The Middleby Corporation (NASDAQ:MIDD) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call August 3, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Timothy FitzGerald - Chief Executive Officer

James Pool - Chief Technology and Operations Officer

Bryan Mittelman - Chief Financial Officer

Steven Spittle - Chief Commercial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Saree Boroditsky - Jefferies

Mircea Dobre - Baird

Jeffrey Hammond - KeyBanc Capital Markets

Tami Zakaria - JPMorgan

Lawrence De Maria - William Blair

Todd Brooks - The Benchmark Company

Brian McNamara - Cannacord Genuity

Operator

Thank you for joining the Middleby Second Quarter 2023 Conference Call. With us today from management are CEO, Tim FitzGerald; CFO, Bryan Mittelman; Chief Operating and Technology Officer, James Pool; and Chief Commercial Officer, Steve Spittle. We will open the call with management comments and then open the lines for questions. Directions on entering the queue will be given at that time.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Tim Fitzgerald. Please go ahead, sir.

Timothy FitzGerald

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today on our second quarter earnings call. As we begin, please note, there are slides to accompany the call on the investor page of our website.

We are pleased to have posted solid results, reporting a record second quarter with strong performance at both our commercial and food processing businesses. And we continue to progress our residential business, while it is impacted by the challenging market conditions and destocking of inventory at our channel partners.

We posted overall improved profitability during the quarter and continue to make progress towards our longer towards margin targets. Our profitability is benefiting from our focus on new product innovation to drive improved sales mix. We are realizing efficiency gains reflecting the impact from our manufacturing investments and we are focused on longer-term supply chain opportunities with ongoing product design and sourcing initiatives, providing for greater improvements over the next year.

While market conditions have proven to be challenging, particularly in the residential segment, the inventory destocking, which has impacted the first half for our commercial and residential businesses, we believe will largely be normalized by the end of the third quarter. And we continue to have strong engagement with our customers across all three of our foodservice businesses.

Our new product introductions have accelerated over the past several years as we target growing market trends and launched game-changing innovations, addressing customer challenges of labor, speed, energy, food waste and sustainability.