The Middleby Corporation (NASDAQ:MIDD) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call May 8, 2024 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Tim FitzGerald - Chief Executive Officer
James Pool - Chief Technology Officer & Chief Operations Officer
Bryan Mittelman - Chief Financial Officer
Steve Spittle - Chief Commercial Officer
Steve Spittle - Vice President of Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Mig Dobre - Baird
Jeff Hammond - KeyBanc Capital Markets
Saree Boroditsky - Jefferies
Tami Zakaria - JPMorgan
Brian McNamara - Canaccord Genuity
Walt Liptak - Seaport Res

Operator

Thank you for joining us for The Middleby Corporation First Quarter 2024 Conference Call. With us today from management are CEO, Tim FitzGerald; CFO, Bryan Mittelman; Chief Technology and Operations Officer, James Pool; Chief Commercial Officer, Steve Spittle and Vice President of Investor Relations, John Joyner. We will begin the call with opening remarks then open the lines for questions. Instructions on how to join the queue will be given at that time.

Now I would like to turn the call over to Mr. FitzGerald. Please go ahead.

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. First quarter proved to be challenging with the backdrop of the housing market, interest rate environment and price cost pressures at our restaurant and food processing customers, weighing out our businesses as we started the year. Even though challenges persist, we are seeing improving order activity and expect this to continue as we move through the year, as customers execute on state of business plans and as opportunities in the pipeline begin to convert.

While customers are slow to restock inventories, given shorter lead times and higher carrying costs, inventories in the channel have returned to normalized levels and now provide a tailwind, as end user sell-through occurs and this bodes well for the later part of the year.

At our Commercial Foodservice business, customer execution has been slow, starting the year, given continued longer lead times for permitting and construction along with longer deliberation on their business plans, given economics of higher restaurant operating costs. However, our channel partners are building backlogs weighted to the second half of the year and our chain customers continue to maintain their plans for operational upgrades and store openings, which are also weighed to the second half.