KHC - The Kraft Heinz Company (KHC) Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference (Transcript)
2024-05-31 06:32:06 ET
The Kraft Heinz Company (KHC)
Bernstein’s 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference
May 30, 2024 03:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Carlos Abrams-Rivera - CEO
Conference Call Participants
Alexia Howard - Bernstein
Presentation
Alexia Howard
Good afternoon, everyone. It's my great pleasure to welcome Carlos Abrams-Rivera, who's the CEO of Kraft Heinz since December of last year. My name is Alexia Howard. I've been covering the U.S. packaged food group since, I think, August of 2006. For those of you in the audience this afternoon, if you have questions for Carlos, please feel free to use the Pigeonhole link. Hopefully, it will come up on my little iPad here, and we'll work those questions into the conversation as well.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Alexia Howard
So Kraft Heinz has undergone a remarkable transformation since 2019, in terms of the company's culture, the portfolio, rebuilding capabilities, including marketing, innovation and promotional optimization, and it's receiving accolades for the progress that the company has made. Now clearly, at the same time, the packaged food company, more broadly, has had a very tough time in 2023, and investors are kind of now waiting with bated breath to see if volumes will improve as we lap some of the headwinds from last year.
So maybe to kick things off here, Carlos, you've been back at Kraft Heinz since early 2020, and congratulations on stepping into the CEO role at the start of the year, yet you were also with Kraft way back before the separation of Mondelez in 2012. So as you come back to the company over the last few years, what has changed in your view in the gap?
Carlos Abrams-Rivera
Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me here. I appreciate the opportunity, and it's been a great day of connecting with a number of people throughout the day. And what I would say is, I started with Kraft Heinz now four years ago. It's a completely different company than it was the moment I walked in. And I think that it's been a -- certainly the privilege of my life to be a CEO and a very humbling and appreciative opportunity.
And I would say is, today, I think what I'm excited about the fact is that we're such a stronger company than we were four years ago. If you think of even just as basic as our balance sheet, right? We were junk-rated a few -- just a few years ago. We did that quickly. Within two years, we went back to investments grade status. We're in a place now that we can control our destiny. We removed a number of things in our portfolio that didn't fit with -- because they were highly commoditized and exposed to private label, that we were able to sell at a good valuation because we had the discipline of how we approve it, how we win through it. So again, a very much different company than we were before....
The Kraft Heinz Company (KHC) Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference (Transcript)