Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc. (LW) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:LW) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 5, 2022 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Dexter Congbalay - VP, IR

Tom Werner - President and CEO

Bernadette Madarieta - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Chris Growe - Stifel

Peter Galbo - Bank of America

Tom Palmer - JPMorgan

Rob Dickerson - Jefferies

William Reuter - Bank of America

Carla Casella - JPMorgan

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Lamb Weston First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Dexter Congbalay. Please go ahead.

Dexter Congbalay

Good morning and thank you for joining us for Lamb Weston's first quarter 2023 earnings call. This morning, we issued our earnings press release, which is available on our website lambweston.com.

Please note that during our remarks, we'll make some forward-looking statements about the company's expected performance. These statements are based on how we see things today. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the cautionary statements and risk factors contained in our SEC filings for more details on our forward-looking statements.

Some of today's remarks include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with our GAAP results. You can find the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations in our earnings release.

With me today are Tom Werner, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Bernadette Madarieta, our Chief Financial Officer. Tom will provide an overview of the current environment. Bernadette will then provide details on our first quarter results and our fiscal 2023 outlook.

With that, let me now turn the call over to Tom.

Tom Werner

Thank you, Dexter. Good morning and thank you for joining our call today. We're pleased with our performance in the quarter. We drove strong sales growth, expanded our gross margin and nearly doubled adjusted EBITDA including unconsolidated joint ventures. Our results reflect our continued focused on implementing pricing actions to offset input and transportation cost inflation, driving productivity and cost saving initiatives, increasing service levels for our customers in each of our sales channels, and supporting our people and talent. We’ve built good operating momentum over the past few quarters by focusing on these near-term objectives. And we're confident in our ability to deliver the upper end of our sales and earning target ranges for the year.