B&G Foods at Barclays Conference: Strategic Restructuring and Challenges

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, B&G Foods (NYSE:BGS) presented at the Barclays 18th Annual Global Consumer Staples Conference, outlining its strategic transformation amidst challenges. CEO Casey Keller highlighted the company’s efforts to simplify its portfolio, focusing on spices, seasonings, meals, and baking staples, while addressing the hurdles faced by the Green Giant business. Despite a decline in sales, the company remains optimistic about its restructuring and financial goals.

Key Takeaways

• B&G Foods is actively restructuring its portfolio, focusing on core categories by divesting non-core businesses.
• The company plans to divest its Green Giant business by 2025, aiming to reduce complexity and improve margins.
• Efforts to reduce net leverage from approximately 7x to 6x within the next year are underway.
• The company is targeting a long-term EBITDA margin of 18% to 20%.
• B&G Foods remains committed to its dividend policy, even as it navigates strategic changes.

Financial Results

• Q1 sales decreased by 9%, while Q2 saw a 4% decline. Early Q3 results suggest a decline of 1% to 2%, indicating a slight improvement.
• The company aims for 1% top-line growth and 2% bottom-line growth across its core portfolio.
• Long-term EBITDA margin target is set at 18% to 20%, with an implied margin of around 15% for 2025.

Operational Updates

• B&G Foods has divested several businesses, including Back to Nature, Green Giant canned vegetables, LeSueur, and tomato businesses in New Jersey.
• The Green Giant divestiture is expected to significantly reduce leverage and improve financial performance.
• The company is implementing a $10 million cost-saving initiative in Q3 and Q4, focusing on productivity and trade spend efficiency.

Future Outlook

• The company anticipates organic sales to decline in the low single-digit range in the latter half of the year.
• Spices and seasonings are expected to achieve low single-digit growth, while meals may grow by around 1%.
• Baking staples are projected to remain flat but maintain solid margins and cash flow.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO Casey Keller noted the challenges with Green Giant, describing it as a low-margin, high working capital business.
• CFO Bruce Wacha emphasized the importance of reducing leverage and supporting the company’s dividend policy.
• The impact of tariffs on spices and seasonings was discussed, with strategic pricing actions being implemented to mitigate costs.

In conclusion, B&G Foods is navigating a complex transformation with cautious optimism, focusing on strategic divestitures and financial improvements. For a deeper understanding, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Barclays 18th Annual Global Consumer Staples Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker: Find our seats. We’ll kick off our next session here with B and G Foods. So welcome back, everybody. With us today are CEO, Casey Keller and CFO, Bruce Wacha. Welcome back to both of you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Casey, maybe a good time a good place to sort of kick it off is sort of a state of the union as you reflect upon how the company has transformed since you’ve taken over. What’s top of mind as you continue to try and navigate through this sort of elongated period of uncertainty?

The elongated period of uncertainty?

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: I like that. So I’d say that the State of the Union is we’re getting better. If I think about some of the elements that we need to really manage with this company in terms of transforming it and turning it around, number one is the portfolio restructuring and getting down to a core portfolio that we think we should be in long term. So as we’ve talked about many times, we’ve sold off several assets. We sold off the back of nature cookie cracker, getting out of the snack business.

We sold off some of the vegetable assets that were high working capital intensity, high inventory seasonal packs, everything else, so Green Giant canned vegetables in The U. S, most recently, the LeSour business, also the Don Pappino and Scalifani fresh packed tomato businesses in New Jersey. So we are making progress, making divestitures. Obviously, the big pieces that still need to happen, are the rest of the Green Giant assets, both The U. S.

Frozen Green Giant business and the Canadian Green Giant business, which would be both canned vegetables and frozen. I think we’re making good progress on those. We’ve disclosed that they’re under review, but candidly, we’re in advanced discussions. And I think those could be twenty twenty five transactions if things go well, but you never know, obviously. These are pretty central to our transformation.

Green Giant has been probably our most challenged piece of our portfolio. Our economics have never looked good. It’s a very low margin business, high working capital intensity, probably double the inventory intensity of any other business that we have. And it’s probably it’s been our laggard in terms of our performance. The category has been troubled.

Private label has been an issue in that business. And we just have subscale economics. We don’t have the depth of frozen business to be able to support our own distribution or network or even our own R and D capabilities. So it just does it’s not a business that fits with the rest of our portfolio. It doesn’t have any synergies almost in anything.

It’s added a lot of complexity, and I think it’s central to transforming our company to a much simpler company, a much more focused company in spices and seasonings, in meals and in baking staples. Those businesses have a lot of synergies. Those businesses we know how to run. Those businesses have higher margins. Those businesses have better cash flows.

So we will be a stronger operation once that is done. And so getting there, making progress. The other piece is just looking at the core performance of those remaining businesses ex Green Giant. I’m starting to see some progress. If I think about our total company, really tough first quarter with down 9%, a lot of that being driven by kind of customer inventory reductions.

Second quarter, down 4%. So third quarter, for the first two months, down between one percent and two percent. So it’s getting better. It’s getting better. We’re seeing some improvement in our consumption data.

I know we’re probably 60%. You can read and measure channels, 40% not. So it doesn’t exactly correlate, but we’re seeing a little bit of progress there, not as much as I’d like, to be honest with you. I mean I’d like to see us get even lower, closer to zero in terms of our consumption sellout data. And we’ve taken some actions on some of our businesses.

We’ve had a couple of businesses that competitive entries, the Ortega business with Taco Bell coming in, Siete coming in. We’ve done some much stronger actions to kind of defend against that, and I feel that we’re making progress there. Our sauce Taco Sauce business is healthy and growing. Spices and Seasonings, we’ve kind of refocused down the core business of DASH and Weber, making good progress in terms of turning those businesses around. We got distracted with a bunch of small license opportunities that I think were not the right things for us to do.

So I think even with the dynamics of the hangover from COVID and inflation, I think we’re starting to lap some of those effects. But then on some of the things that we can control our own business in a more competitive environment, I think we’re doing a better job innovating and doing things. So we’re getting there. We’re getting there candidly, maybe a little slower on the restructure the portfolio restructuring that I’d like. And it’s been kind of an elongated recovery in terms of the consumer.

I’d like to see that go faster, but we are making progress. So we are making progress.

Unidentified speaker: That’s great, great and very helpful background. I guess on the consumer, sort of at a high level, how would you describe where the consumer is today maybe relative to where it’s been over the past couple of years? Is uncertainty still driving greater conservatism? Or are you finally starting to see maybe some green shoots in consumer sentiment?

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: I think what’s happening is that we’re beginning to lap some of the changes in behavior. So the trade down behavior, the resurgence of private label post COVID, the shock, sticker shock of the higher pricing and the inflation, I think we’re starting to lap some of the behavior changes related to that. I think it’s going to take another six months for us to kind of fully get through that. But I’m encouraged that and I mean, there was some contraction of the center store that went on for a while. We’re beginning to lap some of that as well.

But we’re I don’t see I think consumers still their budgets are still a little bit tight, particularly in the middle and the low side. And they’re continuing the behaviors that they did before, but I don’t see that they’re doing new things, that they’re continuing to trade down more and more and more. I think we’re just lapping some of the initial reactions to the higher pricing and their constrained budget. So I’m optimistic that we’ll get through it. I mean, we’ll get back to more of a steady state in terms of the center store.

But it’s been longer to recover on that than I would have expected. But I’m not seeing any new behaviors that would indicate to me that things are going to get worse. I think I’m just beginning to see a slow recovery, slower than we’d like. Yeah. Great.

Unidentified speaker: It’s been a few years now since you announced the formation of sort of the four business units, spices and seasonings, meals, frozen and vegetables and specialty. I guess how has that reorganization benefited the company since it was first implemented?

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: I think a couple ways. So first, it’s pushed accountability down for managing the P and L and managing the business. And I think it’s hard to look at the period of time that the business units were formed and what’s really happened, because it’s been an incredibly volatile environment. But I think we are managing those businesses better. We’re making better decisions about where we should be playing, where we should not be playing.

We’re starting to get some breakthroughs in innovation on some of these businesses. In some cases, like in Spice and Seasy, I think we took a little bit of a wrong approach. Now we’re kind of fixing it and getting back. But it’s pushed accountability down the business. We’re making better decisions.

We’re making much faster decisions, and we’re making better P and L decisions. If you look at ex Green Giant, which has had its own problems despite kind of some of the top line issues in the company, we’re not doing badly on the bottom line. We’re making smarter decisions about how we manage costs, how we manage pricing. Our productivity, honestly, of the biggest things that the business units have brought is the multifunctional coordination of our productivity efforts, so bringing COGS down. Our margins are starting to improve.

We’re managing whatever inflation we have plus covering some margin improvement. So and right now, I think we’re at like 3.5% of COGS in terms of our productivity efforts, which is a long way from when we started the business. It’s So probably less than one I think it’s yielding benefits. Hard to look at the complexity of the last couple of years and say you can see it fully in the results, but I do believe it’s working.

Unidentified speaker: Great. And maybe just by background, you can remind the audience what role you expect for each of those business units to sort of play within the portfolio and maybe the time frame we should anticipate each of these units reaching sort of their full potential since, obviously, as you talk about, there have been some more dynamic times for the company in the past couple of So

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: Spices and Seasonings, I think, is kind of our jewel. It’s highest margin business. It’s in a category that’s showing some pretty good dynamics, 2% to 3% in the last year or two, tied to the fresh protein, the fresh perimeter of the store in terms of flavor enhancement. We struggled a little bit, at the beginning of this year, didn’t get quite the results we wanted. But if I’m looking at the third quarter, we’re starting to see better results in our first two months of the quarter, getting better top line performance.

We’re refocusing on our core brands, Weber, DASH, other things. Our private label MemberSmart business has been strong. So I feel like we’re getting to the point on Spice and Cs that we should be seeing kind of consistent top line growth in the low single digits. It’s happening, and I think we’ll continue to see it happening. Some challenges on that business from tariffs because that’s probably our main exposure.

So we’re sourcing most of our spices from overseas, obviously, not really available here in The United States, China garlic, black pepper, Vietnam. So we’re taking pricing actions to do that. And so far, it looks like most of the industry is doing that because everybody is sourcing in the same place. But I think spices and seasonings, you’ll see good improvement in the top line. And as we get through the pricing to manage the tariffs, we should be strong in the bottom line too.

Meals, on the Meals business unit, you know, I’m expecting that business to be, you know, kind of, you know, 1% kind of growth business. You know, we’re in the taco the taco category with Ortega, which should be a little bit higher growth. But, meals overall, you know, Mexican meals, Ortega, Las Palmas should be a little bit should be good growth, low single digit growth. And then if you look at the other part of meals, the concentration is really in the hot prefix, so Korean wheat, McCann’s Irish Oatmeal and Mid Grill Farms pure maple syrup. I mean the combination of those, I would expect meals to be about a 1% grower, over time with some stronger performance on the Mexican side and maybe some more static kind of top line on the hot breakfast side.

Ortega has been a little bit of a journey for us because there’s been a lot of competition entering that category. Traditionally, was Old El Paso and Us. And then Taco Bell has kind of made a big entry into that category, resurgence in that category over the last couple of years. Siete came in kind of taco seasonings recently. But we’ve got some good plans.

We’re fighting back, and I’m seeing better and better sellout trends on that business. So I think we’re getting there on that one. Baking staples, look, this is the baking staples are what we call specialty business unit. This is kind of our mature cash flow management business, maintain margins, and we’ve been doing a good job of that. So the profitability has been very steady on that business.

Crisco has been a little bit of a challenge managing the volatility in the soybean oil prices. As we brought prices down on Crisco to reflect lower soybean oil costs, it’s been slower to get reflected than we’d like, but we’ve maintained kind of profitability and margins. And so I think we’ve done a reasonable job of managing the cost and the gross profit of that unit, and you can see it in the results. Clabber Girl has been a good performer for us in terms of baking powder. So that business, we kind of expect to be flat, flattish, but maintain good margins, good cash flow, good EBITDA.

And so far, we’ve been delivering that. So that’s kind of the expectations. And we’ll talk about Green Giant because we’ve already talked about that. That’s been a big drag on our portfolio. So as we kind of get that out of

Unidentified speaker: our out of the business, we should be seeing the other three businesses kind of more stable performance. Yes. And on that point, when you’re sort of fully through maybe the more significant asset optimization moves that you plan to make, I guess what does the remaining business look like? Like what’s your expectation around the type of growth you’re looking for, both top line and, call it, EBITDA?

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: I mean I think our longer term algorithm is to get 1% across the remaining portfolio between spices, seasonings, meals and big staples and specialty. So we’d expect to get 1% on the top line. Good cost management, get ladder that down to 2% in the bottom line. So just to get sort of a stable platform that if we can get our leverage down and get back to something in our 4.5% to 5.5% leverage range, we can go back into the M and A game, make more disciplined acquisitions, more focused acquisitions in some of those core categories where we can add value and do some things and get synergies. I mean that’s kind of the vision.

So we’re not going to 1%, 2% is not going to drive huge valuation growth, but getting our business back to the point where we can do smart M and A, which is what our history has been, right? If you like if you take a look at B and G, what have we done successfully? Honestly, if you look at Spice and Seasonings, that’s probably the prime example. We bought three businesses over time, built up a Spices and Seasonings portfolio. We’ve got a strong asset.

We run that business well. We’ve got good margins. It’s a combination, a consolidation of three different acquisitions, a different size, scale. That’s the model. The model is we go and do that.

We buy more spices and easy business. We buy another baker’s staples business. That’s how I see us driving B and G going forward and driving valuation. Being smart about it and making sure that we’re buying things that we can add value to that will have synergies that we just don’t buy and bolt on drop administrative synergies, we need to do more than that. We need to get more in the P and L.

We need to be more focused in terms of our

Unidentified speaker: And B and G has a history, if we go back a ways, of doing that actually very successfully.

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: I’m So kind of got away with that with Frozen, to be honest with you.

Unidentified speaker: Right. Right. You recently announced an amendment of your senior secured revolving credit facility, which temporarily increases your maximum consolidated leverage ratio from seven to one to 7.5 to one. But leverage is obviously still a topic of concern for investors when it comes to B and G, with net debt to EBITDA still approaching 7x. I think on your second quarter earnings call last month, you mentioned that you believe you can reduce net leverage down by a full turn to maybe six times in twelve months’ time.

How much of that is predicated, I guess, on further asset sales using free cash flow to pay down debt versus using free cash flow? And can you talk through your plans to address the ’27 and ’28 bond and loan maturities?

Bruce Wacha, CFO, B and G Foods: Yes. So Andrew, as you said, on the second quarter earnings call, we referenced our leverage just under 7x today and talked about a path to bring it down to about 6x or so in the next twelve months. There’s, call it, four pieces to that. There’s about a half a turn of leverage that we expect to come out with the culmination of the strategic review of Green Giant, aka divesting that business. There’s about onethree of a turn of deleveraging that comes from running the business better, hitting the midpoint of our guidance for EBITDA should take about onethree of a turn off of our leverage.

And then about oneten to twoten of a turn from both just excess cash, so excess cash, EBITDA less CapEx, cash interest, cash taxes and after dividends, and then another tenth to twoten of a turn for continued optimization in our working capital and inventory, which we’ve been bringing down over time. Great. As far as the debt stack, we’re a regular way issuer in the high yield markets. We have been for the last twenty five years. And so we’ve got a debt stack that looks not that different than what it would have looked like ten years ago or fifteen years ago.

We do have a 2027 maturity. Those become current in 2026. I think it’s reasonable to expect us to refinance those in the regular way, high yield markets, at some point that makes sense over the next twelve months.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Great. In regards to the dividend, you’ve been able to maintain it at its current level, right, despite some of the leverage concerns. I guess what’s driving your confidence that the current dividend level is the right one?

Bruce Wacha, CFO, B and G Foods: Yes. So a couple of things. So since we’ve been a public company, B and G has always paid a dividend. It’s probably always paid a little bit of a higher dividend than the industry average to reward investors to hold our stock while they wait for the next M and A event to create alpha. No different year.

The Board expects management to run the business to support a dividend, and I think it’s reasonable to expect them to continue to do so. We do set our dividend policy quarterly from an approval process, but the Board generally expects a longer term view than just what is the next quarter. And so with everything that we have going on with the business today around strategic review and capital structure, I think it’s reasonable to understand that the Board is going to look at the business post strategic review and post capital structure and say, what is the right excess cash ratio to support a dividend and what’s the right ongoing dividend? Yes.

Unidentified speaker: All right. Your long term EBITDA margin target is 18% to 20, which the company was able to achieve back in ’nineteen and 2020. However, implied EBITDA margin for 25%, think it’s closer to around 15%, which is only slightly below where EBITDA margin has been over each of the past two years. Can you remind investors what have been the biggest drivers of the EBITDA margin contraction from your long term target down to the mid teens range the past couple of years? And could margin get worse before it gets better?

And how are you thinking about both the steps and the time line it will take to get back to that sort of longer term range?

Bruce Wacha, CFO, B and G Foods: Yes. There are two things that really drove that margin down. So part one, the first two years of COVID were phenomenal for a packaged food manufacturer, terrible for society, but we had outsized sales, and margins were pretty consistent with where they were pre COVID. And then we had two years of supply chain disruption, input cost inflation and then ultimately, massive cost increases, which led to massive price increases. Generally speaking, the price increases protected dollar profit, not margins.

And so we margined down as sales went up due to pricing to protect dollars. So part one, we had inflation. We took price as best as we could, but we got margin down as a result of that. Part two is Green Giant, our frozen and vegetables business, has had margin deterioration. It is volatile.

It’s in the agricultural industry, and so there’s good crop, bad crop. And it’s also had higher costs, particularly around logistics. If you just do simple math and extract that business from our portfolio, you would get a margin that’s back around that 20% EBITDA margin area that we’d like to be.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Maybe shifting to some closer in topics, and you touched on this a little bit earlier, Casey. Organic sales in the first half were down about 7%, though did sequentially improve from down 10% in the first quarter, down 4% in the second quarter. Your guidance implies sort of organic sales in the back half maybe down low single digit range. You talk about what you’re seeing in the market that sort of gives you some of the confidence you should be able to achieve that sort of sequential improvement you’re looking for in the back half?

And I know you talked about the first two months of this quarter were even better than that. So you’re it seems like you’re on your way.

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: I think so what we’re looking at is, obviously, our sellout data, our shipments and sales for the first two months are in line with where we expected. So that’s always the first confidence for me that we’re actually getting there. So and we need to see continued improvement even going into fourth quarter. And the only other thing I’d remind you is we have a fifty third week in the fourth quarter. So we have an extra week, which is part of our of the reason how we’ll get to kind of a flat or positive performance in the back half.

So and we’re watching our sell out consumption data pretty closely. The 60% that we measure just to see what’s going on there, as I said, some improvement, but not as much as I’d like to see. And we’re watching that week by week to see if we’re getting that sequential improvement that we expect. Honestly, I don’t really worry about July, August too much because that’s really our low seasonality. We’re getting into our big seasonality with the fall baking and some of the other even Green Giant has a little bit of a seasonality effect in the fall.

So it’s going to be really important that we see kind of sellout data improving in that period. So but look, our sellout data I mean, our sell in data looks good. Our sellout data is improving. We’ll keep watching it, but the fifty third week will help. So I’m feeling more and more confident.

We also have a dynamic, in terms of EBITDA in the business of the frozen business had a we had some really bad crop issues that led to costs being in the back half of last year and then the first half of this year. So we had crop issues on corn. We had crop issues on peas. So those look like those crops are coming in very favorably this year. So we’ll have better costs year over year.

Plus, we had kind of ForEx with the Mexican peso kind of hurting us last year through the first half of this year. Should be moderating in the back half year over year. So we’ve got quite a bit of shift in our frozen and vegetable business going on from the bottom line. The other thing we did, we put up kind of a $10,000,000 cost challenge into the back half of this year. So Q3 and Q4, we’ve kind of cut costs, increased improved productivity from our original plans.

We’ve got some restructuring that we’ve done in the company to save overhead costs. So we’ve got some things that are helping improve the profitability in the back half, which is what we really want to see as well, not just top line performance. We also want to see the shift in the frozen and the $10,000,000 cost challenge coming through in the P and L, which we’re starting to see.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Got it. In Spices and Seasonings, it’s a segment, as you mentioned, that is expected to be most impacted by tariffs, given certain ingredients are largely imported from Asia. I guess given some of the softer trends in the segment of late, and you explained kind of why that is, How would you characterize your ability to maybe take some strategic pricing to cover some of this tariff driven inflation? And I guess how concerned are you about consumer elasticities if you were to put through some incremental pricing?

Obviously, largest competitor is going to be doing some of that as we move through the latter part of this year to do their best to sort of mitigate. Where are you on that

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: sort of that continuum? We’re taking pricing to recover tariff costs in the spice and seasonings business. The only other place that we have significant exposure is in steel steel cans, and we’re also taking pricing to recover those costs. So we’ve released those things. We’re in discussions, in negotiations with customers on those.

So I feel like we’ve got the right approach. As in the spices and seasonings category, this is not just us. This is the the all the entire category is facing this. It looks like the lead competitor has already moved in some cases. So I think the plan to execute pricing is underway.

And it will just be a matter of timing, getting through all the negotiation and lead times to get things set relative to how our costs are coming in. So tariffs on spice and seasonings are really our biggest issue. It’s China, China 30%, it’s Vietnam, black and then black pepper. This is probably the biggest piece of the exposure we have. So if we can manage it in spices and seasonings, I feel pretty comfortable that we’ll get through it all.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. We kind of waited, and I think that everybody waited until all this tariff negotiations settled down. I mean, if we had taken pricing two months ago, we would have at 54% in China, you know, 30 like percent. So it’s been a little volatile, but I think it’s kind of at least steady stated for a little bit here. I’m personally hoping that we get to a point, and when we get through all these tariff negotiations, that the unavailable natural resources argument that, you know, coffee, cocoa, spices, you know, we begin to see some relief around that.

But at this point, I think we’ve decided we got to move forward, and we got to go with we’re starting to incur costs behind the current tariffs, so we need to start recovering that. And then over time, we’ll look at do we get some relief on that front and be able to back off some of these this pricing action. But right now, it’s that’s not in sight. Yes.

Unidentified speaker: Your Meal segment over time is expected to grow sales low single digit. Hasn’t been able to deliver that really since you started reporting at the segment level. What gives you the confidence over the longer term? This is still a segment that can kind of consistently deliver modest sales growth. And how core valuable is Ortega and other, we’ll call it, the ethnic brands to the future plans of that space?

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: Yes. I mean so the biggest lag on us being able to get to positive sales growth has largely been Ortega. Las Palmas is growing nicely. Actually, Maple Grove Farm syrup has started to grow nicely. Creamy wheat has been pretty steady.

So really, it’s about Ortega. Ortega has been and I think you probably even heard this with old El Paso. It’s just new competition coming in, more competitive environment, slicing the pie up a little bit We’ve we’re defending our turf. We’re doing the right things. We’ve innovated in sauces.

Our sauces business is kind of helping and growing. You know, we’ve we’ve had we’ve taken some hits in terms of our shelves and kits and some of the ancillary things. The other piece, frank frankly, half of the decline in Ortega is because we lost the whole Chili’s crop from South America last year. So we had literally no supply. And we’re the only we’re the game in town, know, the the only game in town.

So we lost probably $5,000,000 of sales because we had no ability to service that business. And, we will get back in because Walmart’s holding the slot and everything once the new crop comes through. So Ortega has been a struggle, supply, competition. But I think we’ve got new innovation coming on shelves that will strengthen our position. We have a We’re launching a Cheez It licensed shell in the cheese taco shell category.

We have new green sauces coming on, an Ortegaon sauces. We’ve got some enchilada kits coming in. We’ve got some new things that are hitting. We’ve got some strong innovation. So I think you’ll see Ortega beginning to improve.

We’ve broadened the distribution of our sauce business across channels. So it’s getting there. It’s just been a tough period with supply and competition.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. To get to the midpoint of our EBITDA guidance for the full year, we would require EBITDA to be up about 3% in the back half of the year, would represent a pretty meaningful inflection relative to the EBITDA declines of 219% in each of the first two quarters. So what sort of visibility do you have towards achieving this inflection? And sort of what are the key drivers of doing so? Yes.

Sure. So the two big positive drivers.

Bruce Wacha, CFO, B and G Foods: Part one, Casey mentioned Green Giant. So we had a bunch of one offs that impacted us the back half of last year and the front half of this year, particularly around weather related crop bad crop last year and then also currency. We manufacture in Mexico, so we basically manufacture in pesos, and the U. S. Dollar peso got out of whack for a period of time.

Both of those, we expect to be better. We kind of know that they’re better because of when crop and product is made. And so we should have some favorability in the back half on Green Giant, from a margin and profit standpoint. Also, Casey talked about the $10,000,000 cost savings challenge. We know where most of that is because it’s fairly straightforward.

It’s cost savings, and we’ve already executed and actioned a fair amount of that. And so pretty good visibility on those. There’s bad guys, of course. We talked about it on our earnings calls. Both of those initiatives were about 8,000,000 to $10,000,000 between Green Giant and then the cost savings.

We obviously know we’ve got bad guys as well around tariffs, around input cost inflation, favorability in some categories, a little bit of a drag in others. But on the balance, we feel pretty comfortable that we should be flat to up in the back half of the year.

Unidentified speaker: And can you expand a little bit on what sort of actions specifically you’re taking as part of that plan to save the incremental $10,000,000 in the back half? And I guess how sustainable are those efforts as we look past ’25 and into ’26 and beyond?

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: So the components of the 10,000,000 that are flowing to the P and L now, we actually can start seeing it in our numbers now. But so first, we increased our productivity efforts from 3% to 3.5%. And so we’re starting to see that incremental 0.5% flow into our back half costs. So it’s if you think about 0.5% on our COGS of $1,000,000,000 that’s pretty substantial. It’s pretty substantial.

So and we’re not counting on all of that flowing in this year because of the timing of when we’re shipping inventory and deferrals and all that. But we are expecting some of that, and we’re seeing it kind of in the projections. The second thing that we looked at was we did pare back on we had conducted some restructuring. So we have restructured some of our operations. We got rid of a few central functions.

We’ve, you know, RFP ed some of our other, you know, kind of, you know, services and other things. We are looking to the future of what our company might look like ex Green Giant, and we began to restructure some of that in advance of that. These things are all sustainable, that those will be ongoing cost savings. We also went into our trade, our trade spending because our trade spending has kind of creeped up over the last couple of years and looked at how do we get some efficiency out of the trade spend. And we’ve kind of paired back our back half plans, cut some inefficient spend and done some other things and been able to see that.

In some cases, we’ve looked hard at our marketing, where is it working, where is it not working, and cut back some of the things that we didn’t think were effective and preserved marketing spend where we really needed it. So these are pretty tangible actions that we can see, and we can see them kind of flowing in the P and Ls and the forecasts. And they’re the right things to do. I would say about onethree of it is coming from restructuring, about onethree of it is coming from productivity, and then about onethree of it is coming from from trades’ beneficiency and some other things.

Unidentified speaker: Sounds like you’re trying to get ahead of any potential stranded costs that might come about as a result of a frozen divestiture. Okay. Maybe last thing is sort of as we sit here today And I think that’s the

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: other thing we haven’t really talked about, but Green Giant added so much complexity to our company, Mexico operations, Canada selling operation that when we get out of that, we have disproportionate amount of costs trapped in managing that business. So we’ve got a program mapped out of what we would look like without it, and we’ve kind of just moved that forward with some of these

Unidentified speaker: cost savings. Good. As we sit here today, what do you see as the biggest risk and or opportunities for just the year to come in either better or worse than sort of currently expected? And you’re talking about 2025? Yep.

’25.

Casey Keller, CEO, B and G Foods: I mean, I think the biggest, the two risks that we’re watching pretty closely are how fast do we recover the top line. So is our the sellout is the sellout consumption data improving and getting down into the closer and closer to stable or closer and closer to low single digit client. I I want to see that. Number one, I think that’s a risk of how fast that happens. The other one is, tariffs.

So we’ve executed the pricing. We’ve released it. We’re in the discussion with customers. It’s really the how long it takes us to get it implemented and relative to how fast the tariff costs come in. I think those are should be fairly closely aligned or maybe just a little bit of gap between them.

But like let’s say we have some issues with getting that pricing through in a couple of big customers, that might be a little bit of a risk to what we’re doing. But I feel pretty confident, as Bruce and I are talking about, we see the EBITDA improvement versus year over year. On the frozen vegetable, the cost savings challenges, we feel pretty confident about that. It’s really that top line and making sure that our top line trends are recovering and stabilizing and that we’re seeing the pricing get reflected to cover tariffs.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Good. I think that’s a great place to cut it off. We’re out of time. Please join us over in the breakout session, and please join me in thanking Casey and Bruce for being here.

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