B&G Foods, Inc. Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference

Our company was here, so I got to Right spend some quality time with them.

Yeah. So, I was on the B&G Foods board for about eight and a half years. Been in the role for four weeks now. What I will say is fundamentally, I think the strategy is on track. I had the opportunity to oversee the governance and then move into the execution of running the day-to-day operation. To me, that's what excited me, because I saw tons of opportunities with B&G Foods. When I think about the first four weeks, we have really put a lot of focus on going brand by brand and understanding where are there opportunities to either grow the brand, stabilize the brand, or is there investments or fundamentally something that we have to do transformational with the brand. I would kind of sum it up into four areas. One is there's an opportunity around profitable consumption.

Over the last couple of years, it feels like the organization has gotten distracted and was not putting the place or the focus on consumption. How do we shift our energy to profitable consumption? I think the team's done a great job of reshaping the portfolio. That's never ending, and that will continue to go on. But with that, how do we ensure that we're sharper on our priorities, drive better execution, and then ultimately look at how do we drive EBITDA expansion, margin improvement through different type of initiatives. All those are the things that makes me really excited about taking on this role. But it's going to be about execution, speed of delivery, a sense of urgency, and then leveraging my background, coming from a retailer and knowing the retailer mindset as well as the digital mindset.

How do you lean in to use data to make faster decisions?

Yeah. So once again, I think the team's done a really good job of managing the portfolio. There's been a lot of changes over the last three years to strengthen our portfolio with the divestiture of Green Giant, cost, looking at our SG&A, right-sizing of the organization, all the above. And once again, that's going to be an ongoing effort that we're always going to look at. When I think about areas that we're going to double down on, it is going to be looking at how do we look and spend our marketing dollars. So today, we really take the approach of major programs. I don't believe for a mid-size cap company we need to. What we need to do is really focus on clear priorities and how we're executing with great focus and taking the dollars that we have and really putting them to work for us.

And through retail media, through digital, all the above, how we could hone in and really drive around brand awareness, equity, and then more importantly, contribute to the retailers around their digital strategy as well. There's a little bit of a strategy shift there that will occur. The last component, it is going to be about operational excellence. What I mean by that, I know that's a buzzy word, but it is about how we run our plants and our manufacture with strong productivity, labor standards that ultimately will improve our cost structure. But how do we drive volume back into the plants that will improve the profitability of our products and our plant operations?

Yeah. So, there's going to be a lot of parallel efforts here to keep a focus on where we need to go. It's going to be really four key. One, profitable consumption, both for tracked as well as non-tracked metrics. We've over-indexed and kind of changed our messaging over the past couple of years to really focus on non-track, and we have to win in both. So consumption, profitable. EBITDA, how do we continue to grow and expand our EBITDA, which ultimately then leads into how we could pay down debt, deleverage at a faster rate, and have a clear path to deacceleration of our deleverage position. Lastly, our brand awareness which ties right back into consumption. Do we have relevant brands? Are we priced right? Are we selling at the rate that we expect?

And to me, it's a cylinder, it's a flywheel that ultimately will grow better profitability, more sales, and de-leverage us at a faster rate.