Middleby Corp Jefferies Global Industrials Conference 2026

Great. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Great to be with all of you. Thanks for taking time to be with us. Very excited over the next 20 minutes or so to talk about what has been a transformative year at Middleby. If either you are new to Middleby or you have not stayed up with Middleby, when I say transformative, it is not a fancy buzzword. We truly have changed the landscape of our company this year. Beginning of this year, we sold off a 51% portion of our residential platform to 26North in a joint venture with them. Then 5 months later, we completed the spinoff of our food processing platform into its own separate standalone public company, today known as Midera. Very exciting for both platforms. It allows them to continue to grow and expand in their various categories.

What it allows us to do is now get back to our roots and to be very focused as a pure play Middleby Commercial Foodservice company, which is where Middleby started 25 to 30 years ago. We will talk about a number of different initiatives today. Probably the biggest thing I want to stress is that for as long as I have been at Middleby, we have always been a very sales-centric organization, always very focused on our customers, very close to our customers, and you are seeing that come through. What we have done so far this year, we talked about it on Investor Day, we have seen top-line net sales grow 8% so far this year. We are very happy about that. We are going to talk more about that. We know that if we want to be an elite industrial compounder, we have to marry up great top-line growth with world-class margins.

That is what we are going to focus on more in this presentation today than we ever have before. How do we do that? That is through operational excellence, talking about how we are thinking about our portfolio of brands, our SKUs, our facilities, and coupling up with our organic sales growth. If you are new to Middleby or have not stayed up with us for a while, just a quick recap of what Middleby Commercial Foodservice now looks like. 2025, $2.4 billion in revenue, segment margin of 27% EBITDA, 65 brands across the globe, 38 factories, and about 6,000 employees. As you see in the bottom right corner of the slide, we are very fortunate to have a great and very diverse customer base. Some of the leading chains around the world, across QSRs, across c-stores, across retail, both domestic and abroad.

We'll talk a little bit more about the split in Middleby Commercial Foodservice between our core cooking and warming brands, which is about two-thirds of the business, and then our ever-evolving ICE and beverage platform. These are the brands in the portfolio today. You start on the left-hand side, and it's the core cooking brands that I've referenced that go back to the initial acquisition of Pitco and Blodgett from Middleby back in 2001. We've built great brands, very focused in leading technologies within cooking and warming. But over the last 6 to 8 years, we've developed and built out our ICE and beverage platform. Very focused on, again, ICE, but the ever-evolving and ever-growing segment of beverage, which we'll talk more about. And it's the unique combination of the cooking and warming and ICE and beverage that is the secret sauce for Middleby.

This is a portfolio of brands that nobody else in our industry has, and we'll talk more about how that has actually helped us grow both parts of our business. If you pay attention to nothing else today, this slide to me is why I'm so excited about Middleby, is, again, back to my time here, I've been here 16 years, we've always been very focused on our customers. We've been very close to our customers. We're a very sales-centric organization, and then we have a deep DNA within innovation, new product technologies, new developments. We're expanding to new markets. Again, we're going to talk more about ICE and beverage, international markets, but what is so exciting is really the fifth bucket today, which we'll talk more about, and that is our drive towards operational excellence.

I think this is coupling the best of Middleby of the past, what we've done so well, and coupling it with this next chapter of Middleby. So these are our five key pillars of our growth over the next several years. Even though we've always been a very sales-centric organization, we've never wanted to be complacent about how we think about how we engage our customers. This slide shows all of our either brand new or completely rethought go-to-market initiatives, from our independent sales reps here in the U.S. to our ever-evolving digital marketing strategies. We've built innovation kitchens around the world to allow our customers to experience Middleby firsthand. The flagship's in Dallas, but we've built ones in Europe.

All of these initiatives are to make it easier for our customers to understand Middleby, to be closer to Middleby, and for us to be closer to them. And you may sit here and say, "Okay, Steve. Hey, that's great." Everybody you're going to see today probably has a slide that's similar to this about how they're close to the customers, what they're doing. But let me give you a real-world example of why all of these initiatives matter. I shared this during our Investor Day back in May, and very fortunate and very thankful to KFC for letting us share a story together and this initiative together. KFC has been a long time customer of Middleby on the cooking and warming side of our business for decades. KFC came to Middleby saying, "We want to add a beverage platform to our menu," about 2 years ago.

Think about a fried chicken concept saying, "We want to be in premium beverage." You have to really start to think about how you get your head around that. They came to Middleby to figure out how to do that. They started our innovation kitchens in Dallas, moved to our innovation kitchens in the U.K., working very closely with their suppliers. The end result is what you see on the right-hand side, a combination of 100% Middleby products. Taylor, QualServ, Marco, Terry. Middleby is now powering the Kwench program for KFC. KFC is very vocal and very transparent about this initiative. It is truly driving new daypart and new traffic to their stores. It has been rolled out in a lot of international markets in the U.K., Canada, Australia. They have big growth plans for this.

This does not happen for Middleby if we do not have the relationship, if you do not have the innovation kitchens, if you do not have the portfolio of brands. If you did not have cooking and warming, you did not have the relationship. If you did not now have ICE and beverage, this does not come to fruition. This is the power of Middleby. Then again, you couple it up with international distribution, after-sales service, and support. That is why this has been such a success, not only for KFC but for Middleby as well. I am giving you this as one example. There are so many QSRs. There are so many fast casual concepts that are really focused on adding new beverage, premium beverage to their menu. It is a great example of how Middleby is leading the charge on this initiative right now. Get very excited to talk about customers. Now back to numbers. This is just a recap.

This is what we presented at our Investor Day back in May of our financial outlook over the three-year period going through 2028, which we will talk a little bit more about. You can read the page of the net sales growth, 3%-6%, coupled with 6%-9% EBITDA growth, 200-400 basis point margin expansion, which we are going to talk more about in the slide deck, and the appropriate 10%-15% EPS growth. As I said at the beginning of the slide, we are very happy with how the first half of this year has come together from a top-line perspective, growing 8% so far through the first half of the year. Our guidance for the year has increased to being up 7% overall.

We are very fortunate to have a recurring revenue stream around parts and service, which today is about 17% of our annual revenue, and we believe we can continue to grow that segment. What I am very happy about from a growth perspective is our sales are very balanced. It is very balanced among QSRs. It is very balanced in the U.S. domestic business. It is very balanced in our international segments in Latin America, Europe, and Asia especially. It is not one in particular customer, it is not one in particular segment that is driving our growth so far this year. This gives me a lot of encouragement for how the rest of this year and the next several years continue to unfold.

But as I said at the beginning, we know that we have to marry the strong top line with the margin expansion, which we're going to talk a little bit more about in these upcoming slides. One of the questions that we do get and would like to give some clarity to is the margin profile of our cooking and warming segment versus our ICE and beverage platform, which today is about a 400 basis point difference between the two platforms. What I want to stress is that there is no structural difference between the two platforms. There is no reason that ICE and beverage cannot get to the same margin profile as cooking and warming. Cooking and warming is a more established platform, which is part of it. There still is a lot of development and investment that's going on in ICE and beverage.

Last night, we announced the closure, and I'll talk a little bit more about it, of our brewing business, which represents for ICE and beverage a 220 basis point pickup as we go into next year. So immediately right there, we're closing a part of the gap. There are a number of startup costs as we talk about new products around beverage that we're investing in. My biggest point and my biggest takeaway here is, yes, there's difference today, but we feel like we have a very clear path to close that gap, and there is no reason that both platforms can continue to expand their margin profile. The ICE and beverage in the long run will certainly be in line with our cooking and warming platform.