thanks for that. Then my follow-up, you know, we're seeing some pockets of the industry where food service brands are making some really nice inroads in terms of market share growth in retail grocery and making that channel crossover, you know, soup, french fries, mashed potatoes. You have the presence of Bob Evans already.
I'm curious, given how tough volume growth is for a lot of these traditional retail brands, how do you think about leveraging the manufacturing assets to maybe, you know, expand Bob Evans into new categories or license other food service brands to enter additional categories within your meals orientation? Just, you know, have you considered that as a means of growth potentially in leveraging your assets at all?
I think you said it right. It's that's a lot of what the Bob Evans business is, right? It does leverage a lot of the assets from Michael Foods. kind of expanding to other categories, I think that the Bob Evans team, like any of our teams, assess that all the time and depends on kind of what they see as their ability to win in the category and the trends there. I would actually highlight that the Bob Evans team is the Bob Evans business is essentially that business that leverages the Michael Foods assets.
Great. Thanks for your time this morning.
Thank you. We'll go next to Carla Casella with JPMorgan.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. You talked a bit about private brand today, and it's raising the question, how much of your business today is private brand and sort of where are you the highest as a percentage of the segment? Is there more opportunity there? I guess the follow-on to that, and margin opportunity as well.
Post Consumer Brands is where we have actually the largest private label brand and the highest in terms of percentage of the total business, and it's around 20% of the business is private label. If I understood, your question is like, what is our position? We have a very strong position in cereal and granola and peanut butter.
We are a smaller player in private label in pet. We are more of a premium private label player into pet. In terms of opportunities, we see opportunities in all those categories. In general, in all categories that we play in, we would always consider how to leverage the branded and private label portfolio, right?
Okay. It sounds like you're growing more on the refrigerated side and I'm wondering if there's any private label in with Weetabix in Europe?
There is private label in Weetabix, yes, and that has been the case for years now. We are growing faster in refrigerated because essentially we make the decision of actually re-engaging with the private label business in that category. It's going from essentially nothing. We see it as an opportunity, ongoing opportunity. For now it's targeted on fewer retailers, but it's an opportunity there as well.
Okay. Is the opportunity there similar to where you are in consumer brands? Like, do you see those categories get to 20% private brand?
It's difficult to say. I mean, Weetabix, I think it is. Well, it's higher, yes.
it's higher than 20%.
Weetabix is from a category standpoint, private label is much larger in the U.K. than the U.S., obviously a much smaller market. Our share is in line with the category in terms of branded versus private label.
Private label is north of 40% for us over there. I think in line, I don't know that there's a lot of opportunities there. We feel really good about having the alternative price points just like we do at Post Consumer Brands. We think that gives us a competitive advantage and inroads with retailers both on the branded side and, you know, with that private label presence.
Okay. Can I just ask one quick finance question? You've done a lot with share buybacks. You've done a bunch of refinancing lately. How much cash should we model in that you need to keep on the books just to run the business?
Sure. We generally think about it, call it $150 million of just cash on the balance sheet for working capital purposes. Just, you know, given our Weetabix office as well as international, that's about the right level of cash that's needed for daily operations.
Okay, great. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. This does conclude today's question and answer session, as well as Post Holdings' second quarter 2026 earnings conference call and webcast. Please disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day.