The Middleby Corporation (NASDAQ:MIDD) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 10, 2023 11:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Tim FitzGerald - Chief Executive Officer
Bryan Mittelman - Chief Financial Officer
James Pool - Chief Technology and Operations Officer
Steven Spittle - Chief Commercial Officer
Conference Call Participants
John Joyner - BMO
Saree Boroditsky - Jefferies
Mig Dobre - Baird
Tami Zakaria - JP Morgan
Tim Thein - Citi
Larry De Maria - William Blair
Madison Callinan - Canaccord Genuity
Jeff Hammond - KeyBanc Capital Markets
Todd Brooks - The Benchmark Company
Operator
Good day! And welcome to the Middleby Corporation First Quarter 2023 Conference Call.
With us today from management are Tim FitzGerald, CEO; Bryan Mittelman, CFO; James Pool, Chief Technology and Operations Officer; and Mr. Steven Spittle, Chief Commercial Officer. Management will begin with opening comments and then we will open the call for questions. Instructions to enter the queue will be given at that time.
Now I’d like to turn the call over to Mr. FitzGerald for his opening remarks. Please go ahead sir.
Tim FitzGerald
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today on our first 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 to begin the year, reporting a first quarter with strong performance, both at our commercial and food processing businesses, while our residential business was expectedly impacted by challenging market conditions and destocking of inventories at our retail partners.
In the quarter we drove improved profitability and we continue to make progress towards our longer-term margin targets through focus on profitability of our sales mix and with further improvements yet to come through efficiency gains and supply chain initiatives.
During the quarter we were pleased to have also realized meaningful reduction in production lead times across most of our businesses, as we benefit from improvements in our supply chain and through the investments made across our manufacturing operations. We're now in a significantly improved position to better serve our customers and take advantage of market opportunities.
To start the year, we continue to have strong engagement with our channel partners and customers across all three of our food service businesses, with interest in our latest products and innovations offering benefits focused on energy, labor, speed and sustainability.
The investments made in our innovation centers demonstrating these latest solutions have proven to be a strategic asset for our businesses. The traffic in these showrooms continues to increase as we invest heavily in training with our channel partners as our world class culinary teams engage hands-on with customers looking to evolve kitchen and food service operations.