George Paleologou
President, CEO & Director
Welcome, everyone, to our 2026 second quarter conference call. With me here today is our CFO, Will Kalutycz. Our presentation will follow the deck that was posted on our website this morning. You can also access it by clicking on the link included in this morning’s press release.
Our second quarter results represent a key inflection point for our company as we demonstrated meaningful progress on a number of financial and strategic objectives while executing well on our various growth and operational initiatives. This progress is validating the potential value to be created from our most recent capital spending cycle, which began in 2022 and involves a complete transformation of our manufacturing footprint and ability to service the U.S. market.
The issue of how ambitious this CapEx cycle was has at times been met with skepticism by the market at large. So today, I’m going to spend a few minutes explaining its merits and potential rewards. The capacity we built over the past few years was not created to produce the foods of the past, but rather the foods of the future. This was done to position us to take advantage of the emerging new food order, which I talked about in my most recent letter to shareholders.
Current consumer trends towards cleaner, healthier and more nutrient-dense foods are disrupting the traditional CPG space in ways that we have not seen before and, in turn, is creating white space selling opportunities for companies like ours.
Demand for most of our core product categories such as meat sticks, cooked protein, sandwiches, artisan breads and kettle-cooked meal solutions is
