All right, good morning, everyone. I'm Andrew Strelzik, BMO's Agribusiness, Beverages, and Restaurants Analyst, and I'm delighted to welcome everyone to our 20th Annual Farm to Market Conference. Twenty years is an incredible milestone, and this year we have the pleasure of hosting over 100 companies and nearly 1,000 total attendees over the course of today and tomorrow. Our goal today remains the same as it's been over the last two decades: provide a forum to explore key themes and investment opportunities across the food value chain. The conference will highlight fireside chats and presentations from senior executives of leading companies spanning from farm to market, including the fertilizer, chemical, agribusiness, protein, food, beverage, distribution, and food retail sectors. I want to take a moment to thank the many people who make the conference the success you see today.
The management teams have been incredibly generous with their time and insights upon which the conference has been built. Our fantastic sales force, dedicated editorial staff, and tireless conference coordinators are remarkable in their commitment to making this event a success for investors and companies in attendance. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank the investors joining us from all parts of the world who really make this event special. In addition to the variety of company and sector dynamics we expect to explore over the next two days, we seek to keep the conference relevant each year for the rapidly evolving dynamics across the agriculture and food value chain. We're fortunate to have as our keynote lunch speaker today former Chief Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisors, Ernie Tedeschi, to discuss the evolving global trade and tariff landscape.
Tomorrow's keynote panel, featuring Katherine Saunders from Weill Cornell and Jordan Bar Am from McKinsey, will focus on the rise in popularity of GLP-1 medicines for weight loss and its impact across sectors. We hope you come away from the conference with incremental insights and a better understanding of company strategies and outlooks, opportunities and challenges, key issues, and new ideas. If you have any questions or need any help, please do not hesitate to ask. Thank you and enjoy the conference. For the 20th consecutive year, we have been fortunate to have Tyson kick off this conference. Under the leadership of CEO Donnie King, Tyson has implemented a disciplined focus on controlling the controllables, that has driven the turnaround of its chicken operations, put prepared foods on a path to sustainable double-digit margins, and stepped up earnings in pork and International while managing through a challenging beef environment.
In fact, profit growth has been restored across the portfolio, with the exception of beef, underscoring the benefits of Tyson's diversified multi-protein model. Donnie's joined by Curt Calaway, who has enhanced the leadership team since becoming CFO nearly a year ago. Over that time, Curt's continued to manage Tyson's balance sheet through the lens of financial discipline, opportunistic capital allocation, and cash returns to shareholders. Donnie and Curt were extremely appreciative of you guys being here again this year.
Good morning.
Maybe I'll kick it off this way. You know, we talked about the turnaround in the chicken business. You've seen a material improvement. You've talked about some of the cost savings you've captured through closures and some of the other actions. Is there a way to frame kind of that improvement through operational KPIs, or how else to think about where your plans are in terms of that improvement?
Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. In terms of our chicken business, we're very proud of where we are presently within the chicken business. We're going to have a great year. We had a great first half of the year, recording roughly $680 million in adjusted operating income. The back half of the year appears to be very constructive for us. There are some uncertainties and some investment spend that we have around our brand, which are, if you think about it, some of that would be for this year's sales, but I think more importantly for 2026, 2027, in support of brand and brand health and product innovation. In terms of controlling the controllables, that is the mantra at Tyson Foods, and that's what we do. The turnaround that you spoke of, you know, and if you think about that, that's been about two years.
You know, it was the fundamentals of the business. It was live performance. Our live performance today looks more like it has historically. We went through a period in the early 2000s, I think it was 2021, 2020, and even through 2022, where we had issues with hatch and livability and egg production and just a number of things. We have moved beyond that a little bit. You know, if we look at from a hatch and a livability perspective, at least based on what USDA reporting is, you know, we do very well relative to the industry reported numbers. That is pretty exciting for us and gives us a little bit more stability in terms of supply planning from a supply planning perspective. Inside the plants, it is really, well, sexy to me.
It's probably not sexy to everybody, but labor, yield, and efficiency and throughput, I mean, those are all really exciting things for me. We're doing those much, much better today. We still have things that we can do and get better at, but our performance through the plant is very good. If you think about it in terms of the mix that we have through those plants, we talked a couple of years ago about moving our mix more to, let's call it value-added, branded, and we've done that in a pretty significant way. We've lessened our exposure to commodity markets. You might look at a breast meat market that's $2.85 and say, "Hey, genius, you just moved away from what is a very high breast meat market relative to prior years." We did that. That's not our model.
We take that breast meat and we put it into value-added products that we sell behind the number one brand in chicken in both food service and retail. We are doing that really, really well. We have aligned ourselves with strategic customers, and we are growing with them. In fact, if you think about our growth, we had a second consecutive quarter of growth in our chicken business, volume growth. We grew in the quarter and the year, top line, bottom line. That feels really good. We got more opportunity to grow. We are looking to create greater capacity utilization, even through, you know, based on what we have done, and work our assets a little harder and bump the return on invested capital, and doing all those things. We are continuing to invest in innovation. You know, we launched some lightly breaded products, tenderloins and bites, and so forth.
We have a pretty robust pipeline for chicken for the balance of the year. It is the fundamentals of the business. They will never get old. They will never go out of style. Our plan and our turnaround is no more complex than that.
It's been, you know, three or four years since you kind of really detailed what that mix looks like. Since then, you've closed several plants. Is there a way to think about what your mix looks like today compared to what it was several years ago? Are you happy with that? Do you expect it to continue to evolve?
I think it will continue to evolve. It will look more like value-added, branded, convenience. You will see a little more focus on nutrition and health of the products, better for you. If you look at what we did today, or what we're doing today, or where we're headed today versus where we were then, at the time, we were over-indexed to some of the more commodity-exposed businesses. We've made some adjustments through all the network changes that we've made over the last, you know, three years or so. That is working really well for us. You will see more of that. An area where we will do a little more than we've done would be in some of the premium fresh chicken. We've made investments, in fact, made them this past year. You will see some growth in there.
If you look at where we are at retail, we're in every part of the store. We are part of every day part. If you look in food service, we, across commercial, non-commercial, you know, we have a great presence, again, across all day parts. In addition to that, we're able to meet the consumer across a number of price points based on what their needs are.
Yeah, I'm sure you've gotten this question a fair amount since the print. As strong as chicken margins are, you know, you reiterated the chicken guidance for the year, expect it to be in the top half of the range. I think people look at that and struggle to marry the two pieces. Can you walk us through what the back half of the year is going to look like, the decision to reiterate the guidance in this kind of chicken environment that, on paper, looks so strong, and how we should think about it?
Sure. Let me start off, and Curt, he can add colors. This is one he is really passionate about. I need to give him some airtime here as well. In terms of that, you know, our range for chicken this year is $1 billion-$1.3 billion. You know, we had $680 million of adjusted operating income through the first half of the year. We have a great Q3 going. We have every reason to believe that the back half of the year will be constructive from a pricing, from a supply demand balance. We have talked about this in terms of the middle or to the upper. There are some unknowns at the time we did this with tariffs and uncertainty around what we would be able to ship. You think PAWS and so forth. We feel good about the back half of the year.
Nobody in Tyson is running from the top end of that range. We try to balance that. There is another component to that, which is not chicken, that we tried to factor in. What we have said, if you take it in total, is we think chicken will be toward the top end of the range. We expect our beef business, because of where we are in the cycle, to be, you know, a little worse than or toward the worst end of that. We said the range in beef just for this point to be - $200 million to - $400 million in the year. You have one that is going to be on the top and one that is going to be on the lower side. We took it all together. In total, we did not adjust, nor did we tighten ranges.
We still feel very, very good about our chicken business and where it is and what it's going to do for the balance of the year.
I might add just for a moment. I think it's important to add to the comments that we made. You know, we were just three months away from raising our guidance, right? We had raised our guidance at the end of our first quarter, and we reiterated that. We did not change anything from revenue all the way through operating income all the way down to free cash flow or CapEx, right? Our guidance was the same from a range standpoint. What we did provide, though, was color around where we felt like we could be at the upper end of a range or perhaps at the lower end of a range, just as Donnie illustrated. I think we had, you know, we made comments about we felt a constructive environment was there for chicken. I think we've addressed that, right?
We produced, as Donnie said, $680 million of adjusted operating income in the first half. At the upper end of the range, that would imply about $620 million of operating income in the back half of the year. That includes a disproportionate amount of investment back across the brands and the health of our chicken business in the back half of the year. That follows a second half of 2024, where we were about $660 million range, right? I think that, from our perspective, provided a very strong backdrop relative to not only finishing 2024, the first half of 2025, and what that implies in the back half of 2025, at $680 million, and what that implies in the back half of 2025 with that investment, I think, gave a very strong outlook for our chicken business.
You touched on some of this at the start in terms of the operational improvements. We have gotten this question a decent amount over the last week or so from investors. I just want to give you the opportunity to address it. Is there anything from an operational standpoint that maybe is keeping you from achieving a higher number in this environment that you maybe have taken a step back or anything like that?
I do not see anything that would prevent us from getting there. If you think about any kind of impediments, you know, from a live performance perspective, from a plant performance, from a mix, from customer relationships, the health of our brands, we feel very good about that. I think it is also important to know that our business model is not one that features, you know, commodity markets. Our business model is, you know, the correlation between breast meat and market prices is very low correlation. In this environment, I think some in the room would also attest to this, is that we did not see the wing season that we thought we would see. Therefore, we are seeing the value of wings continue to go down. That is, you know, that is a headwind for us. The big picture here is this.
Breast meat prices are high here in 2025, but we're not playing here just for 2025. Our model is we contemplate being at this level, this billion, billion three, year in, year out. That is the play that we're running. We are trying to create those hedges, if you will, within the business that will protect that margin structure at that level, not only in 2025, but in 2026, 2027, and beyond.
You talked obviously about the chicken breast prices and the strength that you're seeing there. Can you talk about the supply demand across the different parts of the industry or of your business? Obviously, you're seeing the strength of breast prices, leading indicators that are not indicating that much supply growth. How are you thinking about that?
We see the same data that everyone else sees, USDA data. That's the only source from an industry perspective we have. If you look at April, I think it projects from a chicken production, it was + 1.9%. In May, it dropped to 1.4%. You know, I think that may be the high point, at least for 2025. I do not know that. In terms of Tyson, we're well balanced across all these different areas that we play in and feel good about that. You know, in Q2, one of the things you would see, and I'll just add this, is you saw a slight uptick in working capital. A lot of that was built on some customer building inventory for some customer needs that started rolling out in early Q3. That's been addressed and moved.
We do not have excess inventory in any part of our chicken business. We feel really good about that. Demand for chicken is going to be strong from our perspective in the back half of the year and even into 2026. It is going to be that value protein sitting underneath, you know, the price of beef, which, I am in the beef business. The consumer of beef, they are still buying beef. They are still buying grinds. They are still buying middle meats. They are moving all around. Beef consumption is still very good.
I think we, sorry, just to add really quick. I think, you know, we made the comment last week around we would expect from a production standpoint, beef, you know, to really be kind of flat. Pork is going to be not really making up much ground. It serves as a very constructive environment for chicken, which was why the catalyst of what we shared, that we still have a, you know, positive outlook relative to consumer desiring chicken.
The demand backdrop, I mean, to your point, several years, it should stay very strong. Your operations have improved, but there is a lot of kind of limitations in the industry in terms of the ability to raise production.
Is there a way to frame how much that is limiting things, maybe like the maximum excess that we could get to if some of those issues were to subside?
You know, I'll speak first to Tyson. You know, we still have some latent capacity. We can extra hours, extra shifts, those type things that we could push our system. And we'll flex in and out of that when we need to. We want to increase the capacity utilization of our chicken business like we do every other business, right? I talked about the volume growth in chicken in our Q1 and Q2. We want to see more of that. We intend to grow and support those needs that we have. From an industry perspective, you know, I assume you're referencing the record excess and so forth in Q2. I think it's at an all-time high. I think you have to factor in hatch and livability, which is something that's going on in the industry today.
With $2.8 5 breast meat, I would suspect if somebody wanted to produce more, they'd be doing it right now. Or if they could produce more or had capacity to produce more, which is going to require, would require greater hatchability or, excuse me, greater hatchery capacity and even additional housing.
Are we at a point where chicken margins have been pretty strong now for a bit where we might see more of that expansion? I mean, there's been one of your peers that announced a new plan. I don't know if others are exploring that. Just generally speaking, are there limitations in the ability to do that?
I think there are some limitations relative to hatch and livability. There are some issues, you know, from a genetic perspective that is limiting that. I think the thing that you have to know about that, though, at some point, that is going to be corrected. I would assume that is going to be corrected. As I mentioned earlier, we lived through that, you know, three or four years ago. It takes a minute to correct that. We are not all the way to bright yet, but we are in a much, much better place than we were before. As I referenced, you know, versus USDA reported data, we have a substantial advantage to what is reported in hatch and livability there. We feel pretty good about that. I think there will be a bit of a lid on this.
I think industry will probably try to fill these gaps. You know, I think chicken will be in short supply for a bit.
Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit to the prepared foods business, starting to see some real improvement there. Can you maybe walk through over the last couple of years, what have been some of the impediments from a profit standpoint there and the areas that you're addressing now that have led to some of the recovery there?
Sure. We're very proud of our prepared foods business. It is one of the crown jewels within our portfolio. It is, I think, if you, well, if you go back to 2024, we recorded roughly $900 million of adjusted operating income in prepared foods. If you look for the six, seven, eight years prior to that, it was somewhere around $800 million. So a bit of a step change. Let me back up and walk you through some of the building blocks of that. Everyone here experienced the impact of COVID, right? We went through COVID. Then there is post-COVID when you're trying to staff a plant and trying to get lines to run efficiently. From 2021-2 022, we all lived that into 2023. In 2024, we began to, across all businesses, began to get staffed and run more efficiently.
2024 was, across all businesses, a pretty significant step change. You move into twenty 2025, and this thing is continuing to accelerate. Prepared foods is participating in all that. If you look at that $900 million, that is not what we believe to be the top end of that. My personal belief is that there is no business within Tyson that has more headroom available than our prepared foods business. I think the number of which we think about and talk about internally is probably far larger than what anybody here would think about. You think, double digits, 10%, right? That is not what we are looking for. That is where we are today. We are looking to be a lot bigger than that. If you think about, how do you get that? You have got these iconic brands of Jimmy Dean, Hillshire, Ball Park, and so on.
In addition to that, through the leadership in our prepared foods business, we're putting all these things together. It looks just like if you talk about chicken or if you talk about beef or you talk about pork, we're running the same play about five times. It's operational excellence. It's how you procure the inputs in prepared foods. Then it's how you run it through the plant. I think we improved controllable within plants somewhere around $36 million-$37 million in Q2 alone. That's looking better. That team is running a better operational footprint than we have in some time. If you move into the mix, you know, we have the largest innovation pipeline in our prepared foods business that we've ever had. It's exciting stuff.
We've got some really, really nice tools around how we look at that, how we start from insights to the innovation and try to meet the consumer where they are and what their needs are. By the way, we support it in the marketplace financially. Those are doing really well. If you go back a little bit of time, you will find that we kind of pivoted toward more of just a retail prepared foods business. If you go back into 2014 when we bought Hillshire, we had about a $5 billion private label, predominantly food service business. Hillshire was a $5 billion predominantly retail business. We put those together. Over time, through COVID, through a bunch of different scenarios, we gave up volume in food service. We gave up volume in private label.
We focused on just the brands. Therefore, from a return perspective, which Curt will speak to, the volume bottom or top line was not growing. Pricing was up. We are looking for growth in the top line and the bottom line in prepared foods. We have a significant amount of invested capital in our prepared foods business. We have to leverage and get returns on that, which means you have to grow more volume. You do not just say, go grow volume. You have to be more targeted than that, know what customers you are going to, what that product mix is going to look like. You have to have innovation. We are the category leader with these brands in many of these categories. I would point this out. Private label is growing.
The consumer is more price sensitive today than maybe ever more. They still enjoy those brands. Those brands that we have provided pretty significant halo around for us in that category. What we are doing is adding back food service volume. We are adding back some private label business for our customers. We will have two or three different tiers of product offerings across a different category. I could go on and on in that. I would tell you that the upside and the opportunity within prepared is it will be a game changer for Tyson Foods.
Let me just add just a moment. Go back to what Donnie started with on, you know, our average really from post-2014 through up to 2024, we're averaging about $900 million. And the team had, you know, really started to make a little bit of an evolution as we worked our way through 2024. And very proud of an accomplishment of hitting the $900 million mark as Donnie started with. The guidance range we set for 2025, you know, had a bottom end of $900 million and better, right? In the last earnings call, we talked about we're expecting to grow prepared foods, right, from volume all the way to the bottom line. How that's being done, exactly as Donnie said, is it starts with within the walls of the plant and the operational efficiencies that we have available to us to attack.
I always talk about, right, there's a level of intensity from a prepared foods plant operation level that has room for improvement. In a commodity business, you know you have to operate with that intensity in a commodity world. In our prepared foods business, when you're managing brands and innovation and plant operations, it's not as critical as it is in the commodity businesses. We have started that process of transforming within the network of the plants to generate the profitability, but most importantly, generate the cash to fund back through the innovation pipeline. Donnie shared, right, the enthusiasm we have for the innovation pipeline. I've been around 19 years. I can tell you by far and away, it's the best innovation pipeline we've had in my 19 years here.
The commitment back behind that to support it in the marketplace is what gives us the confidence that we see, you know, a step change from $800 to $900, a step change from $900 to better in 2025, and where we're looking to go in 2026 and beyond, growing both as a top line volume all the way through the P&L.
I have to ask this as a follow-up. You talked about the longer-term kind of headroom and how exciting that opportunity is. Is there a way a, to frame kind of the productivity this year that's included in the guidance? Maybe productivity is not the right word. That component and then how you view kind of the longer-term earnings potential of that business.
Yeah. I would say, again, I would reiterate there is significant uptime. I would ask you not to think about it in terms of a productivity initiative. That sounds like an event. I'm not looking for an event. I'm looking for a way of life. That continuous improvement process across prepared foods is doing those fundamentals, whether it be with brands or with labor and yield or how you buy the raw material or those relationships with customers. Doing those with excellence is what we're looking for day in, day out, not only for 2025, but for beyond.
In an environment in which, in large part because of beef, production is going to be down, demand is going to stay strong, we should have high protein prices. Your input costs will be a bit of a headwind. Just philosophically, given the desire to grow volume, how do you balance those two pieces within kind of your revenue management?
We'll start with back what I mentioned at the beginning, which is we have to make sure we're absolutely cost competitive, right? That gives us the flexibility to invest where we need to, to bring innovation back, which will create a point of difference, and then really drive home the value of an incredible portfolio of brands, right, that resonates with consumers, has a lot of equity. It starts with the cash generation of the business, what we've already done, and what we're building on to really drive home points of differentiation and value behind the brand.
Okay. Shifting gears to the beef side, the commentary that you provided on the earnings call around herd rebuilding, potential herd rebuilding, was a bit more optimistic than we've heard in quite some time. You know, kind of what's informing that view? Where do you see the industry in the cycle today?
Let me start with, we have a great beef business. In fact, the team leading that beef business is as good as I've worked with in all my years with Tyson Foods. Do not allow the adjusted operating income number to communicate to you that we are not performing or executing. We are actually executing with excellence like I've never seen in our beef business. What is informing us relative to the herd rebuild? USDA data. If you look at the number of cows that have been harvested, that number is down about 18%, according to USDA. If you look at cattle on feed and if you look at heifers as a percent of harvest, we see the heifer harvest - 4%, according to USDA. Those are all encouraging signs. We believe that we are at near the herd rebuilding.
We see all kinds of signs of that. I think the reality is this. Everybody's hesitant, including me, to call that we are now in rebuild. I think what actually happens here is you will be in a rebuild mode. If we're not, we're very close. I think that you'll actually be in it before you really know it and can call it. You need a couple more data points from here to be able to confirm that. I think that's where we are. In fact, you know, this is a good news, bad news story. The good news is we think we are now getting herd rebuild. The bad news is we now have fewer cattle to harvest. That creates, you know, spread compression.
What we've challenged the team to do is to, again, control the controllables to extract or to eliminate the waste within the business and find new and creative ways from procurement all the way through connecting with customers and consumers with, let's call it, value-added products. We have a line, if you look at our case-ready beef and pork, very much value-added. We've added a line of seasoned marinated meats, which when you get the opportunity, you should try those. The convenience factor and the quality of those products are second to none. We're working on it from that side too. Call the date of heifer or, excuse me, of herd rebuild. You got 30 months or so that you're going to see this thing take. We still got some headwinds ahead of us. That is certainly factored into our guidance that we gave.
That is how we see the beef business. We got a good beef business. It can be a little painful right now. I spend a lot of time walking up and down a hall talking to our team in beef, trying to encourage them to just keep doing what you're doing, keep controlling what you can control, keep your head up, keep moving forward.
I think Andrew just added that really quick. Yeah, certainly, you know, back to my earlier comment, beef availability will be challenged during that time period, right, which is another strength relative to our intentional multi-protein, multi-channel strategy, right? When we've got an environment that is challenging in beef and you've got an environment where there's probably less availability of beef, it's helpful and certainly in the total complex to be able to manage that multi-protein, multi-channel portfolio.
I guess I find in my conversations, at least, that in the market, there's not a great understanding of how to think about margins or profitability in beef as you get this herd rebuilding. So, you know, what's the right way to think about it? Obviously, cattle availability will go down first before it goes up. Do you expect to be able to kind of manage along sideways?
Or I guess just directionally, how should we think about that?
Maybe let me start with kind of a longer-term picture. Let's call it 30 months out, 36 months out. Think about it this way. If our range for 2025 in beef is to lose $200 million-$400 million, right? Let's say we lose $400 million. If you think about beef back to, let's call it mid-cycle or some realistic level of operating income, you could easily see a differential of about a $1 billion swing from the $400 million to what is kind of mid-cycle average conservative kind of viewpoint of what beef can do. If you take that $1 billion and you add it to what we just said about prepared foods and chicken and what we're doing in pork and international, it becomes a very attractive business. It is going to take a minute to get there.
I wanted to touch briefly on pork and international, which, you know, was very nice to see some of the improvement in performance in both of those businesses relative to what we would have expected. I know you've been doing some things operationally there as well. Can you just give a little more insight into how sustainable that is? Was there anything in the quarter that maybe propped that up that we should expect to not continue or have you improved that performance?
I would say we're running a really good business in our pork. If you look at, again, controlling the controllables. Again, I said this is sexy to me. It may not be to you. Labor yield and efficiencies and throughput and those type things, we reduced our controllable costs by roughly 18% in Q2 alone in our pork business. That's sustainable. The market, the supply demand fundamentals are good. Herd health is good as it relates to pork. You know, our pork business is not the largest, but we certainly think it can be, you know, the best based on the size and scale. We got a great team leading that business today. The agility that you see in that business is something that I take great joy in watching. Let me shift over to international. International is a smaller business for us as well.
What we've been doing in international is essentially what I've just described that we did in chicken and prepared and beef and pork, is controlling what we can. It's the fundamentals. Essentially, it's capacity utilization. When we purchased the assets from Keystone in 2018, if you go back, we added, I think it was 12 plants to that in our international footprint. We had some JVs and some co-manufacturers and so forth. What we are essentially doing is filling up our assets in China and in Thailand and in Malaysia. The volume going through that, the capacity utilization, the return on the invested capital you get from that grows both top line and bottom line. The play is very similar to what we're doing in every other business.
You've been managing cash pretty tightly for the last couple of years. CapEx has come down. Now we are on an improving, it seems like, earnings trajectory. You know, how are you thinking about your capital allocation on a go-forward basis? Is there an earnings framework as things get better that we can think about to guide that?
Yeah, great question. Thanks. I think, you know, certainly worth pointing out and recognizing the discipline in the cash management that we've had in the last 18 months. You know, while we knew at coming out of 2022, 2023 that there would be a pullback from beef profitability, you know, we ran about eight quarters below our long-term leverage target of two times because we knew there would eventually be a pullback in beef earnings as that hit. You know, the chicken profitability fell a little bit in 2023, and our leverage moved up to 4.1 times. And so we were very intentional in our capital allocation priorities, which start with maintaining financial strength, but also include, you know, investing in the business and returning cash to shareholders.
As we worked our way through 2024 and the first half of 2025, it was about getting leverage and building that and maintaining that financial strength. Very happy that we got back to 2.3 times. We're not quite to our long-term target of two times net leverage quite yet, but we can see the pathway. As always, right, we are back to where we should be investing. We also shared CapEx guidance between $1 billion and $1.2 billion, which we think is a very healthy reinvestment rate for us. Certainly does not as a pullback from where we were at nearly $1.9 billion a year back in the 2022, 2023 time period. That was really about adding a lot of capacity into the network, as Donnie talked about, number of international facilities.
We also built four domestic facilities, much larger in the domestic arena, much smaller facilities in international. The same mantra of filling those assets up and valuing up we've been going through. It is really about that discipline around capital. We did raise our dividend at the start of this year for the 13th consecutive year and a milestone for us on hitting $2 per share on a dividend return.
Is there, if you were to expand kind of the growth CapEx portion, I mean, what's the priority list? What's attractive at a high level?
Yeah, as Donnie had talked about before, our value generation is in our branded portfolio mix. We have a lot of innovation pipeline. We've got a lot of capacity that we can fill. As we reach and look for that next evolution, it absolutely is centered around prepared foods, value-added branded items, and certainly continuation of increasing our value-added portfolio in our chicken business.
Lastly, before we're out of time here, share repurchases haven't been a huge piece of the capital allocation story recently. How should we think about that? Is there something you're looking for before we should think that that maybe gets to be a bigger piece of the opportunity pie?
Yeah, absolutely. Return cash to shareholders through dividends or share repurchases is still absolutely in the capital priorities. We generally look at, you know, ensuring that we're covering any dilution that occurs and then make a strategic choice relative to alignment of other alternatives from cash deployment. We will make that decision at the right time.
Okay, great.
It's pretty good value right now.
There you go.
That's a good way to end it. We're out of time anyway. Thank you very much, guys, for being here.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.