Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. ($KDP)

Okay. Welcome back, everybody. Thanks for joining us. For our next session, I am very excited to welcome Kerry Dr Pepper back to our conference. With us today from KDP are Chief Executive Officer, Tim Cofer; and Chief Financial Officer, Anthony DiSilvestro. Tim and Anthony are going to use the balance of our session today to run through a presentation to update us on the many things going on at KDP. And with that, I'm going to hand it right over to Tim to take us away.

Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Steve. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be back here in Paris at the Deutsche Bank conference. A lot has changed since we presented on this stage a couple of years ago. And I'm looking forward to sharing the exciting developments underway here at KDP. Now before jumping in, let me, of course, first call your attention to our standard safe harbor regarding forward-looking statements and our use of non-GAAP financial measures. So with that out of the way, let me start with an overview of our company, including the recently acquired JDE Peet's business. KDP is now a scaled beverage leader with $28 billion in annual sales. Our business is global, with roughly 2/3 of the business in North America, 20% in Europe and remaining 15% in international markets. Our business is singularly focused on beverages, which in my opinion, is the best place to play in consumer staples. Why? It's a large and growing market with approximately $1.4 trillion in global sales and a healthy mid-single-digit growth rate over time. And importantly, beverages benefit from strong structural tailwinds, including frequent and habitual consumption patterns continually evolving demand trends that create growth opportunities and ongoing premiumization. Within the beverage industry, KDP is a scaled challenger. We have leadership positions in sizable and attractive categories like carbonated soft drinks, mineral water and coffee, but also have significant white space and runway for future expansion. As I'll discuss in more detail shortly, our recent acquisition of JDE Peet's tripled the size of our coffee business and added significant capabilities across formats, channels, and geographies. For the first time, we now have scaled and advantaged businesses in both refreshment beverages and coffee. So with this foundation in place, we plan to separate into 2 pure-play businesses, Beverage co and Global Coffee Co. Each future business will benefit from tailored strategies, operating models and capital allocation approaches aligned to their specific category and geographic exposures, enhanced organizational clarity, including aligned incentives and priorities, greater strategic optionality and distinct yet attractive investment cases. As Anthony will discuss in more detail, we're making steady progress towards our separation with a targeted completion date in early 2027. Let me now walk you through each future business and its investment case in more detail, and I'll start with Beverage co. The future Beverage Co. operates in the attractive $300 billion North American cold beverage market. The industry delivers consistent growth over time supported by its ability to continually evolve with consumer mega trends such as wellness, self-expression, convenience and entertainment. We are 1 of only 3 industry leaders, which together represent about half of the beverage category sales with the balance of the competitive landscape remaining fragmented, which provide meaningful opportunity for our business to gain share and drive industry consolidation over time. Beverage Co. is a large and profitable pure play, $12 billion in annual net sales, $3.6 billion in EBITDA and a 30% margin. We are distinguished by key competitive advantages, including a portfolio of iconic brands. with leadership positions in attractive categories like carbonated soft drinks, energy, waters, tea, juices and others. A proven model to extend our portfolio into fast-growing beverage white spaces. Enhanced digitally enabled marketing capabilities to drive greater mental availability for our brands and a powerful and scarce direct store delivery route to market that drives superior point-of-sale execution. We believe these factors position Beverage Co. for strong stand-alone growth and superior returns over time. Let me discuss each of these advantages in turn, and I'm going to start with the brands. So at its core, Beverage Co. is a brand-led company. We have over 50 brands, including 3 $1 billion-plus brands starting with our flagship, Dr Pepper, which has approximately $6 billion in retail sales, along with Canada Dry and Mott's. We have 12 additional brands with over $500 million in retail sales, including own trademarks like 7 Up, Ghost, Penafiel and Snapple as well as partner brands like C4, Bloom, Electrolit and we have yet another 12 $100 million-plus brands. Our brands are distinct. They're supported by a passionate consumer base and they command category leadership positions. Importantly, they also offer significant opportunities for future growth. Our brands play an attractive beverage spaces. Our largest category exposure is carbonated soft drinks or CSDs, which generate nearly $50 billion in annual retail sales in the U.S. and have grown at a mid-single-digit CAGR in recent years. The category is roughly split evenly between flavors and colas with the former growing at a faster rate. This performance reflects a trend towards bold, varied flavors in beverages, which has been only amplified by the growing influence of Gen Z, Gen Alpha and multicultural consumers. Beverage Co. will be very well positioned to capitalize on this dynamic as our business primarily focuses on flavors and has the #1 portfolio in this high-growth space. The CSD category has also proven effective in adapting to consumer wellness preferences through 0 sugar and low-calorie options, which have grown at a double-digit rate and now represent 1/3 of the CSD category and our iconic Dr Pepper brand holds the #2 position in this dynamic zero-sugar. CSD category are also notable for the great value they provide consumers. You see on this chart, on a price per ounce basis, CSDs are among the most affordable category in beverages and screen particularly attractive relative to areas like energy drinks, ready-to-drink coffee and protein. The value proposition is further enhanced by the category's comprehensive price pack architecture with offerings that range from entry to premium price points and packages that are geared for both immediate and future consumption occasions. Another notable category feature is a private label penetration of just compared to 21% in the CPG average, reinforcing the power of brands in beverages. The combination of these factors underpins our confidence that the CSD category will remain an attractive space in the future. Now within carbonated soft drinks, Beverage Co.'s positioning is anchored by our flagship Dr Pepper brand. Dr Pepper has gained market share for 9 consecutive years. It's the #2 soft drink in the category. It ranks as the most popular beverage brand with teens and Dr Pepper has the highest engagement of any food or beverage brand on TikTok. Importantly, despite the success, the brand retains significant runway for growth. And we're pursuing this growth through multiple initiatives. First, as I'll discuss shortly, we're raising the game on marketing to more precisely and powerfully appeal to both existing and new consumers. Second, we're applying localized strategies to strengthen our leadership in heartland markets and close market share gaps in underpenetrated regions. And third, we're continually aligning our portfolio with attractive growth areas, such as 0 sugar CSDs and cultural trends like dirty soda. As a result, we're confident that Dr Pepper can sustain its strong momentum in the coming years. We're also taking the core foundations of Dr Pepper's success, a distinctive brand position, impactful marketing, purposeful innovation, strong point-of-sale execution and applying this repeatable growth model to other brands. For example, we leaned into Canada Dry's positioning as a relaxing beverage, reinforced that identity with marketing like the current Dry Time is My Time campaign and complemented the work with our highly successful Fruit Splash innovation. As a result, Canada Dry has strengthened its leadership position in ginger ale and here in 2026, is on track to gain CSD market share for a fourth time in 5 years. We're also beginning to activate the same playbook on other iconic brands, including 7Up in CSDs and Snapple and Mott's in still beverages. As those initiatives build momentum, we expect to see positive results. Another core element of the Beverage Co. model is finding attractive opportunities to address durable and high potential white spaces. Over time, we've successfully evolved our portfolio through a flexible build-buy partner approach, characterized by different models, levels of capital investment and commercial arrangements. The chosen model is tailored to each opportunity and can range from organic brand extensions to capital-light distribution partnerships like in the case of Electrolit to equity investments like C4 and Bloom, and finally, to outright acquisitions like Ghost. Importantly, we have been and we will be patient and disciplined as we execute this strategy. While we look at many options, we only move forward when we're confident in a partner or target brand's growth potential and when the economics are compelling. The energy category is an illustration of how we successfully deploy this model. Energy drinks are large and a very attractive space with a $30 billion in annual retail sales and a double-digit multiyear CAGR. Just 4 years ago, KDP market share in this category effectively rounded to 0. Today, we have an over 8% share, which we've built through capital-light partnerships, equity investments and bolt-on acquisitions as well as organic growth for the brands we've added to the portfolio. Looking ahead, we feel good about our positioning in the category. We have a portfolio of complementary brands that play in the fast-growing Zero Sugar segment while still serving distinct consumers and need states. Each of our brands has significant runway for growth, which supports our goal to achieve a 10% plus market share in the coming years. In fact, we've already crossed that market share threshold at 13 major customers in the United States. Importantly, our white space expansion strategy provides both growth and healthy economics to KDP. For example, strong stand-alone sales and distribution emergence are a prerequisite for partner brands to enter our system. We then look to enhance the stand-alone contribution through 2 additional benefits. First, operating leverage as the added volume, obviously reduces our fixed cost per unit and second, halo effects from the additional scale enabling larger drop sizes, greater in-store frequency and stronger outlet level relationships, which, in turn, drives incremental volume and profit for other brands within our portfolio. As a result as our partnership mix has grown in recent years, we've nonetheless expanded segment operating margins. We expect a similar dynamic to continue as we build our presence in more white spaces in the future. Our brand building model is another growth lever with a simple goal to drive demand and win more beverage occasions. We do this by building physical availability to ensure we deliver the right product, package and price point in every channel where the consumer shops, strengthening mental availability and purchase intent through distinctive brand positioning and impactful marketing and driving a sustainable flywheel of growth by continuously recruiting new households while deepening engagement with existing consumers. To deliver on these objectives, we've been enhancing our marketing function with a focus on 5 key capabilities. First, deeper consumer insights from better connecting existing databases and integrating new data sets. Second, precision marketing, which uses those consumer insights and improve measurement tools to direct the spend towards the highest return audiences. Third, deploying more impactful creative content including capitalizing on viral cultural moments to build consumer connection. Next, combining the first 3 capabilities to deliver very personalized and relevant messaging. And finally, applying these same tools to our innovation engine to improve success rates and increase incrementality. Importantly, all of this is underpinned by advancements in AI capabilities highly connected first- and third-party data sets and optimize workflows. As our largest brand, Dr Pepper has been one of the initial focus areas for these enhanced capabilities. For example, this past fall's College Football Fansville campaign included over 2,500 different marketing permutations, delivering to consumers tailored content based on many factors, like their location, their retailer of choice, the beverage and occasion preferences and even whether their favorite football team won or lost its most recent game. Where we deploy these precision and personalization tools, we saw more than double the sales lift and roughly higher incremental return on ad spend relative to the national campaign average. As you can expect, we're now beginning to successfully apply these marketing tools to additional brands, and we expect these capabilities to become an increasingly meaningful top and bottom line enabler for our portfolio. Our brand building model is further enabled by our scarce and differentiated direct store delivery, or DSD, capability. We operate 1 of only 3 national nonalcoholic DSD systems in the United States. We reach approximately 80% of the population through our own trucks and the remaining 20% through high quality partners. Whether owned or otherwise access to effective DSD is absolutely critical in beverages. And when executed properly, DSD systems enable brands to serve stores that would otherwise be difficult to reach, strengthen relationships with store-level decision-makers and drive superior quality of distribution, including the very important cold drink assets. Importantly, DSD systems are highly responsive to scale, with the additional volume driving operating leverage that can fund a virtuous cycle of reinvestment and further growth. As a result, we've invested in our DSD network in the form of new brands, more powerful digital tools for our frontline employees and opportunistic expansion into new geographies. These investments have generated healthy returns and we'll continue to prioritize a route to market as a focus area. So bringing all these elements together, we believe Beverage Co. is well positioned to create value as a pure-play public company. The business will have strong and self-sustaining growth enabled by an advantaged brand portfolio, differentiated capabilities and an entrepreneurial challenger culture, enhanced by additional upside potential from strategic optionality over time. Now let me turn to Global Coffee Co. I'll start with the category. Coffee is a $400 billion global category and one of the most popular beverages worldwide. The category is emotional. It's habitual and it provides clear functional benefits driving consumption with over 3 billion cups consumed every day. It is the #1 beverage American consumers say they cannot live without. And this is evident in our 97% household penetration. Importantly the category's resonance extends to younger consumers. In the U.S. coffee's daily penetration with young adults has increased nearly 10 percentage points in the past decade, and we're seeing a similar trend in other countries as well. As a result of these factors, global coffee volume has demonstrated durable long-term growth at a 2% volume CAGR. And when you factor in the contribution from a price, and favorable mix, dollar sales have increased even faster. Global Coffee Co. is a scaled and profitable category leader with $16 billion in annual net sales, $3 billion in adjusted EBITDA and nearly 20% margins. The business ranks as the world's #2 coffee player by sales with leading share positions in over 35 markets blending and innovation. It has deep expertise in sourcing, blending and innovation. Our portfolio breadth is attractive with broad participation across formats, including outsized exposure to high-value growth areas like single serve. As I mentioned earlier, we created Global Coffee Co. through a combination of KDP's Keurig unit and the acquired JDE Peet's business. Global Coffee Co. unites the best features of each legacy company, pairing Keurig's North American leadership and unparalleled single-serve capabilities with JDE Peet's global scale brand portfolio and broad coffee presence. We expect from new avenues of growth and value creation through an advantaged portfolio, enhanced revenue potential and clear and actionable synergies. Let me start with Global Coffee Co.'s advantage and complementary brand portfolio. The company will be anchored by 4 $1 billion-plus icons, Keurig, Peet's, Lor and Jacobs, along with 6 $500 million-plus brands and 8 $100 million-plus brands. These are category-leading trademarks that are beloved by their consumers in their key markets, including Keurig in North America, Lor right here in France, Jacobs in Germany and Central Europe, Dow Egberts in the Netherlands and Belgium and Kenko in the U.K. While these brands are strong today, we see further opportunity to reinforce their leadership positions and drive even more growth in the future. The combination of Keurig and JDE Peet's should also drive enhanced growth potential for Global Coffee Co. through revenue synergies. Key opportunities include strengthening the Peet's brand in North America, sharing technology between Keurig and JDE Peet's single-serve platforms. extending Keurig's coffee brands into additional formats and channels and expanding the new Keurig Ulta platform to encompass additional brands and markets over time. Let me briefly touch on each of these in turn. Starting with the Peet's U.S. opportunity. Despite its heritage as a coffee pioneer and its premium credibility Peet's remains underpenetrated outside the West Coast. We believe there is meaningful opportunity to build it into a truly national brand. The key enabler will be Keurig's scale, including our existing retail partnerships and coast-to-coast route-to-market capabilities, which we plan to leverage to increase the breadth and depth of Peet's distribution. We expect to complement this with reinvestment of cost synergies behind high ROI marketing and promotions as well as coordinated commercial plans that capitalize on incremental growth opportunities for the combined Keurig and Peet's portfolios. As it relates to technology, one opportunity is in brewers. Keurig has always internally managed innovation and R&D, outsourcing only the production to third-party partners. As a result, Keurig's expertise in brewer technology has established us as the clear innovation leader in North America single-serve. We can extend some of these capabilities to JDE Peet's single-serve systems, expanding the consumer benefits provided by Lor, Sense and Tassimo brewers and ultimately unlocking additional growth opportunities. Moving to the format opportunity. In the U.S., legacy Keurig has been concentrated in the single-serve segment of at-home and office coffee, which comprised less than 1/3 of total coffee occasions. Importantly, Keurig brands like Green Mountain and the Original Donut Shop, have consumer permission to stretch into new areas, which we can accomplish by leveraging JDE Peet's existing format capabilities in areas like roast and ground, whole bean, instant and coffee concentrate. And finally, there's an opportunity related to Keurig Ulta, our next-generation coffee system targeted for launch in North America in late 2026. Ulta delivers multiple consumer benefits, including the ability to brew an unmatched variety of coffee and espresso-based beverages from a single machine. In addition, the platforms Ulta Rounds is a consumable that is plastic-free and aluminum-free, providing significant sustainability advantages. We see multiple ways to unlock this system's full potential through the combination with JDE Peet's. First, Peet's, will be one of two brands available in the Ulta system at launch, enhancing the premium positioning and broadening consumer appeal. Over time, we plan to include even more brands as part of Ulta. And second, we believe Ulta's consumer benefits are universally relevant. So while our near-term focus will be on North America, we also see an eventual international opportunity, which can be enabled over time by JDE Peet's global scale and it's recognizable and beloved multinational brands. We also expect that Global Coffee Co.'s revenue opportunities will be further enabled and supported by the same marketing strategy, we're applying in Beverage Co. centered on deeper consumer insights, precision marketing, breakthrough creative content, personalization and stronger innovation. We're implementing many of these same capabilities currently on our Keurig Anthem campaign, delivering content specific to individual households interests and needs and driving meaningfully higher returns. As we extend this approach across both legacy Keurig and JDE Peet's portfolios, we expect a measurable impact on our marketing effectiveness and growth potential. Beyond the revenue opportunities, Global Coffee Co. also has clear and actionable cost agenda. Work is actively underway to achieve our cost targets and we remain confident in delivering $400 million in synergies over 3 years. Savings will come across SG&A and IT, procurement and manufacturing and logistics, driven by discrete work streams that are jointly owned by legacy KDP and JDE Peet's leaders. Importantly, these cost synergies are incremental to the EUR 500 million of longer-term cost savings targeted under JDE Peet's Reignite the Amazing Program, half of which is planned to be reinvested to drive growth. The legacy JDE Peet's team has already begun driving these savings through portfolio simplification, design to value, organizational streamlining and route-to-market consolidation. And in addition, the legacy Keurig team continues to execute its ongoing annual productivity program. So overall, we expect Global Coffee Co. to be an attractive stand-alone company with steady and resilient growth and cash flow, supported by leading brands combination-related revenue and cost opportunities and deep and focused coffee expertise. With that, let me turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Anthony DiSilvestro.

Thanks, Tim, and good morning, everyone. I'm Anthony DiSilvestro, KDP's Chief Financial Officer. Today, I'll provide an update on our separation progress discuss our capital allocation priorities and deleveraging plans and then review our financial outlook for total KDP and for each company. Let's start with the separation time line. As we have outlined in the past, we are taking a milestone-based approach to our work and will only complete the separation once our key objectives are achieved. Importantly, we are making steady progress. We have named CEOs for each future business with Tim to leave Beverage Co. and Rafa Oliveira, to head Global Coffee Co., and have also established executive leadership teams to manage each business during the transition period. We closed the JDE Peet's transaction on April 1 and have started integrating the business with our plans for synergy capture well underway and execution on track. We have raised deal financing, including equity-like capital have a clear deleveraging path and are committed to maintaining investment-grade ratings for KDP and each future company. And we have commenced work to establish independent corporate cultures and identities while also initiating the planning process for the future Boards of each business. Based on our progress and the status of these milestones, we continue to target a separation in early 2027, subject to market conditions. Our capital allocation priorities are consistent with these separation milestones. In the near term, we will focus on organic investments in our business, maintaining our current dividend, and paying down debt to enable rapid deleveraging. We expect to reduce management leverage for total KDP to approximately 4.1x by year-end, supported by cash generation and EBITDA growth, and we'll continue to delever both Beverage Co. and Global Coffee Co. beyond this year. Once each business has sufficiently delevered, it can consider a more balanced capital allocation approach, including potential dividend increases, opportunistic M&A and share repurchase activity. Free cash flow generation will be a primary enabler of our multiyear capital allocation. We expect to generate $2.5 billion in free cash flow during 2026, which includes a 3.5% contribution from JDE Peet's. On a combined Beverage Co. and Global Coffee Co. basis, free cash flow should step up in 2027 and 2028 reflecting the following: First, EBITDA growth from a full year contribution of JDE Peet's, underlying momentum in Beverage Co. and Global Coffee Co., and incremental cost and revenue synergy delivery. Second, a meaningful reduction in transaction-related onetime cash expenses following a peak in 2026 and finally, working capital improvements, most notably in inventory. In total, we expect approximately $11 billion in combined free cash flow for Beverage Co. and Global Coffee Co. from 2026 to 2028. This will initially support deleveraging, but over time, will also provide meaningful financial optionality for both future companies. As we execute on our transaction-related work, we are guided by 3 priorities: First, delivering our 2026 guidance. Second, integrating JDE Peet's with excellence and beginning to unlock combination benefits, including revenue and cost synergies. And third, preparing both pure-play companies for post-separation success. Consistent with those priorities, we are reaffirming our 2026 guidance and remain confident in our ability to deliver on our outlook for $25.9 billion to $26.4 billion in net sales and low double-digit EPS growth this year. We are also reiterating our long-term growth expectations for each future company. Based on the enablers that Tim discussed, we expect Beverage Co. to deliver mid-single-digit net sales growth and high single-digit EPS growth. Global Coffee Co. is positioned to deliver low single-digit net sales growth over time with some year-to-year variability based on coffee costs and high single-digit EPS growth supported by its cost savings agenda, and we expect both businesses to be highly cash generative. Overall, these are attractive growth algorithms within consumer staples which underpins our confidence in each company's standalone value creation potential. With that, let me turn it back to Tim for some closing remarks.

Thanks, Anthony. So to wrap up, let me bring together the key elements we've discussed today. First, KDP is a scaled leader in the large and growing beverage industry. One of the most attractive spaces within consumer staples. Second, from this strong foundation, we're pursuing an exciting separation into two focused, and advantaged pure-play businesses with distinct yet attractive investment profiles. Beverage Co. will be a North American-centric beverage business positioned for consistent growth enabled by iconic brands, a proven white space expansion playbook enhanced demand generation capabilities and a scarce and advantaged route to market. Global Coffee Co. will be a global category leader with strong positions across markets and formats, deep coffee expertise and compelling revenue and cost synergy opportunities. As stand-alone each business will be optimized for strong performance with tailored strategies, sharper focus and purpose built organizational structures and cultures. And third, we have a robust integration process and operating model in place to support execution, including delivering on our 2026 plan with excellence and achieving our key integration and separation milestones. In summary, this is an exciting moment for KDP and we are focused on delivering on the significant value creation opportunity ahead. Thanks for your time today.

With that, let me thank Tim and Anthony and KDP, and thank all of you for joining, and that's the balance of our time. So good luck in your next meeting, and thank you again.

Thanks, Steve.