Campbell Soup Company (NYSE:CPB) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript March 6, 2024 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Rebecca Gardy - Chief Investor Relations Officer

Mark Clouse - Chief Executive Officer

Carrie Anderson - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Lazar - Barclays

Ken Goldman - JPMorgan

Peter Galbo - Bank of America

Michael Lavery - Piper Sandler

Jim Salera - Stephens

Operator

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Campbell Soup Company's Second Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, [Technical Difficulty] to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host Rebecca Gardy, Chief Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Rebecca Gardy

Good morning and welcome to Campbell's second quarter fiscal 2024 earnings conference call. I'm Rebecca Gardy, Chief Investor Relations Officer at Campbell. Joining me today are Mark Clouse, Chief Executive Officer, and Carrie Anderson, Chief Financial Officer. Today's remarks have been pre-recorded. Once we conclude the prepared remarks, we will transition to a live webcast Q&A session. The slide deck and today's earnings press release have been posted to the Invest Relations section on our website, campbellsoupcompany.com. Following the conclusion of the Q&A session, a replay of the webcast will be available at the same location, followed by a transcript of the call within 24 hours.

On our call today, we will make forward-looking statements which reflect our current expectations. These statements rely on assumptions and estimates, which could be inaccurate and are subject to risk. Please refer to Slide 3 of our presentation or our SEC filings for a list of factors that could cause our actual results to vary materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. Because we use non-GAAP measures, we have provided a reconciliation of each of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure in the appendix of our presentation.

Slide 4 outlines today's agenda. Mark will provide insights into our second quarter performance as well as in-market performance by division. Carrie will then discuss the financial results of the quarter in more detail and outline our guidance for the full fiscal year 2024, which we reaffirmed this morning.

And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Mark.

Mark Clouse

Thanks, Rebecca. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter fiscal ‘24 earnings call. As you saw in our press release this morning, we once again delivered on our commitments with sequential improvement in volume trends and year-over-year operating margin expansion in both divisions. While it is true that category trends have slowed over the last year, I'm encouraged by a variety of stabilizing consumer indicators, like consumer sentiment, household penetration, and average categories purchased. However, we are also continuing to see economic pressure impacting select categories and certain consumer demographics. While we expect these trends to improve over time, we're certainly not there yet. In the meantime, I continue to be very happy with our team's ability to control the controllables, including managing our supply chain and in-market execution. Looking ahead, we are affirming our full-year outlook as we anticipate continued sequential improvement in top line earnings and margin progress while sustaining our best-in-class navigation of this volatile environment. Carrie will elaborate on that a bit later.