McCormick & Company, Incorporated (MKC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We're going to get started with our last presenter of the day, which is McCormick. But before that, I just have 2 quick announcements, really requests. First, remember that after the presentation here, this room will be locked so that tomorrow's presenters can rehearse. Please remember to bring all of your belongings with you as we move into the breakout room. Second is, please join me in thanking McCormick for hosting our first snack break of the conference earlier this morning. We truly appreciate it. Over a long period of time, McCormick has benefited from the increased demand for flavor and its focus on great categories. The company has maintained its flavor share leadership through solid innovation and marketing based on consumer insights while also strengthening its portfolio with acquisitions. Like so many other companies here, the business has not been immune from supply chain and inflationary pressures over the last several years. We look forward to hearing more from McCormick about their plans to build on their long-term growth track record while recovering margins from the leadership team here with me today. We have Chairman and CEO, Lawrence Kurzius; President and Chief Operating Officer, Brendan Foley; and EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Mike Smith. With that, Lawrence, I'll turn it over to you.

Great. Thank you, Tim, for the opportunity to participate today and to everyone here who's joining us. Please take note of our safe harbor statement in today's presentation. As you know, some of today's remarks will include forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. McCormick is end-to-end flavor. And today, we will provide a greater understanding of the differentiation created by the breadth and reach of McCormick's portfolio. And importantly, these overall takeaways. We're driving growth. We're focused on the future, and we're continuously adding value. In 2022, our profit was impacted as we adjusted to a volatile environment dealt with severe disruption in key markets and pricing lagged the pace of accelerating inflation. We're committed to driving long-term sustainable and profitable growth, and every decision is made through that lens. Our long-term fundamentals remain intact. Our focus continues to be executing on our long-term strategies, which have proven effective growing both sales and profits and have compounded that growth successfully over the years. I want to reinforce that McCormick's objectives remain the same, and we expect our delivery to be top tier. Our purpose-led performance principle reflects the integration of purpose into everything we do from driving top-tier financial results to positively impacting society. We are unlocking exciting opportunities to drive long-term sustainable growth and value for our business while doing what's right for people, communities and the planet. If you look at the last 5 years, we created significant value through the first 4 years. Last year, 2022 was an aberration and online with expectations of top-tier results. However, even including 2022, our 5-year shareholder return exceeds the Packaged Food Index as well as our flavor house peers. We're best-in-class on a long-term framework. Importantly, we know what to do in 2023, drive volume growth, especially in the consumer segment, begin rebuilding Flavor Solutions margin and address the acceleration of costs from the last several years, especially in our supply chain. In the long term, our strategic road map has not changed. It's still about growth, performance and people. Our commitment to ESG is embedded in our overall business strategy. We've laid out a series of commitments and clear performance targets for 2025. We continue to be recognized as a leader in this area recently by Corporate Knights in their Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations Index as the #1 most sustainable corporation in the food product sector for the seventh year in a row. Now turning to growth, which will be our primary focus today as we believe most of the -- most powerful contributor to long-term shareholder value creation is growth. McCormick is a global leader in flavor, operating in 2 segments: Consumer and Flavor Solutions, providing flavor and inspiring healthy choices across the globe. Our Consumer segment has leading brand shares in our key categories in many markets around the world. We have brands in nearly 170 countries and territories and sell products at every price point, ranging from premium brands to private label. Our Flavor Solutions segment is a culinary-inspired flavor business with deep understanding of consumer flavor experiences created from real food and natural ingredients and underpinned by leading technology that develops consumer-preferred flavor solutions for our customers. The breadth and reach of our global flavor portfolio ideally position us to fully meet the growing demand for flavor around the world and drive continued differentiated growth. Our compelling offerings in our 2 segments for every retail and customer strategy across all channels create a balanced and diversified portfolio to drive growth. Flavor is an advantaged category projected to grow at a 7% CAGR over the next 3 years. Our top global Consumer segment categories are driving the growth of flavor and continuing to outpace other categories and other high-growth categories like sweet biscuits, snack bars and savory snacks are key categories for which we develop custom flavor products for our Flavor Solutions customers. McCormick's deliberate focus on the attractive high-growth categories across both segments provides us with a significant long-term tailwind to drive profitable growth and capitalize on the strength of our category leadership. We continue to capitalize on the growing consumer interest in healthy, flavorful cooking, trusted brands and digital engagement and purpose-minded practices. Our proprietary consumer survey data and external research indicate these long-term trends are as relevant today as ever and have even accelerated, generating a continued tailwind for growth. There's been recent conversation about consumers returning to pre-pandemic behaviors. Most of our categories remain elevated as the cooking at-home trend, which predates the pandemic continues. Research consistently shows at-home meals remain above 2019 levels and show consumers cooking more at home and more from scratch. They're enjoying the cooking experience and believe home cooked meals are healthier. This shift is one driver of the growing demand for flavor that is the foundation of our sales growth. Consumers are facing many challenges right now with inflation being one of their top concerns. Our research continues to indicate that an overwhelming number of consumers plan to cook as much at home or more. With the sustained increase in at-home meal occasions, consumers are finding it more economical to cook at home, and they are deploying multiple cost-saving strategies in the kitchen to help their household budget. Importantly, though, our research also indicates that over the past several months, consumers are trading down less to private label products and relying on their trusted brands to deliver flavor for their meal occasions. Home cooks are smart enough to know that it's more effective to save a few dollars on the higher cost items than miss out on flavors to save a few pennies by trading down. McCormick is part of the solution for consumers and combating the inflationary environment without sacrificing flavor. McCormick has a unique system of advantages that work together to create an overall enduring advantage with our people and culture at the foundation. We are relentless and are focused on growth, performance and people, and we are diligent in our approach to driving sustainable, profitable growth. Our advantages are crucial to ensuring we deliver on our growth potential, and you will hear about them throughout our presentation. We are positioned in great categories with an advantaged portfolio and exceptional support for our brands in everything from global sourcing to category management to brand marketing. And with our performance mindset, we're fueling our growth with our CCI and global operating effectiveness programs and creating capacity for growth with our strategic investments. Importantly, all our advantages deployed at scale, together with the successful execution of our proven strategies by our experienced team gives us confidence we will deliver on our long-term objectives drive sustainable growth and build shareholder value. Let's turn now to our Consumer segment, where we're driving our leadership in our core categories, including a renovation of our U.S. everyday spice range. Across the world of flavor, there are 4 key benefit spaces where consumers are seeking solutions, and we're delivering exactly what consumers want. Fresh flavor is the #1 driver of grocery shopper satisfaction. Consumers of all ages are looking for ways to make the cooking process easier and integrate convenient solutions into their routines. Value is increasingly important today, and it isn't just about price. 2/3 of consumers will purchase brands that offer more total value for the money. And consumers continue to seek flavor exploration. Most consumers are excited to experiment and are inspired by new dishes, new flavors and new cuisines. McCormick delivers across each of these consumer needs with the power of our brands. We're driving leadership through strong brand equity powered by brand marketing, new products and category management. McCormick continues to be the leader in packaged spices and seasonings with a 20% global share, nearly 4x the size of the nearest branded competitor. And we have the leading branded spices and seasonings market share position in many markets around the world. We also continue to hold strong leadership positions in many condiment categories. McCormick is the leading hot sauce company in the world. We'll go deeper into this category later today as part of a dedicated section on our global heat platform across the enterprise. We continue to advance our leadership globally in the recipe mixes category. During 2022, we rose to the #1 global share position for dry recipe mixes, including taking the top share position in the U.K. market. In the U.S., this category had significant challenges during the pandemic, driven by high demand and capacity limitation. We had a period of poor service, product allocation and paused innovation resulting in total distribution point, or TDP losses and market share losses. Through supply chain investments, we restored service to strong levels and coupled with category management, brand marketing and winning innovation, we have rebuilt TDPs and regained share in 2022, and our momentum continues. We're driving the same actions to strengthen our spices and seasonings leadership. This category has had supply challenges as well, but our U.S. service levels have improved. We are restoring service-driven losses and grew TDPs this past quarter. In 2023, we are relentlessly focused on driving our brands. We're reinforcing we are the taste, quality and sourcing consumers can trust and communicating our long-standing sustainability commitment through our grown for good standard. New products are ramping back up in 2023 with our U.S. spices and seasonings launches 6x greater than in 2022. With new items highly correlated to TDPs, this bolsters our confidence in our expected TDP growth. Globally, our new item launches are also increasing, and we've listened to consumers on our Black Pepper tin. They didn't like the plastic can we went to a few years ago. So we are transitioning back to tin. 2 sizes have already switched and velocity has improved substantially. Finally, we're managing price gaps on top core items. These are much sharper than they were, and we have filled in open price pockets, emphasized value sizes and taken other steps while private label and other brand prices have come up. We continue to realize the results from our initiative to reinvent the in-store experience for U.S. spice and seasonings consumers. The category and McCormick brands are growing faster in stores where retailers implemented the changes. We have improved performance and are building momentum with similar plans in other markets further driving our category leadership. Additionally, we're continuing the global rollout of the consumer preferred package for our core spices and seasonings portfolio. In markets where already launched, we have elevated our performance and with much excitement we are currently launching in the U.S., but it is more than just a packaging change. We are completely renovating our core everyday urban spice portfolio and leveraging new technology to address consumers' desire to buy and cook with the freshest herbs and spices. The atmosphere in the bottle is nitrogen flushed, which means visibly fresher flavor, brighter color and stronger aroma. The modern new Snaptight trademark lid seals in the aroma and freshness. The pop you hear tells you it's close tight and the black and red distinction tells you how to unlock it and to help consumers quickly find the right product, we're printing the product name in an easy to read Best Buy date on the top. The new high-quality bottle and label design showcases the transparency and quality of our herbs and spices. And the bottle is made with 50% post-consumer recycled plastic approximately a 20% carbon footprint reduction from the current package. Consumer testing results have been strong, 40% higher freshness perception, 2x higher preference and 25% increase in loyalty among current buyers. We expect this renovation to be a big win for consumers, the category and McCormick and will differentiate McCormick even more. The rollout started this month with the transition on shelf happening over the course of the year. By the end of 2023, we'll be fully shipping our completely renovated design, and we'll be supporting it during the year with our highest spend brand marketing campaign over the past 5 years. We're confident this renovation will help us attract and retain the next generation of cooks. We're also strengthening our value proposition, offering greater value to consumers with larger sizes continues to be a key growth driver. Larger sizes are the fastest-growing segment in the U.S. spices and seasonings category and we're experiencing shorter purchase cycles on our super deal format compared to the typical size. Consumers are using more of the flavors they love. In France, the Ducros value size is also one of our best performing product lines. We've also been expanding distribution in the discount channel and have been gaining share in this fast-growing channel in EMEA. We know there is a concern about private label encroaching in this category, but it is not the case and our offerings are a big reason. Consumers love the value we offer and retailers love higher branded profit relative to private label. We continue to be excited about providing consumers a brand offering at an opening price point with our Lawry's brand. Early results show consumers are trading up to this line from private label and importantly, delivering incremental dollar profit to the category. We're delivering the consumers -- the convenience consumers are seeking as well. Our Gourmet Garden brand is the #1 fresh convenience brand in the U.S. and Australia with proprietary technology that provides consumers with a closer to fresh experience. In the U.K., we just launched Schwartz brand gravy. Just add water and stir, they're beating the top competitor on taste and retailer acceptance is strong. And in Australia, we'll be launching use it up recipe based in partnership with OzHarvest, Australia's #1 food rescue organization, to encourage consumers to use up vegetables on hand and reduce food waste. In the U.S., we continue to use our Flavor Maker app to grow our consumer relationships and first-party data. It's ranked in the top 1% of Apple Food app and we were up to 1.4 million downloads. It shows us real time what flavors and recipes our consumers care about. We've now made it even better with a new meal planning feature. We continue to inspire consumers flavor exploration with our U.S. innovation this year. We're kicking off the 2023 grilling season with new flavors and partnering with a great new brand ambassador, MaxtheMeatGuy who will inspire millions of followers with our products. We're really excited about our new Stubs master series with our proprietary FONA true taste smoke technology, we can capture real authentic hardwood smoke flavor in dry seasoning rubs. And building on our '22 -- 2022 successes, the Tabitha Brown Sunshine seasoning was the fastest selling new blend in spices and seasonings category last year. And in 2023, we're expanding her line further. And following our Creamy Mustard last year, we're launching a creamy-roasted garlic mustard. In direct-to-consumer, we continue to grow our platform with new innovative flavors as a testing ground and with the growing consumer interest in global cuisines, we're launching world flavors in the club channel. We are driving growth with industry-leading brand marketing. We have consistently made significant brand marketing investments and as a percentage of sales, our consumer segment brand marketing is the highest in our peer group and we continue to increase our effectiveness by using scale to our advantage, further centralized capabilities, consolidating media buys and shifting our investments to working dollars. We have an overwhelming share of voice in our categories and the strength of our messaging is evident by engagement rates and ROIs that exceed industry norms. In summary, for the Consumer, our fundamentals remain great categories and brands focus on what matters to the consumer and importantly, robust growth plans. Now let's bring to life in a video how with the unmatched breadth of our portfolio, we're meeting our consumer needs globally and continue to drive our undisputed leadership in spices and seasonings. [Presentation]

Thank you, Lawrence. Now turning to our Flavor Solutions segment and our plans to continue to accelerate our growth as we build to be a top 3 flavor house. Our Flavor Solutions segment has one of the broadest range of offerings in the industry. We collaborate with a broad consumer base, and we are continuing to diversify it across the food and beverage industry and in health and nutrition. Importantly, we leverage our proprietary technologies, our unique capabilities and customer engagement approach to target high-growth categories and drive our leadership. Let me tell you more about our plans of what makes McCormick different. The execution of our long-term strategy to migrate our portfolio to more technically insulated and value-added categories has continually to successfully progress. Since 2019, we have delivered a 12% sales CAGR across our Flavors and branded Food Service product categories. This was partially offset by the pruning of some lower-margin business. While our flavor solutions sales growth has been outstanding and our migration successful, our profit and margin has been pressured by short-term factors. We expect to resolve a significant amount of the pressure and for it to be a tailwind in 2023, with the remainder being resolved largely in 2024 and a small tailwind in 2025. We are committed to restoring Flavor Solutions profitability to recovering margin and ensuring we keep our customers in supply to drive growth. Now expanding on Flavors, our most technically insulated and value-added category, which we have grown to over half of our Flavor Solutions portfolio, which we have grown to over -- and we are building to be 1 of the top 3 global flavor houses in our advantage by several differentiators. Our culinary foundation is at the heart of our passion for creating custom, on-trend flavors and flawless customer experience. We have unmatched breadth providing iconic flavors across the globe in all categories and channels. And as a brand leader, we know the importance of brands, and we make flavors that deliver on a customer's brand promise. We are uniquely advantaged by insights from our Consumer segment. We often have the same consumers as our customers, and we have insight into their preferences and demand for clean and healthy. We leverage those insights to help solve the challenges our customers bring to us as well as drive their innovation. That is a powerful and unique advantage to McCormick. And importantly, we are 100% focused on great flavor and making and eating, drinking experiences that taste great, whether our consumers or for our customers, consumers. We developed culinary and consumer inspired flavors for a wide range of applications across attractive categories. These are categories in which we have a competitive advantage, partially attributable to our deep expertise in applied science which drives our success in developing winning flavors for our customers' applications. And with the meaningful additions to our high-growth portfolio of performance and health from FONA, our breadth and depth was further expanded as well as our reach with new customers. We are specifically targeting opportunities to grow in attractive, high-growth end market applications. For instance, alcoholic beverages, savory snacks and Performance Nutrition. We have delivered an outstanding 3-year sales CAGRs in these categories, notably outpacing market growth, and we serve many of the leading and emerging players in them. For example, we serve 6 out of the top 10 companies in North America Performance Nutrition. The capabilities we have built and further expanded with the acquisition of FONA are creating significant top line growth opportunities. Through our acquisition of FONA, we also continue to fuel growth with the power of our combined complementary portfolios, customer bases and capabilities. We are reaching a broader customer base and further diversifying it with both beverage and Performance Nutrition, increasing share of our portfolio. We are driving new wins with existing customers by cross-selling across our full suite of offerings and gaining new customers that are driving considerable growth. By leveraging our global footprint and capabilities, we are creating additional opportunities. For instance, we are expanding Performance Nutrition into Canada and localizing confectionery flavors at Giotti for a FONA customer. McCormick is advantaged by our clean and natural leadership. Consumers have a heightened desire for transparency. They want to know how their food has grown and how it is handled. They want to know it is the taste they can trust. With McCormick's natural ingredient heritage and our unwavering commitment to sustainable sourcing, we are advantaged. And using our proprietary clean and natural technology platform, FlavorReal, we can isolate key flavor attributes of natural products and transform them into natural extracts to use in product development for clean labels with simple ingredients. Consumers' demand for transparency continues to grow, and we continue to expand our portfolio of natural extracts, providing even greater opportunities to win with differentiated solutions that deliver on transparency. McCormick is also driving differentiated customer engagement through the Flavor University program. The program educates the broader food and beverage industry on the creation and use of flavors and showcases McCormick's technical strength. Flavor University is open to anyone in the industry and attendance is fueling growth. In 2022, we converted 45% of the new companies attending into new customers. And the customers who have attended are contributing significantly to new product sales today. This industry-leading experience is enhancing McCormick's reputation and position as a technology and subject matter expert in the flavor industry. It is creating value for our customers, strengthening our customer intimacy and driving growth. Accelerating innovation and flavors is also driving growth. New products contributed 20% more growth in 2022 than last year. And we are carrying a strong pipeline into 2023. We doubled the sales of our products developed with Sage, our tool that combines our unrivaled repository of consumer preference insights with leading artificial intelligence. Our use of artificial intelligence and product development is unique in the industry and advantages us as customers drive for faster speed to market. We have proven with Sage that we are creating fresh new flavors faster. The products we develop using Optify our technology, which is key to mask the off notes of functional ingredients increased 30%, driving share gains in Health and Performance Nutrition. And we further leverage our agile flavor and analytical sciences to gain share, increasing our sales from matching by 28% in 2022. Finally, leveraging the unique advantage of being a leader in consumer brands, we are partnering with our customers to drive the growth of their brands while leveraging the power of ours. Continuing with innovation, with flavor forecast, we inspire innovation opportunities with tomorrow's top flavors today. Our annual forecast pinpoints emerging flavors and culinary trends and many of our predictions have stood the test of time. Our customers collaborating with our culinary experts use the forecast as a valued resource and product and recipe ideation. It is driving growth, particularly in the beverage category by leveraging our beverage insights over the years, and we are increasing our number of beverage customers and new product growth in 2022. And in branded foodservice, we are using the forecast to provide menu inspiration to create trend forward eating experiences for their guests, flavored by our products. Building further on branded foodservice, we are driving growth and gaining share in our core categories, both spices and seasonings and hot sauce. We are increasing restaurant penetration, including expanded placement on tabletop and increased share across Frank's RedHot, Cholula and French's. We are leveraging our culinary partnerships to collaborate with operators on menu ideas to enable flavor experiences and are driving greater participation on menus. Our co-branded limited time offers increased 120% and in 2022. Entering 2023, we have a robust innovation agenda. We are launching more than 2x the new items than we did in 2022. Our growth in branded foodservice is strong. And now you will hear more about how our growth in consumer and flavor solutions is heating up. The growth in trends behind hot and spicy is not a surprise. We have been predicting it for years. To capitalize on it further, McCormick is building a global heat platform across the enterprise, and we are uniquely advantaged with our breadth, depth and scale to seize growth in an explosive way. Let's start with consumer insights. Gen Z and millennials are kicking up the demand for heat. They are more experimental and prefer authentic, bold and spicy flavors more so than the generations before them. Their love with heat has driven growth in inherently hot foods like hot sauce as well as in foods with hot and spicy profiles like salty snacks. While 90% of consumers prefer some level of heat, consumers also want a balance pairing of flavor and heat. Discovering new flavor experiences is important to consumers and they are interested in cuisines, they are intrinsically spicy and globally inspired like Mexican or Thai as they seek authentic flavor experiences. The elevated consumer interest in heat is clear across many categories and channels. Consumer categories defined by heat, like hot sauce and heat within categories like spices and seasonings and frozen meals and snacking are growing at accelerated rates. Heat is one of the fastest-growing flavor profiles across in our flavor solutions portfolio, driven by growth in heat inspired salty snacks and other center of store categories as well as increased consumer demand for all things hot when dining away from home are getting take out. The demand for hot and spicy is on fire, which is a significant tailwind to driving McCormick growth. While quantifying the size of a particular flavor attribute across our entire portfolio is not an exact science. We estimate that our heat platform represented at least 20% of total McCormick sales in 2022. And that will only continue to grow as we continue to capitalize on the growing demand for heat. In our consumer segment, the growth of our heat portfolio has accelerated globally with hot sauces and heat-related spices and seasonings, growing at an organic CAGR of 13% and 10% since 2019. In our Flavor Solutions segment, we continue to strengthen heat leadership by growing at a 10% CAGR since 2019. We have a proven track record as a preferred heat supplier to our customers with significant new product sales related to hot and spicy flavors and impressively winning 9 out of 10 heat briefs across the Americas and EMEA regions in 2022. We are the leading hot sauce company in the world. Through the growth we have driven, we have advanced Frank's RedHot to be the #1 hot sauce and Cholula to be the #1 Mexican hot sauce in the world, as well as leadership positions in branded foodservice in the U.S. and Canada. Consumers want a flavorful and approachable hot sauces, and we have the perfect blend of flavor and heat across our portfolio. And as already shared, we are the global leader in spices and seasoning with leading branded share in many markets around the world. We are uniquely positioned to win in heat with our global iconic brands. Our expertise and capabilities of heat include our unrivaled consumer insights, science and technology advantages and our sourcing and manufacturing expertise. We have decades-long presence and knowledge in key sourcing areas like in India with sun dried chillies through a joint venture partnership. And in Mexico, we further expanded our presence with the addition of Cayenne Pepper for Frank's RedHot. We are advantaged by our tremendous insight capabilities. Over the years, we have identified nearly 50 flavors influenced by our flavor forecast, including Chipotle which has increased exclusively since we featured it in 2003. In product development, we can transform heat from one form to another. a spicy chili into a natural extract or a hot sauce into a dry seasoning and with our patented controlled release encapsulation technologies, we can time the delivery of heat to create an optimal experience, whether it be fire at first bite, a gradual build or a warm taste at the end. Our flavor scientists have an unsurpassed understanding of how our raw materials, their origin, aging, processing, cooking and fermentation, bring out the nuances and differences in heat and flavor. Heat is our differentiation to claim. Our broad portfolio with offerings across consumer product formats, flavor applications and global cuisines, positions us to fully meet the demand for heat. And the reach of our heat platform is as ubiquitous as hot and spicy is in food today. We are heating up your eating and drinking experiences globally no matter where or when. The younger generation is driving hot sauce growth, and we plan to drive it to be the condiment of the next generation. In the U.S., we have the 5 highest selling products in the category and are driving nearly double the dollar productivity compared to all other brands. And we are building partnerships such as with Anheuser-Busch and Eggland's Best to fire up growth in more consumer occasions. I guess you could say, it's from kegs to eggs. We are launching new Frank's and Cholula hot sauce flavors in 2023, including Frank's Dill Pickle and Cholula Reserva which is crafted with 100% Agave Tequila. And we are making it easier for consumers to sample our hot sauce flavors with a Frank's variety pack in the club channel or a Cholula gift box from our online store. We are reaching the next generation and building awareness and fueling excitement and customer engagement with our brand marketing initiatives. McCormick brands command a leading share of voice in the U.S. hot sauce category. We are also driving scale across markets by leveraging our content on a global level and making overt media channel and partnership choices to win with younger consumers. Our Fortnite activation that just wrapped up a few weeks ago, surrounding the big game is a great example of how we are directly reaching next generation through gaming. We launched a flavor pack version of Fortnite called The Floor is Flava where players navigated an immersive chicken wing shaped island in the volcano that spew Frank's RedHot. This included partnering with TGI Fridays and DoorDash for a free chicken wing offer. It was our best-performing big game campaign to date, capturing over 1 billion impressions in North America. And now turning to Cholula. With nearly double-digit growth in Mexican foods and sauces in the U.S. and EMEA, we are expanding into the Mexican [indiscernible] and providing consumers the authentic Mexican flavor of Cholula in new formats. We are launching Cholula Taco recipe mixes as well as salsas based on authentic Mexican formulas. Crafted in Mexico using locally sourced fresh tomatoes and Tomotilos. These new products will provide consumers an easy trade up on authenticity. Look for these on shelves in April, just ahead of Cinco de Mayo. We are accelerating our spices and seasonings growth in both segments with heat. We are inspiring consumers and food service operators to explore hot and spicy with online recipes and digital marketing campaigns and with new products in every region. For Frank's Nashville hot in the Americas to spicy blends and APZ to new Frank's recipe mixes and EMEA and meeting the consumer demand for both heat and global cuisines, we've launched our first-ever McCormick Flavor of the Year, Vietnamese Cajun Style Seasoning with new product launches in the Consumer segment and branded foodservice. We are heating up snacking and restaurant menus with our iconic brands and customer preferred flavors. In snacking, our hot and spicy momentum with labor solutions continues to be strong and fuels our new product pipeline. We are leveraging the power of our hot sauce brands, a unique advantage to McCormick. To extend the reach of our iconic flavors through our customer partnerships, we are thrilled to be heading up our customers' iconic brands. We are also continuing to expand Frank's RedHot with our frozen line of snacks launching new flavors this year. Finally, we are winning placement on away-from-home menus with hot and spicy flavors where there's spicy coating on a quick service restaurant offering or the wings at your local restaurant. I hope you now have a greater insight and appreciation for how McCormick is heating up lives everywhere and our unique advantage to win. Let's bring that advantage and a winning platform to life with this video. [Presentation]

I guess you could say we're turning up the heat but now for performance, fueling our growth and investing for the future. McCormick is a growth company, and our priority remains to drive consistent sales growth. We delivered this in 2022, with underlying business growth in both segments, and our outlook for 2023 reflects continued expectations for top line growth. Margins matter, and we have a well-established track record of discipline around cost management. However, growth is the greatest driver of shareholder value and our priority. We are uniquely positioned in consumer staples to deliver consistent sales growth, thanks to the system of competitive advantages covered earlier, and our focus insurers will continue to win with results. Turning to operating income. 2022 was a challenging year with a few major impacts undermining our ability to deliver. COVID-related China disruptions and the war in Ukraine pressured margins and cost inflation escalated more than expected. As a result, our pricing actions lagged the pace of inflation. These pricing actions are now catching up and are either completed or well underway. We plan to fully recover the inflation our pricing has lagged over the last 2 years, which will be a tailwind to our profit in 2023. Most frustrating was the continued broad-based supply chain challenges that we and the industry encountered in 2022, and the resulting cost increases and inefficiencies, some of which related to investments and decisions we made to support continued growth for both our customers and McCormick. With service levels rebuilt and stabilized back to strong levels over 95%, we are now able to normalize our supply chain costs, another tailwind to profit in 2023. Through our global operating effectiveness program, or GOE program for short, we are increasing our profit realization. We're normalizing our supply chain costs while continuing to support customer growth. Through actions such as reinstating more normal shift schedules and accelerating automation, we expect a 10% reduction in our Americas supply chain workforce, and we have already achieved half. We're investing to increase both manufacturing capacity and reliability in constrained areas, enabling the repatriation of production we had scaled up at co-packers to meet high demand. We're on a track for co-pack spending in 2023 to be at a 5-year low. We're also returning to historical safety stock levels. And as our operating environment normalizes with all of these changes, we expect additional benefits such as reduced expedited freight and material losses, costs which we absorbed and did not price through. Finally, we're taking streamlining actions across the entire organization by optimizing our processes and aligning our structure for efficiency. In summary, we expect our GOE program to drive annual cost savings of $125 million with $75 million realized on our bottom line in 2023. Our CCI program has a well-established track record of success, and we're leveraging its proven program discipline to drive our GOE program results. In 2023, we anticipate an additional $85 million in CCI savings to both fuel growth and contribute to our profit realization combined with the $75 million from the GOE program that is expected to be profit realization, we plan to generate a total of $160 million in cost reductions, which bolsters our confidence in our projected 2023 growth. There continues to be a very long runway beyond 2023 to deliver additional savings and fuel for future growth. For 2023, we expect to grow sales 5% to 7%, driven primarily by pricing actions from both those taken last year and new ones in 2023. And as always, we plan to drive growth through the strength of our brands, our category management, brand marketing, new products and differentiated customer engagement plans you heard about today. In terms of profit, we expect a favorable impact from the GOE program as well as lapping the COVID-related disruptions in China last year to be partially offset by our Kitchen Basics divestiture and an expected increase in employee incentive compensation expenses. The net favorable 200 basis points impact of these discrete items, combined with a 7% to 9% underlying business growth, results in our adjusted operating income growth projection of 9% to 11%. We expect our adjusted earnings per share growth will be tempered by higher interest and higher effective tax rate. Overall, we're projecting a strong 2023 operating performance with continued positive top line momentum, significant optimization of our cost structure, strong adjusted operating profit growth and margin expansion. We remain confident in the underlying strength of our business and that with the execution of our proven strategies, we will drive profitable growth in 2023 and create value. With our disciplined approach to capital allocation, we have a strong record of driving long-term sustainable growth and creating value for our shareholders. Our balanced use of cash remains consistent. Our top priority is to drive profitable growth, both organically by investing to support our brands and categories and through acquisitions. We have an exceptional track record of acquiring attractive brands in great categories and unlocking growth across both segments. We have a portfolio that we are happy with today. But as always, we'll remain opportunistic. After growth, we prioritize paying down debt and returning capital to shareholders. We have paid dividends for the past 98 years, increasing them for 37 consecutive years. Our balance sheet is strong. And after a temporary setback in 2022, we expect strong cash flow in 2023, driven by our profit and working capital initiatives, allowing us to continue paying down debt and to delever to approximately 3x by the end of 2024. Now for the supply chain investments we have made to support growth. We continue to make the investments we had planned as well as new ones to support increased demand despite the industry-wide supply chain disruptions over the past 3 years. We have completed significant investments in each of our regions that have increased our capacity, expanded our capabilities and modernized our workplaces. We're continuing to invest to strengthen our resiliency and profitably meet growing demand. In our Flavor Solutions segment, our flavors volume, driven by seasonings and spray dry flavors has grown at a 5% CAGR over the past 3 years, and we continue to project strong volume growth. We're making investments in additional capacity to relieve constraints and to sustainably meet the future growth we expect. This capacity, which includes the expansion of FONA's footprint will be online mid-2023. And as you've seen today, hot sauce growth is on fire. Volume has grown at a 3-year CAGR of 7%, and we expect the accelerated growth to continue with the investments we are making, including expanding capabilities to other sites we're expecting a 30% increase in capacity, which will begin to come online later this year. We're also optimizing our supply chain cost base through automation and digitalization. We have -- we have designed automated global solutions and are deploying them across our network, driving a reduction in headcount. We have programs in place to enable faster decisions with real-time performance data resulting in increased productivity. Our investments will not only reduce our cost, they will upscale our workforce and further increase our resiliency. McCormick has a long legacy of sourcing over 14,000 materials from over 80 countries with a purpose to deliver a differentiated and sustainable supply of spices and herbs. We're confident in achieving our goal to sustainably source 100% of our 5 iconic branded ingredients by 2025 and have extended our goal to 7 additional ingredients by the end of 2028. Last year, our Vahiné brand launched its first traceable vanilla beans with blockchain technology, allowing consumers to trace their beans back to the farmer who grew them. We have unmatched sourcing capabilities and quality expertise, and we continue to expand on our global sourcing competitive advantage. Turning to people. We're proud of our high-performing collaborative and teamwork-oriented culture that is the foundation of our system of advantages, which began with C.P. McCormick's introduction of "The Power of People." Our employees are the key to our success. They are relentless about winning and position us every day to drive growth. To close, our unique operating system of competitive advantages have driven best-in-class results. We have a long-term framework, which has driven our outperformance over time. You heard much about our advantages today. All of them together deployed at scale, enable the successful execution of our proven strategies. It gives us a high level of confidence in driving both the sales and profit growth in our long-term objectives and importantly, compounding that growth over the years to come. Our focus on growth performance of people remains relentless. We remain committed to driving long-term sustainable, profitable growth and make every decision through that lens as we continue to support our brands and invest in the future. We're confident that our business model and capabilities remain strong. Our focus remains intact. And through the deployment of our competitive advantages and effective execution of our strategies, we will continue to deliver not only top line growth, but also drive total shareholder return at an industry-leading pace. Thanks for your kind attention today. And perhaps we have a few minutes for questions.

First question from -- Andrew Lazar has his hand up. I'm going to take Andrew's question.

Lawrence, you touched a little bit on this in some of your prepared remarks, but I think investors have been increasingly concerned about some of the deterioration in market share and distribution points over the last year plus in the core spices and seasonings category. I guess, what drives your confidence level in restoring these metrics? And I guess, how much progress can you make in '23 specifically?

That's a great question, Andrew. Thank you for that. I think we're very confident about 2023 and our ability to regain total distribution points and market share. I'll first point to the recipe mix example that we gave. We're following a pretty similar playbook there. Once we restored service, we were able to win back about half of the TDPs that were lost over time. These are not the same TDPs just gained back. They're different TDPs because of innovation. And our share today is within 1.5 points of our all-time high share on recipe mixes. We're going to do the same thing on herbs and spices. We've already got service restored. We gained distribution points in the fourth quarter. We have a powerful renovation and relaunch of our everyday spice range and it is supported by the highest brand marketing support program that we have had in the last 5 years. This is on top of other innovation and value offerings. I just don't think that there's a stronger program out there. We're really very confident in our ability to win in that core category and have, I think, demonstrated our commitment to that today. Brendan, do you want to add any comments before we break?

Yes. I would add that. If you take a look at the program that we have for '23, I mean, we're bringing a real scale into the category, again, much like we did on [ IR ] reinvention and really drive an even more productive category. And so with the leverage and just -- not everyone can sort of, I think, execute like we can in this category. And so we're really bringing it to bear in '23. I also think it's a real win for the consumer. It's also a real win for retailers. The consumer just gets much greater value, I think, from McCormick just with the superior package and the additional freshness that we've talked about. And it's really it comes down to, I think, that in many, many ways. And I would tell you the customer feedback we got, as we've been presenting this program out throughout the industry is just, it's a best-in-class transition and execution that we're driving. There isn't a SKU number change that's flowing through right on to the shelf. And I think it's really self-evident right there that there's real incremental value to the consumer. Mike, do you want to add anything?

Yes. Real quick. I mean, we've obviously invested in some capital over the past 3 or so years to really get ready for this, building capacity in our plants. The nice thing is we've added some consumer additions that they want without really adding costs. So we -- from a margin perspective, this is really neutral to us, which is great. So a positive [ IRR ].

I think that's a great note to end the day on. So thank me as we were able to break out and for McCormick management team coming here and give us a great presentation. Thank you again for the sponsorship of the snack break earlier today. That was great. And as a reminder, please bring all your belongings with you as we leave. This room will be locked in the rest of the evening. Thank you.