Nomad Foods Ltd. Aktie

All right. It's time. Let's get this started. So hello, everyone. Thank you to those in the room and those on the webcast for joining us today. We've got an action packed day ahead of us. But before we get into the fun stuff, let's make sure we cover off on the legal stuff. On the screen and in our presentation and press releases, you can find a number of disclaimers. Please read them. All right. Moving on. Here's the agenda. I trust you all can read it. We're going to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time today. So let's get us started. And to kick us off, we've got our Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Sir Martin E. Franklin. Martin?

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. It's great to see so many familiar faces along with many new investors joining us today. To those of you who have supported Nomad for years, thank you for your patience and continued confidence. To those of you who are newer to the story, welcome. I believe you're joining us at a particularly exciting moment. The reality is that Nomad lost its way a bit for a period of time. Having been through similar situations before, we knew that meaningful change starts with leadership and fresh eyes on the business. We put the right team in place and gave them the support and freedom to make the difficult but necessary decisions.

Dominic has now been with the company for nearly a year, and I could not be more pleased with the progress he and the team have made. Together with Ruben, he has assembled a strong leadership team and driven significant change across the organization. They have upgraded talent, improved processes and sharpened the strategy. Today, you'll hear firsthand how those changes are positioning Nomad for a much stronger future. Nomad's brands remain exceptionally strong. Its market is healthy, and we now have the leadership team and strategic direction needed to unlock the company's full potential. Yet our valuation suggests the market is yet to recognize that opportunity.

This despite a very strong following by the credit markets, where we have financed ourselves to have long-dated maturities at attractive rates. We see that disconnect as a compelling opportunity for shareholders, which is why my co-founder, Noam, and I have recently increased our personal investments in the company. But we also know that perceptions do not change because of presentations. They change because of results. That is exactly what we expect this team to deliver, and we do not think it will take very long. I have lived this market cycle before.

Like Nomad, our specialty chemicals company, Element Solutions, was a static equity story through its transformation until it caught investor interest, after which its revaluation from about $11 to now close to $40 was fairly rapid. I believe we will achieve the same thing here. And more importantly, this is not a reacceleration story that begins today, nor is it a story built on promises for some distant future. The revitalization is already underway. The actions have been taken. The foundation has been rebuilt and the early evidence of progress is becoming increasingly clear. Today, Dominic and his team will show you both the proof points that the inflection has already begun and provide the road map for sustaining and accelerating that momentum in the years ahead.

I believe it's just a matter of time before the markets recognize Nomad's real value, and we regain the momentum of years past. One final note. Before anyone asks in the Q&A about whether or not we have considered taking this company private, let me say that, of course, we know this is an option that exists if the credit markets are open. Our opinion is that we believe doing so would deny our shareholders the upside inherent in the company's outlook. If the company performs as we expect and the market continues to discount Nomad's value, we always have this alternative to consider. But for us, it's a last resort. So with that, let me turn it over to Dominic and enjoy the morning. Thank you.

Thank you, Martin, and thank you all for joining us today. After 9 months as CEO of Nomad Foods, my conviction in this business has only strengthened. What I found is a company with leading brands, great assets and significant growth opportunities alongside several areas where we can perform better. We've already begun addressing those opportunities and building momentum. Today, we'll discuss what we've accomplished, where we see the biggest opportunities and how we plan to win. Most importantly, we'll outline our 3-year value creation plan, which we believe will drive faster growth, stronger profitability and substantial shareholder value creation. But before we dive in, we have a brief video to share to get us started.

[Presentation]

This video captures some of the momentum that is building across Nomad Foods today. And I hope it's the same sense of excitement and confidence you feel as we take you through our plans. We have a lot to cover today, but if you leave with only 3 messages, these are the ones I hope you remember. First, we've strengthened the business and returned the company to organic revenue growth in Q3. Transformation is never a straight line, but we have clear and compelling plans to build on this momentum and sustain profitable growth in 2027 and beyond.

Second, momentum is building and the growth opportunity ahead of us is substantial. Historically, our growth has been constrained by several self-imposed limitations. We are removing those constraints, significantly expanding our addressable market and unlocking new revenue growth opportunity that we're confident we can capture over time. And third, while we have big ambitions, our execution plan is highly pragmatic. We have a clear road map to sustain top and bottom line growth, improve returns and reduce leverage. Given our current valuation, we believe successful execution against these priorities has the potential to create significant shareholder value. By the end of today, I hope you'll have a deeper appreciation not only of how far we've come, but more importantly, for the scale of the opportunity that lies ahead.

What we're demonstrating today is not an inflection in waiting. It is an inflection underway. We are committed to delivering substantial earnings and free cash flow growth over the next 3 years and beyond, and it starts with restoring sustainable organic revenue growth. As we discussed on prior earnings calls, our performance this year was impacted by several transitory headwinds. Those headwinds are now behind us and the actions we've taken to strengthen the business are beginning to gain traction. As a result, we expect to return to organic sales growth this quarter. We believe that growth will continue through next year and accelerate thereafter, consistent with the midpoint of the guidance we're introducing today.

As Ruben will discuss later, we expect sustainable top line growth to translate into sustainable earnings growth. Today, we are establishing an external target of delivering low single-digit top and bottom line growth over the next 3 years, which we believe is substantially better than what is implied in our current valuation. While we have significant ambitions for the business and see substantial opportunities ahead, we're equally focused on rebuilding credibility by setting targets that are both meaningful and achievable even in a less favorable operating environment. That philosophy underpins these growth targets. At the same time, we're taking actions to improve the conversion of earnings into free cash flow, creating additional capacity to enhance shareholder returns.

Our capital allocation priorities are clear. We intend to maintain our attractive dividend, which currently yields approximately 6.5%, while reducing leverage to increase financial flexibility and broaden our shareholder base. We believe this combination of dependable revenue growth, consistent earnings expansion, increasing free cash flow, ongoing deleveraging and a disciplined dividend policy will create substantial long-term value for shareholders. We are confident that we can achieve our plans for several reasons, the first being our advantaged starting point.

Nomad Foods already operates from a position of strength. That strength is evidenced in our strong leadership position. We're already the largest savory frozen food company in Europe with branded retail sales that are twice as large as our next closest competitor. Our leadership comes from the power of our brands. While Nomad Foods itself is just over a decade old, the brands that make up this company have been trusted by consumers for generations. Birds Eye has been a household name in Europe for nearly a century. Findus traces its roots back to the 1940s and iglo has been serving families since the 1960s. These are not just brands. They're part of the fabric of everyday life across Europe. Generations of consumers have grown up with them, creating deep levels of trust, familiarity and loyalty.

Across our key markets, our brands consistently rank among the strongest in the industry. We hold the #1 position in brand awareness in 14 of our top 15 markets and the #1 brand equity ranking in 12 of those 15 markets. Across our 25 country category combinations, we hold an average market share of 38%, more than 2x the combined share of all other branded competitors. These are great assets. As a result, we enter every market from a position of strength, giving us a powerful platform to drive innovation, win with consumers and capture future category growth.

Our strength has translated into leading positions across numerous categories and markets. No other company matches the combination of category breadth and geographic reach that we have. And importantly, we're far from finished. Despite our scale, we still see substantial opportunities to expand our categories, extend our brands and drive future growth. A critical enabler of that growth will be our supply chain, which is one of our most underappreciated strengths. Across Europe, we have built a manufacturing and distribution network capable of serving our retailers at scale. Our footprint includes 17 factories, 94 warehouses and 80,000 delivery points, creating a pan-European platform that will be both extraordinarily difficult and prohibitively expensive to replicate today. Importantly, we still have meaningful unused capacity within that network.

As we grow, we can capture additional volume without needing to make disproportionate investments in infrastructure. That combination of scale, reach and operating leverage is unparalleled in our category in Europe. The strength of our brand and supply chain assets is enhanced by the strength of our category. Across the markets where we operate today, Frozen Food has delivered strong and consistent growth over the last decade. Even through COVID and the subsequent inflationary period, the category proved remarkably resilient, and this growth has been balanced with both value and volume sales growing. What makes this growth particularly compelling is the scale of the category. The Frozen Food market across the categories and countries that we currently participate in generated EUR 30 billion in retail sales in 2025 and is adding roughly EUR 1 billion of value each year.

That's a tremendous pool of growth and one that provides a significant runway for our value creation. And the size of the growth is even more substantial when you include our potential to expand into new categories, channels and markets. And we expect that growth to continue because it's being driven by long-term consumer trends, not short-term factors. Take convenience as an example. While we serve a broad range of consumers, our core consumer is a busy parent, juggling the demands of family life. Frozen food helps deliver a delicious nutritious meal from freezer to table in under 30 minutes and often much faster. That's why frozen food is one of the most compelling meal solutions available today, offering convenience that rivals restaurant takeout.

Frozen food also delivers outstanding value for money. First, it's simply cheaper. Meals made with frozen ingredients typically cost EUR 2 to EUR 3 less than chilled alternatives with even bigger savings versus takeout. Consumers estimate they can save up to EUR 1,200 per year by replacing takeout meals with frozen options. Second, frozen dramatically reduces waste. Consumers use what they need when they need it and avoid throwing food away. That alone can save households another EUR 360 to EUR 620 per year. Of course, none of the benefits of convenience or value matter if the food doesn't taste great. And this is perhaps the most underappreciated advantage of frozen food.

Take our peas as an example. They're flash frozen within hours of harvest, locking in nutrients at their peak. But just as importantly, they lock in flavor. Freshly harvested peas are naturally sweet. The longer they sit, the more those sugars are consumed through natural biological processes or converted into starch. By freezing them at their freshest, we preserve that peak sweetness and flavor. The result is a product that can deliver a superior taste experience not only versus frozen alternatives, but versus so-called fresh refrigerated products that may have spent days moving through the supply chain before reaching the consumer. In many cases, frozen food is simply better food.

And the Frozen experience is getting better each year. New technologies like air fryers are helping consumers achieve restaurant quality results at home with greater speed and convenience. And we're still early in that adoption curve, particularly across Europe. That combination of increasing convenience, compelling value, improving product performance and expanding variety gives us confidence that this category will continue to grow for many years to come. And lastly, we are quite fortunate to have a portfolio that is strongly aligned with long-term consumer health and wellness trends. More than 2/3 of our sales come from lean protein and vegetables, 2 of the most nutritious and sought-after food groups. That positions us exceptionally well as consumers place greater emphasis on healthier eating and as trends such as GLP-1 adoption increasingly influence food choices.

At the same time, this slide also highlights an important opportunity. While our concentration in these categories is a competitive advantage, it also means we have significant room to diversify into adjacent Frozen Food segments and unlock additional avenues for growth. For the analysts and investors in the room and joining via webcast, we understand that advantages on paper are only meaningful if they produce results. So let's talk about our track record of delivery. The inherent advantages of Frozen Food created tremendous value for shareholders over many years. Between 2016 and 2024, Nomad Foods delivered a 6% compound annual revenue growth rate and a 7% EBITDA growth rate, outperforming many peers in the industry. Yet our recent results tell a different story.

Performance did not meet our expectations, and 2026 is a necessary transition year. Importantly, this is not because our competitive advantages disappeared. We still have leading brands, great categories, strong retailer relationships and a world-class supply chain. So what held us back? After nearly a year with the company, I've become convinced that our recent challenges stem from culture and execution, not the quality of our assets. That's important because execution can be fixed, and that's exactly what we're doing. So what have I learned? First, we became complacent. We stopped acting like a category leader and lost some of the competitive intensity that had driven our success.

Second, we became too focused on margin percentages rather than value creation. During the inflation cycle, aggressive pricing hurt our competitiveness, costing us volume and market share. And by applying overly stringent margin thresholds, we also left attractive growth opportunities on the table. Third, we became too short-term focused. Rather than addressing underlying issues early, we spent too much time managing to the quarter instead of building for the long term. And finally, we placed unnecessary constraints on growth. We leaned too heavily into a narrow view of the categories we should play in. While our nutrition-led portfolio remains a strength, we failed to fully capitalize on attractive opportunities in other categories within the Frozen aisle. All these issues are fixable, and that is exactly what we have been doing.

In 2025, we addressed elevated retail inventory levels that have built up across the trade. We deliberately reduced inventory in the channel, which created an approximately 230 basis point headwind to reported revenue growth. While some retailers also pulled forward purchases ahead of early 2026 price increases, we exited the year with a much healthier inventory position. We continued that work in the first quarter of 2026, drawing down the inventory build in December and ending the practice of incentivizing retailers to load inventory at quarter end. Together, these actions caused our organic revenue growth to trail retail sellout by roughly 550 basis points in the quarter. While these decisions pressured near-term reported results, they were the right actions to improve the quality of our revenue, strengthen our retail partnerships and establish a healthier foundation for sustainable growth going forward.

And while we've been eliminating bad practices and strengthening the foundation of our business, we've also made significant enhancements to our leadership team. I officially became CEO of Nomad Foods and joined the Board at the beginning of this year. I'm immensely fortunate to be guided by our co-chairman and co-founders, Sir Martin Franklin and Noam Gottesman. Both Martin and Noam are titans of business who have created tremendous value across multiple companies and industries. Their partnership, insight and counsel have been invaluable as we shape the next chapter of Nomad Foods. You'll also see my fellow Board member and CFO, Ruben Baldew. Since joining the company in 2024, Ruben has played a pivotal role in helping us identify our opportunities for improvement, strengthening our operating foundation and develop multiyear value creation plan that we're sharing with you today.

Just as importantly, we've strengthened the team responsible for leading the next chapter of Nomad Foods. The executive team you see here combines deep institutional knowledge with outstanding new talent, and 3 of the 5 leaders on this slide have joined the company within the last year. Dior joined us last summer as President of Central Europe -- this summer as President of Central Europe. Central Europe represents one of our most compelling growth opportunities, and I'm confident Dior is the right leader to unlock that potential. She brings more than 2 decades of consumer goods experience and is someone I've worked closely with before. Her track record, leadership style and commercial mindset make her an excellent fit for this role.

Simon joined in the spring to lead our U.K. & Ireland business, our largest and most important market. Simon brings a great combination of consumer goods and food retail experience, giving him valuable insights into both the consumer and customer perspective. Jon also joined us this spring as President of Southern Europe. Jon is also leading several of our category expansion initiatives, which you'll hear more about later today. He brings 25 years of industry experience and like Dior, is a leader I know well from previous roles.

At the same time, I'm pleased that we've retained 2 highly respected members of our leadership team, Neil Fletcher and Eduardo Bachiega, our Chief Supply Chain Officer, who plays a critical role in executing our strategy. As you'll hear later today, Eduardo and his team are leveraging our supply chain, not only as an operational strength, but as a key enabler of our value creation plan. Taken together, this team gives us the leadership, experience and capabilities we need to execute with greater speed, accountability and ambition in the years ahead.

The changes extend well beyond the executive team. One of the best examples is the transformation of our marketing organization. We moved from a complex structure with layers of redundancy to a leaner, more agile model that is locally empowered, consumer-focused and built for speed. By putting decision-making closer to the market, we're improving effectiveness, increasing accountability and ensuring our investments generate stronger returns. Later today, you'll hear more about the tangible benefits we're already realizing from these changes and the role they are playing in accelerating growth.

We also redesigned incentives to drive accountability and reward performance. At the local level, leaders are now compensated based on the results they can directly influence. That sharper alignment is improving focus. And at a senior level, we've strengthened the alignment of executives with shareholders. Through our option matching program, we encourage leaders to invest their own money alongside our investors. I personally have purchased more than $6 million of Nomad Foods shares in the open market, and our senior executives have collectively invested over $4 million more. All of our Board members are also shareholders. And as you heard from Martin, our 2 co-founders have recently increased their investments with sizable open market purchases.

Another important change we've made is rebuilding credibility with the investment community. We stopped overpromising and started setting realistic expectations that we could consistently deliver even in the face of incremental headwinds such as the retail disruptions we experienced earlier this year. As a result, we've broken the negative estimate revision cycle that have been weighing on the stock, and we have begun rebuilding credibility with investors. The same philosophy applies to the targets we are sharing today because going forward, our goal is straightforward, do what we say we're going to do, if not more. But at the same time, we think and act like owners. When shareholders win, we win. As a result, we're highly motivated to execute our strategy, deliver on our commitments and create substantial long-term value.

And while we'll remain disciplined in our approach and our external targets, we will not hold back in pursuing growth opportunities that can create meaningful value for shareholders. As you've heard, we've made significant changes across the business. While there's still work to do, we're encouraged by the early signs that our actions are gaining traction. Inside the company, momentum is building, engagement is higher, confidence is growing and the organization is increasingly aligned behind our plan to win. Outside the company, we're beginning to hear positive feedback from retailers, many of whom have noted a meaningful change in both our approach and the quality of our partnership. And while we're still operating well below our full potential, our actions are beginning to deliver results.

As we look to the next chapter of our journey, we're guided by a simple but ambitious vision to be the Captain of Frozen. Being Captain is about far more than being the largest player in the category. We already hold that position. It's about acting like the category leader in everything we do. It means deepening our role as the industry's greatest expert with unmatched insights into consumers, customers and the trends shaping the future of Frozen Food. It means raising the bar and extending our leadership advantage through superior products, stronger innovation, more effective marketing and flawless execution. It means earning the trust of consumers who rely on us to feed their families and becoming the indispensable partner that retailers turn to for category growth. And ultimately, it means winning. Winning in our core categories and markets, winning through category expansion and channel development and winning by growing both our business and the Frozen Food category as a whole.

Our ambition is clear: lead the category, shape its future and create long-term value for shareholders. Our strategy to deliver this ambition is built on 3 priorities. First, we'll protect and strengthen our core. We'll invest behind the categories, brands and markets that have made us the European Frozen Food leader. Secondly, we'll expand into adjacencies where we have a proven right to win. Third, we'll conquer new territory. We'll pursue opportunities across new categories, channels and markets with the agility and challenger mindset of an insurgent brand backed by the scale and resources of Europe's Frozen Food leader. Together, these 3 pillars give us a clear road map to accelerate growth while remaining disciplined and focused on value creation. You'll hear much more about each of these opportunities from Dior and Jon in just a few moments.

What's particularly exciting is how much this broader perspective expands our opportunity set. We're not going to pursue all these opportunities at once. We remain disciplined, focused and deliberate in how we allocate resources and capital. But by expanding our lens beyond our traditional core categories and near-in adjacencies, we've unlocked a significantly larger growth runway. In fact, this broader view increases our addressable market to roughly 4x the size of the opportunity set we've historically focused on. That does not change our priorities. We'll continue to focus on the opportunities where we have the strongest right to win and the highest returns. What it does change is our long-term growth potential. Simply put, there's far more room to grow than we previously gave ourselves credit for. And with our brands, capabilities, customer relationships and category expertise, we believe we're uniquely positioned to capture that opportunity over time.

Our first priority is simple, fully capitalize on the competitive advantages that already differentiate Nomad Foods and position us to win. First, we have industry-leading brands. We own some of the strongest and most trusted brands in Frozen Food, built over decades and supported by deep consumer loyalty. Second, we have Europe's broadest Frozen Food portfolio. Our scale and breadth make us a more valuable partner to retailers and allow us to serve a wider range of consumer needs, but the benefit goes beyond scale. Operating across multiple categories and markets gives us unique insights into consumer behavior and emerging trends. We often see trends develop in one market before they spread elsewhere, allowing us to identify opportunities earlier, move faster and scale successful ideas more effectively than competitors.

Third, we have a unique pan-European supply chain. Our integrated manufacturing and distribution network is a significant strategic asset and a key competitive advantage. As Eduardo will discuss later, it generates productivity savings that help fund growth investments whilst also providing the capacity, flexibility and speed required to support future expansion. The important point is that our growth strategy is not dependent on building new capabilities from scratch. We already possess many of the assets required to succeed. Our focus is on leveraging them more effectively, more consistently and across a broader set of opportunities than ever before. To ensure we fully capitalize on our competitive advantages, we're systematically removing several constraints that have historically limited our growth potential.

First, we're shifting from a narrow focus on margin percentage to a broader focus on value creation. Margin discipline remains essential, but we'll increasingly prioritize opportunities that generate attractive profit dollars and strong returns that exceed our cost of capital. That gives us a much larger runway for growth. Second, we're becoming even more consumer-led. Our nutrition credentials remain a competitive advantage, but consumers want products that are both nutritious and delicious. By following consumer demand and expanding into attractive adjacent occasions, we can significantly increase our addressable market.

Third, we're becoming faster and more agile. We've simplified the organization, increased accountability and strengthened collaboration across markets. We're focusing on fewer, bigger opportunities and moving with greater speed and urgency. This combination of broadening our addressable market, more fully leveraging our inherent strengths and removing the constraints that have historically limited our growth potential is powerful. It positions us to be the Captain of Frozen with substantial untapped growth potential. Our opportunity is bigger than we've historically pursued. Our addressable market is significantly larger, and we believe we have the brands, capabilities and leadership team to capture it over time. Now let me pass it to Dior and team to show how we plan to do that across categories and channels.

Thank you, Dominic. You've heard the ambition and the strategy. Now let's talk about execution. Our growth will be driven by disciplined commercial execution category by category, market by market with focused investments and winning innovations. This is what we will make happen. To deliver our growth ambitions, we're evolving both innovation and marketing in 3 important ways. First, we're getting better at scaling winning ideas. Our local teams stay close to the consumers and identify what works while our pan-European scale allows us to rapidly replicate successful innovations, campaigns and concepts across markets, brands and categories. This improves speed, increases returns and maximizes the value of our footprint.

Second, we're building a stronger price architecture. Rather than forcing consumers to choose between our brands and private label, we're offering compelling options across value, core and premium tiers. This expands our addressable market, improves retention and creates opportunities to trade consumers up over time. Third, we're modernizing brand building. We're allocating resources more effectively, scaling successful campaigns across markets and investing in higher-quality creator-led content. At the same time, we're ensuring our brands win at the point of purchase through superior products, compelling value and standout execution in store. Together, these capabilities will help us innovate more effectively, strengthen our brands and accelerate sustainable growth.

Let me demonstrate how we're putting these changes into practice, starting with our Fish category. Fish & Seafood is our largest category, representing 1/3 of our revenue, and it is an area where we have significant competitive advantages. We have the leading portfolio of brands, the broad geographic footprint, an unmatched breadth of products and as Eduardo will discuss later today, a differentiated supply chain that further strengthens our position. Fish & Seafood is a large and attractive category. At EUR 6.4 billion in retail sales, it delivers around 5% long-term growth and provides a meaningful runway for value creation, which is fueled by powerful consumer trends. Fish is nutritious, it's convenient, it's affordable, and it delivers great taste for the whole family.

At the same time, there are evolving consumption habits and technologies such as the rapid adoption of air fryers. Consumers can now enjoy a restaurant quality meal of fish and chips from freezer to fork in minutes. Given these favorable fundamentals, we expect healthy category growth to continue. Our ambition is not simply to participate in that growth, but to lead it by partnering closely with our retail customers and investing behind innovation, renovation, marketing and best-in-class in-store execution. Leadership in Fish comes with a responsibility to keep raising the bar. We must continue to lead through innovation while ensuring our core portfolio maintains its market leadership and earns its price premium.

A great example is our largest product segment, the beloved Fish Fingers. In Fish Fingers, crunchiness is one of the most important drivers of preference as consumers seek a great eating experience from the first bite to the last. That's why we invested in a significant renovation of the range. This year, we launched our crunchiest fish finger ever. Consumer testing shows a meaningful improvement versus our previous recipe and clear superiority over our primary competitors. This initiative also demonstrates one of the key capability shifts we discussed earlier, innovation that travels. The crunchiest fish finger was launched and rolled out across all our markets, accelerating both impact and value creation.

Alongside this product renovation, we also leverage our scale and applied the same thinking to our marketing. We built a single pan-European communication platform around the convincing better product with a clear reason to buy and try. The result, as you can see on the screen, is marketing that travels. The core creative idea, assets and messaging remain consistent with only language and pack presentation adapted locally. This more efficient marketing allows us to dedicate resources towards more creativity. Here, you can see 2 out-of-home executions. The product is the hero. The message is simple and clear, and the creative is designed to capture attention. This principle is applied across every consumer touch point from in-store activation to digital media, and it deliver results.

We're turning around our Fish business, which was in decline. Today, retail sales have returned to growth, showing that our approach resonates with consumers. But we aren't standing still. While we are happy to celebrate the success, we're already moving forward to ensure that we continue to increase our competitiveness. As we have discussed on recent earnings calls, cost for the most common frozen fish species in Europe have increased sharply. Both we and our competitors have already taken pricing, and we currently have another round of increases underway. Naturally, this creates affordability pressures for our consumers and increases the risk of trade down or trade out of the category. But rather than viewing this as a headwind, we're actually seeing it as an opportunity. We believe our scale, sourcing expertise and supply chain capabilities position us better than anyone to navigate this environment.

We are leveraging those strengths and expanding our price ladder, offering compelling options across a wider range of consumer budgets to preserve affordability without ever compromising on quality. Let me bring this to life. As one of the largest fish buyers in the world, we have access to a broad range of species and sourcing options. Combined with the capabilities of our R&D organization, we have developed a new range of high-quality products built around Pangasius, creating an attractive value tier within the category. These products will roll out early next year and create a distinctive price architecture. By leveraging different species, we can create a clear, good, better, best ladder that broadens our appeal across consumer segments. Consumers who value the heritage, quality and taste of our core Pollock range or our premium Cod offerings can continue to enjoy the products they know and love. More value-conscious shoppers gain access to a high-quality, more affordable entry point into our portfolio. This strengthens our category leadership, expanding our coverage across price points, retaining our consumers and attracting new ones. We're excited about this opportunity as it does allow us to sustain the positive momentum we have worked hard to restore in our Fish portfolio.

Now let's turn to our second core categories, Vegetables. Vegetables is our second largest core category, representing approximately 25% of our revenue. At EUR 7 billion in size and growing at around 6% annually, it is both a large and highly attractive market. Frozen Vegetables are particularly well positioned because the category's inherent benefits strongly align with consumer needs. Our vegetables are frozen within hours of harvest. They lock in peak nutrition, freshness and flavor and avoid food waste. In a nutshell, consumers get greater value from their purchase. Given these advantages, the strong underlying market dynamics and our own innovation and marketing plans, we see significant growth potential in the category.

Here again, continuous renovation is critical to keep our core portfolio relevant and differentiated, and Spinach is a great example of it. We are the branded Spinach leader in Central Europe, but leadership requires innovation, which we haven't done in the past few years. Our new High-Protein Creamed Spinach with Skyr changes that. It brings the protein trend into Spinach, creates a new proposition in the category and reinforces our competitive edge. The product is on shelf, supported by a digital, social and in-store marketing campaign. It is early days, but I can proudly say that net sales are tracking at more than twice our initial plan. And yet again, this is an innovation that travels. What started in Germany is now rolling out across our major Spinach markets.

And here's another example from peas. But this time, the focus is not on innovation or renovation. Instead, we used marketing to reinforce the superiority of our products and brands. The U.K. and Northern Europe are major pea markets where we hold the leading branded position. Our peas are clearly superior and trade at a price premium. But even great products need support, and here is an example of how we keep our product benefits top of mind.

[Presentation]

As you can see, our advertising is simple, product focused, yet inspiring. We activated it across multiple media channels, reaching more than 40 million adults in the U.K. The results were strong. Our value share increased by 1 percentage point and retail value sales grew 7% during the campaign. This reminds us that our core Vegetable portfolio is far from commoditized. Through a combination of innovation, renovation and effective brand activation, we can continue to widen the gap versus competitors and strengthen our category leadership. Let me close by sharing one more exciting Vegetable initiative that we have planned for next year.

You will remember our Fish example where we expanded our price pack architecture by introducing a value tier to retain shoppers. SteamFresh shows how we successfully premiumize the category and trade consumers up to higher value products. It uses our proprietary technology platform featuring individually portioned pouches that steam in minutes, locking in taste, texture and nutrition. SteamFresh is not a new platform for us. We first launched it in the U.K. in 2014 and have continuously innovated behind the range. The SteamFresh range includes natural vegetable products and products with rice and grain combinations, transforming it from a simple side dish into a convenient meal component. It is sold at a premium price in the U.K. and delivers attractive margin. The brand not only encourages existing frozen vegetable consumers to trade up, but also attracts younger and time-pressed households who may have previously overlooked frozen vegetable on perceptions of taste and texture.

As a result, we have built a clear, good, better, best ladder. This allows us to serve the same shopper across more occasions, increase basket value and drive profitable category growth. SteamFresh is now a EUR 50 million net sales business in the U.K., a testament to the strength of the proposition and the brand we have built over time. And we continue to innovate to keep the platform fresh and relevant to consumers heading into 2027. Here, you can see 4 new ethnic-inspired varieties that we will launch early next year. This innovation step into a powerful consumer trend. Pan-Asian cuisine has been one of the fastest-growing cuisines for at-home meal occasions in the U.K. as restaurant-inspired flavors increasingly find their ways into home kitchens. The success of SteamFresh in the U.K. is encouraging because it is built on benefits that are universally appealing. Consumers value superior quality and convenience, and they are willing to pay a premium for products that deliver both.

Consistent with our commitment to build platforms that travel, we will begin rolling out SteamFresh across multiple markets in 2027. First, with core Vegetables and expanding the portfolio over time. This is a true win-win-win. Consumers benefit from a higher quality, more convenient solution. Retailers benefit from category premiumization and incremental growth, and we benefit from -- by capturing more consumption occasions and growing our presence at the premium end of the pricing ladder. So as you can see, we're bringing excitement to the world of fish and vegetables. And these are our core categories, and we keep investing behind them, confirming our category leadership and creating new avenues for growth.

And with that, let's turn to the next chapter of opportunity, the adjacencies, where we see significant room for expansion in areas where we have demonstrated our right to win. The first adjacency we will discuss is Chicken, which has already scaled to become one of our key categories, fast-growing across many markets and with significant runway ahead. Chicken is one of the most dynamic categories in frozen food today. Across Europe, it represents a EUR 2.7 billion market and has been growing at around 6% annually. Consumers increasingly view chicken as an affordable, versatile and great-tasting source of protein. But the opportunity extends beyond those functional benefits. The chicken phenomenon that has fueled growth across U.S. quick service restaurants across the Atlantic.

We're seeing the same trend emerge across Europe with Chicken becoming a culturally relevant category that consumers actively seek out and engage with. That has created opportunities for brands to stand out through distinctive innovation, bold marketing and stronger consumer connections. Most importantly, our brands have already demonstrated they can win in Chicken. We have built meaningful positions in key markets, and we see a clear path to expanding that success further across Europe. We have successfully built our Chicken business into a EUR 300 million platform, driven primarily by the U.K., where we are now the #1 branded player. One of our biggest successes has been the launch of Chicken Shop, a platform that taps directly into the consumer trends I just discussed.

By bringing on-trend flavors, formats and food experiences into the home, Chicken Shop has become a powerful growth engine and a great example of how innovation and brand building can create value. We plan to strengthen our U.K. Chicken business by expanding into the fastest-growing parts of our category. In Q1, we'll launch an 8 SKU range of whole muscle chicken products across strips, chunks and shredded tenders. This is our first entry into a large, fast-growing segment where Strips and Chunks are growing double digit and now represent over 1/3 of the category sales, a segment where we have no presence today. This is a big deal. And it expands our reach into a large incremental occasions and consumers, extending our trusted chicken credentials beyond our traditional family-focused portfolio.

We are excited about what this can add to our U.K. business, and we're just as excited about the opportunity we have to replicate our Chicken Shop success in new markets. Quick service restaurants are showing that this trend can travel, and now we are too. Let's visit the Nordics.

[Presentation]

Frozen Chicken represents a EUR 480 million retail market across the Nordics, making it an attractive opportunity for expansion. Earlier this year, we launched Chicken Shop in the region, leveraging the same winning product concepts, brand architecture and marketing platform that drove success in the U.K. We supported the launch with a full 360-degree activation program across TV, digital, social and in-store channels, and it's working. Despite still building distribution, we have already achieved a 5% share of the Frozen Chicken Pieces, Grills and Burger segment over the last 12 weeks. This is proof that the platform travels. And as a result, we plan to expand Chicken Shop into several additional markets next year, and we look forward to sharing more with you in due course.

And now let's turn to Meals. Meals represent one of our most attractive growth opportunities. It's a very large category with around EUR 8 billion in retail sales, and it is delivering consistently strong growth as consumers are increasingly looking for convenient, high-quality meal solutions. And while we have strong capabilities and established positions across many markets, our overall share remains relatively modest. We have already demonstrated that we can win in this category with strong positions in the Nordics and meaningful share in Italy and France. In fact, if we replicated our 7% share in France, in Germany and the U.K., it would represent roughly EUR 115 million of incremental net sales in just those 2 markets. So why haven't we grown faster?

Simply put, Meals were not a priority. We focused our resources in categories where we already held leadership positions. And in the markets where we did invest, we built a highly fragmented portfolio with different recipes and formats by countries. The result was unnecessary complexity, lower manufacturing efficiency and resources spread too thin. That's exactly what we're now addressing as we build a more focused, scalable and profitable Meals platform. Looking ahead, localization will remain important wherever it creates meaningful consumer value and attractive returns. But Meals is also a category where successful product platforms and innovations can travel across markets far more effectively as they have today.

Going forward, our ambition is to make the transfer of winning products from one market to another the rule and not the exception. By building on common platforms, we can rapidly scale proven consumer propositions across geographies while still tailoring recipes to local tastes. Sweden provides an excellent example of this strategy in action. Here, we are successfully applying a common chassis approach to expand our flavor assortment. We have steadily expanded our Meals business in Sweden through a combination of strong execution and continuous innovation. Our traditional Meals range provide a solid foundation for localized products that meet the unique demands of the Swedish consumer. We have supplemented that with our Italian platform, successfully transferred from other markets and launched quickly and efficiently. Building on that, we are now introducing Asian-inspired meal varieties that align with evolving consumer taste and growing demand for global flavors. By the way, flavors and formulas that transcend markets and do not need to be localized. This approach enables us to capitalize on the economies of scale, reduce complexity, lower costs and generate attractive returns while maintaining competitive consumer price points. Most importantly, it is driving profitable growth.

As the results demonstrate, we're already increasing household penetration, purchase frequency and buying rate, providing clear evidence that this strategy resonates with consumers and create value for the business. And here's another example of how we're extending successful flavors and formats to efficiently grow our business. On the left is a range of frozen meals in a microwavable bowl format that we successfully launched in the Nordics. The team recognized that this concept has strong potential in Germany, giving us a compelling point of differentiation in a fast-growing category where we are a challenger brand at the moment. The team moved quickly, and the product is launching in Germany and Austria this month. From identifying the opportunity to being able to launch, it took us just 60 days.

We achieved the speed because following our marketing reorganization, we now have a single category team with visibility across the entire portfolio and the ability to quickly identify and scale winning concepts. We're also taking a fundamentally different approach to execution, leveraging the same product platform, the same manufacturing footprint, multilingual packaging and a single decision gate rather than a sequence of approvals. This is a powerful example of how our new operating model is unlocking growth opportunities while accelerating speed, reducing complexity and improving returns. And we're only getting started. We expect many more success stories like this as we continue to scale this approach across our business.

Let's now turn to our third adjacency, Frozen Potatoes, where we also see a significant opportunity to grow. As you can see, the Frozen Potato category is a EUR 6 billion market across Western and Eastern Europe. It has delivered strong and consistent growth with a CAGR of nearly 8% since 2018, making it one of the most attractive categories within Frozen Food. We have already demonstrated that our brands can compete successfully in this space. After all, it is a natural extension for the leading Frozen Fish company to also offer -- to offer a leading Frozen Potato portfolio. We have built strong positions in markets such as the U.K., France and Belgium, proving that we can create value and win with consumers in this category. Growth, however, is not automatic.

Frozen Potatoes is a highly competitive category with limited product differentiation, making cost competitiveness, execution and sharp price points critical to success. Through our experience in our more established markets, we have developed valuable capabilities and learned what it takes to win. Our ambition now is to leverage those learnings and expand our presence in additional markets where we remain underrepresented. To capture more than our fair share of this opportunity, we're deploying a highly focused strategy. We're concentrating on chips or fries, which account for more than 60% of Frozen Potato category volume and developing the one chip with the optimal size, crispiness and taste profile to satisfy the vast majority of consumption occasions.

By simplifying the assortment around the winning proposition, we can maximize scale efficiencies and compete more effectively against the market leader while offering consumers a compelling price value equation. We plan to roll the strategy out across additional markets throughout 2027 and look forward to updating you on our progress. So those are the adjacencies we plan to attack, Chicken, Meals and Potatoes. In each category, we have already demonstrated a clear right to win in multiple markets, yet significant runway for expansion remains. These are natural extensions of our existing capabilities, offering an attractive combination of lower execution risk and strong return potential. With that, I will hand it over to Jon, who will take you through some of our larger white space opportunities.

Good morning. So Dior discussed how we're strengthening and protecting our core business and outline our plans to attack adjacencies where we already compete, but have not yet fully leveraged our scale and category leadership. The third pillar of our strategy is what we call capturing new territory. This pillar is about unlocking growth in categories and markets where we already have proven capabilities, strong brands, winning propositions but limited geographic participation today. In many cases, we're not creating anything new. We're taking businesses that already work, already win with consumers and already generate attractive returns. And we're extending them into markets where we have little or no presence.

That creates a compelling opportunity. We can establish incremental new growth platforms with a lower level of execution risk than building a business from scratch. And the best example of that opportunity is Pizza. Pizza is one of the largest and most attractive Frozen Food categories in Europe. Yet today, our participation is concentrated in just a handful of markets. That leaves a significant runway for expansion, and we're already seeing encouraging results where we've begun to execute. Let me walk you through this opportunity. Pizza is a EUR 7.5 billion retail category, growing at a healthy 6% CAGR across Eastern and Western Europe. And the opportunity for us is significant. Until this year, our presence was largely limited to the U.K. and Ireland, meaning we currently have only a very small share of a very large market. That creates substantial white space for growth.

As you can see on this slide, achieving just a 5% share in key markets such as Germany, France, Italy and a handful of others would generate approximately EUR 140 million of incremental net revenue. EUR 148 million assumes simply capturing a modest share of large growing markets where we already are today the absolute market leaders in Frozen. We entered the Pizza category in 2018 through the acquisition of Goodfella's, an Ireland-based business with strong positions in both Ireland and its neighboring U.K. Since the acquisition, however, performance has been mixed. A few years ago, the business was facing declines in market share following product reformulations intended to improve the nutritional profile of the range.

What we learned was very simple. When consumers buy pizza, taste comes first. Last year, we took decisive action. We reformulated the portfolio with a singular objective to create the best tasting, most irresistible pizza possible. The team delivered. And in the second half of the year, we relaunched the range. The results speaks for themselves. Penetration, market shares and sales improve. In fact, retail sales for our core takeaway line are now growing more than 8%. While this turnaround is important, the broader opportunity is even more exciting. Unlike some food categories, pizza preferences are remarkably consistent across Europe. A great pizza in one market is often a great pizza in another. We now have a winning product and a proven playbook. The next step is clear, bring that success to more consumers in more markets.

So we're taking the product that made Goodfella's takeaway a success and scaling it across Europe. Our research told us the product travels better than the brand. So we're launching it under new banner designed specifically for international growth. The proposition is straightforward, generously indulgent. With 10% to 20% more toppings than many competing pizzas, it delivers the loaded restaurant style experience that consumers are looking for. Nearly half of frozen pizza buyers told us they would definitely or probably purchase the product even at full price. That gives us confidence. We are not building a new brand around a new idea. We are building a new brand around the product consumers have already proven they love.

So we now have a winning product. We also know that visibility at shelf is critical. More than half of frozen pizza purchases occasions are on plan, making standout in-store execution a key driver of success. At the same time, consumers are actively looking for variety. Our research shows the average frozen pizza buyer purchases roughly 3 different pizza brands of ranges each year. That plays directly to our strategy. We will offer consumers meaningful choice, starting with the 6 delicious varieties you see on the screen, while creating a powerful billboard effect at shelf that it's just impossible to miss. We're bringing something generally differentiated to the category, a fully loaded pizza proposition that is largely absent from Frozen aisles outside the U.K. and one that consumers have already demonstrated they have the willingness to pay for.

We will support that proposition by winning both in-store and online through high-impact marketing, strong social engagement and creator-led content designed to drive trial and awareness. And the economics are particularly attractive. We're leveraging our existing factory footprint, warehouse network and commercial organization, allowing us to scale the business efficiently while generating strong returns in investment. Today, we're not ready to disclose the next markets in our expansion plan, but we can share what we've seen in Belgium, where we launched earlier this year using this exact same strategy. The early results have exceeded our expectations. Despite having only 31% weighted distribution, we have already achieved more than 2% market share of the total Frozen Pizza category and nearly 18% share of the Premium American Pizza segment.

Most encouraging is what we're seeing from consumers. According to loyalty card data from one of our retail partners in Belgium, nearly 1/3 of recent purchases are already repeat purchases, even though the brand has only been in the market for a handful of months. These results are an early validation of a repeatable growth playbook as we expand into additional markets.

Now let's turn to Ice Cream. Ice Cream is the largest Frozen Food category in Europe, generating approximately EUR 22 billion in annual retail sales and growing at a healthy 6% CAGR. As Eduardo will discuss later, this is the area of our business with the lowest capacity utilization, giving us a unique opportunity to drive growth while leveraging existing assets more effectively. That combination of a large growing category and significant operational leverages makes Ice Cream a compelling expansion opportunity for us. Capturing just 1% market share across the 4 largest European markets would translate into more than EUR 70 million of incremental net sales. We are participating in a very large category from a relatively small position today, leaving us with substantial headroom for profitable growth in the years ahead.

And while our current ice cream business has a small geographical footprint, its market position where it competes is exceptionally strong. In markets such as Serbia and Croatia, we hold scale leadership positions with our brands. And this is against European leaders like Froneri and Magnum. That leadership is supported by a differentiated brand portfolio, spanning from iconic favorites such as King to innovative offerings like Quattro. Together, these brands allow us to compete across a wide range of consumer occasions, price points and segments. Our route to market in Croatia and Serbia affords us a scale advantage and extensive competitive moat, especially in the Impulse segment, where owning your own freezers at retail is a substantial competitive advantage that requires substantial scale to afford good returns.

We run 470 of our own company-branded direct store delivery trucks and 120,000 freezers at retail. and it has yielded results. As you can see on this page, since '22, the first full year after we acquired the business, we have grown our Ice Cream net sales at an 8% CAGR. And those net sales have been very profitable. In fact, gross margin contribution from our Ice Cream business is more than 10 percentage points than the company average. This is a great business for us and one we need to expand efficiently in more markets.

One example of this recent expansion success is Austria. It was a logical market for us to expand given that our brands already had some established equity in the market, either because of immigration from Serbia and Croatia into Austria and tourism. We have deployed an insurgent brand model in the market, and it is working. We slowly built the business with one grocery chain and then this year added a second one. We are now on track to have captured roughly 1 share point of the market this year, which, as I said before, replicating in other markets could represent a EUR 70 million incremental net revenue opportunity. Now Austria is somewhat unique because our brands enter the market with an existing level of awareness and consumer equity. That will not be the case in every market we pursue.

Future expansion efforts in the 2027 season will leverage licensed partnership model. This approach allow us to combine our route-to-market capabilities, field sales infrastructure and in-house manufacturing expertise with the strength of established partner brands. We believe this is a highly attractive model. It would enable us to leverage assets we already have in place, particularly our sales force in what it is a largely counter-seasonal category while expanding our participation in an incremental category in a capital-efficient manner.

So now let's switch gears away from categories and towards our customers. Retailer trust is critical to long-term growth. And in the U.K., we lost ground. Bottom tier Advantage Survey rankings highlighted shortcomings in customer engagement, category leadership and execution, which translated into lost distribution and growth opportunities. We have fundamentally reset our approach, strengthening our commercial organization, improving collaboration with customers and focus on sustainable value rather than short-term volume. The early results are encouraging. Relationships are improving, momentum is building, and our ambition is to move from the bottom tier to the top tier of the U.K. Advantage Survey by next year.

When we established the right headquarters relationships with our retail partners, we are able to move beyond the traditional supplier role and work together to optimize layout in the shopper journey, elevate the in-store experience and drive mutual growth. No Frozen Food manufacturer in Europe reaches more consumers across more occasions, categories, markets and retail customers than Nomad does. That scale translates into meaningful advantage, deeper consumer insights, stronger category expertise, broader commercial capabilities and one of the industry's largest field sales organizations. By combining these assets with close retailer partnerships, we can help shape category growth, improve execution in store and create a better experience for consumers.

While we do not have a direct store delivery sales force outside the Adriatics, our scale allow us to invest in dedicated in-store sales team across most of our key markets and like many of our competitors that participate in only a single category. These teams play an important role in driving execution at the shelf. In Italy, for example, they help ensure our products are consistently in stock, properly merchandised and easy for shoppers to find and navigate. This might seem operational, but it is a meaningful advantage versus all of our competitors. A high percentage of purchase decisions are made in store, which makes winning consumer attention at the point of purchase critical.

First, we leverage the dedicated in-store sales capabilities I just described, ensuring our products are available, visible and presented in the best possible way. Second, our presence across multiple Frozen categories allow us to generate attractive returns from investments that many competitors simply cannot justify. A great example of that is freezers because we operate across such a broad portfolio of Frozen categories, we can support additional freezer placements with a much wider range of products and consumer occasion, making the economics of capturing new categories highly attractive. This creates a virtuous circle. More freezer space increases visibility, availability and convenience for our shoppers, which drives stronger sales for both our retail partners and our brands. At the same time, it creates competitive advantage that is difficult for a single category competitor to replicate.

To bring this to life, let me show you a real example of what we are already achieving in the Potato category in Belgium. This is a category where we were not the market leader. Yet by applying our Captain of Frozen approach, we have been able to outperform larger competitors and drive category growth. We did this by engaging shoppers at every touch point in the store. Our dedicated in-store sales team ensure strong availability, standout visibility and compelling execution through the Frozen aisle from Frozen placement and merchandising to promotional activation and shopper communication.

The results speak for themselves. There is no better proof point than taking the #1 position in Frozen Potatoes from McCain in one of the highest potato consuming countries in the world. This outcome demonstrates the power of our Captain of Frozen approach. And as that case study demonstrates, winning at the point of purchase allow us to win with consumers, but to fully capitalize on that advantage, we must also optimize the value equation. That means striking the right balance between pricing and promotion, ensuring we remain competitive in the eyes of consumers while continuing to generate strong returns. Our goal is not simply to grow volume, it's to grow profitably. So let's talk about how we're going to achieve that.

As I'm sure everybody in this room is aware, we and the industry overall are seeing renewed inflation. We've seen this before. And to be fair, we didn't handle it so well in the past. We prioritized margin ratios, pricing ahead of competition. This resulted in robust gross profit per kilo for us in the near term, but it also led to significant volume declines in '23 and contributing to the distribution and share losses we have seen since then. We are extremely clear this is not something we're going to repeat. We learned the lesson and we learned it well. Today, we're in a better place after absorbing inflation for the past 2 years. Though in some instances, we do still have some work to do, and this is the reason that you have heard us talking about passing through only partial inflation this year and relying on productivity to fill the gap.

Today, when you're investing in Nomad, you are investing in a better price position company than in the last 36 months. We are more competitive, and you can see it in our improved market share performance over the last 2 periods. And I can assure you it's only going to get better. And if you're investing in us today, you're also investing in brands that have a better right to win at a price premium than in '22 and '23. In '23, only 40% of our top category country combinations were seen as superior to consumers. Today, that figure is above 60%. While that highlights that we have more work yet to finish, it also highlights that we are in a much better position than we were.

And this focus on competitiveness is part of our new approach. When it comes to mitigating our inflation, our focus is on passing through the higher cost to maximize ROI and our competitiveness. To accomplish that, we lean on productivity where needed, but also harness the capability of our advanced data science team. As I mentioned before, aggressive pricing in '22 and '23 took our brands off our desirable price corridors and created a negative curve even in gross profit despite aggressive pricing. We now have calculated the correct price index for all our SKUs, and we can bring them to the sweet spot to maximize results for our desired outcome, whether that be revenue, gross profit, market share or a combination of those.

Advanced data science capabilities with AI tools give us the ability to understand pricing corridors and predict results while being educated by real-time on-the-ground intelligence. And here is an example on your right. With a minimum of 2 years of weekly point-of-sale data, we can run 3 multilinear regressions against more than 10 variables, distribution, promo distribution, feature, seasonality, share and price for Nomad, whether it's branded competition and private label. The output is indicative P&L and market share impact of changes to our price index. This level of insight provided now by AI allow us to price smarter, ensure our competitiveness and maximize our financial returns.

We are applying the same type of AI data science to our promotions. We can determine the best time of the month to promote. And here's an example of how we can determine the optimal depth of promotion. This shows the volume uplift, which we can then overlay with margin considerations at the various promoted depth to optimize top and bottom line returns. The conclusions vary from category to category and market to market. And that is why we get very granular with the analysis to ensure that the insights can be translated into actions. As you can see, we have built AI pricing and promotional capabilities that enable us to optimize both short-term results and long-term value creation.

But now let me switch gears into new channel. It is critical that we win with our customers and win with consumers at the point of purchase, but we also have to win where consumers choose to shop. Today, we're not broadly distributed as a company with our scale should be. That means we're missing transactions that should be ours. We see a clear opportunity to close that gap. The single largest retail channel opportunity we see is hard discount. Across Europe, hard discounts generate nearly EUR 20 billion in Frozen Food sales annually and remain the fastest-growing major retail channel. Despite the strength of our brands, our share in hard discount significantly lags our share in other retail channels.

In Germany, our branded share in hard discount is roughly 60% of our share across all other channels. But in the U.K., that figure is less than 10%. Closing even part of this gap represents a substantial opportunity. If we were to achieve Germany's branded share index in just 5 markets: Belgium, Austria, Italy, France and the U.K., it would generate approximately EUR 150 million of incremental net sales. And that opportunity only reflects branded products. The reality is that approximately 88% of Frozen Food sales in hard discount are private label. If we want to become a major player in this channel, we cannot think as only a branded manufacturer. We must become a strategic partner across both branded and private label.

For many years, Nomad viewed hard discount as a threat. Today, we view it as an opportunity. Rather than resisting the growth of the channel, we intend to capitalize on it. We have started this summer, negotiations with the main European hard discounters to win with a focused range of high velocity branded hero SKUs supported by expanded multipack formats and assortments tailored to hard discount. We will complement our branded offering with private label. Given that 88% of category sales in hard discounts are private label, it is simply too large an opportunity to ignore. By utilizing available capacity, we can participate in this growth while generating attractive returns. The result is a fundamentally different mindset, not defending against hard discount, but winning alongside it. The approach has been extremely well received by hard discounters and already won us new business with one major retailer beginning this October. And it is very likely we will generate more wins before the end of Q4.

The other major channel opportunity we see is Foodservice, a EUR 17 billion market opportunity, largely incremental or completely incremental to our existing business. Today, we're significantly underrepresented relative to both the size of the channel and the strength of our portfolio. Several competitors with smaller portfolios, less geographic reach and fewer category capabilities generate proportionately more than twice the level of Foodservice sales that we do. We believe that gap represents a substantial opportunity, simply bringing our Foodservice exposure in line with industry average could generate approximately EUR 200 million of incremental net sales. We do already operate several Foodservice models across our business today. In some markets, we provide a full-service solution, supplying a broad portfolio directly to restaurant operators. In others, we focus on narrow range of products sold directly to quick service restaurant chains. And in many markets, our participation in Foodservice remains limited or insignificant, leaving significant room for expansion.

Where we have already established strong Foodservice business, our objective is straightforward, continue to nurture those relationships, strengthen our position and grow alongside our customers. However, the largest opportunity lies in markets where our presence is still underdeveloped. In those markets, we are focused on a capital-efficient model built around targeted portfolio of products where we already possess strong capabilities, differentiated offerings and available manufacturing capability. Rather than building extensive direct distribution networks, we will partner with cash & carry operators and third-party distributors who already serve the Foodservice channel and manage the last-mile delivery.

This allow us to leverage existing infrastructure, expand our reach quickly and generate attractive returns with relatively modest investment. We believe this approach offers the most efficient path to scaling our Foodservice business and unlocking substantial incremental growth. While we're still in the early stage of this journey, the opportunity is significant. The economics are attractive, and we look forward to sharing our progress and success stories in the months ahead. With that, I think we are ready for a short break. This morning, you've heard Dominic explain why we believe our organic growth inflection is already underway and how we're expanding our addressable market to unlock new avenues for growth and build on our renewed momentum over the long term.

You've also heard from Dior and myself bring that strategy to life through tangible examples across categories, channels and markets. The opportunity ahead of us is substantial, and we believe we are only at the beginning of realizing its full potential. When we return, Eduardo will explain our unique supply chain as a unique competitive advantage and how it positions Nomad to capture these growth opportunities more effectively than anyone else in the industry. Ruben will then walk you through the financial implications of everything you've heard today, including how we expect these initiatives to translate into sustainable revenue growth, earnings expansion and stronger cash generation, and of course, increase shareholder value. We have covered a lot of ground this morning, but the remaining sections will bring it all together. Enjoy the break, and we'll see you back here shortly. Thank you.

All right, everyone. We're running about 5 minutes ahead of schedule. So we're going to take a quick break, and let's be back here at 10:40, and that includes everyone on the webcast. So we're going to go dark for 18 minutes or so.

[Break]

Okay. If everyone could take their seat, we want to keep this thing on track and we're going to get restarted here in just a second. So please grab your seats.

Welcome back, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the small break. During today's presentation, you have heard about our plans to accelerate growth, expand into attractive new opportunities and create substantial value for the shareholders. Dominic outlined the progress already underway and our strategy to unlock a much larger growth opportunity. Dior and Jon then demonstrate how we are translating that strategy into tangible actions across our portfolio and markets. Now I will walk you through on why we can deliver -- we believe that we can deliver this plan. Thank you, Jason.

A key part of the answer is our supply chain. Over many years, we've built one of the most capable and extensive Frozen Food networks across Europe. This is one of our most powerful strategic assets and a key enabler of our value creation. I can summarize how our operations will contribute to the value creation plan with 3 pillars. The number one is our scale. Our industry-leading scale provides competitive advantage that would likely require billions of euros and many years to be recreated. Second, capacity. We have significant available capacity in our manufacturing network, and it allow us to pursue growth in a highly capital-efficient manner. Third, productivity. Over the last few years, we have proven that we built an engine that can fund our investments behind our growth agenda while helping us to maintain a strong competitive position in the marketplace.

Nomad Foods operations combined decades of Frozen Food expertise with extensive network of manufacturing, sourcing, logistics operations and robust strategic partnerships. Nomad's scale is truly exceptional. We are the largest buyers in peas and spinach in Europe, the largest buyers of whitefish in Europe and the second largest globally. And we operate the largest Frozen Fish factory and the second largest cold chain in Europe. As you can see in this slide, our manufacturing network spans the continent and produce the vast majority of our portfolio from Peas and Fish to Meals and Ice Cream. Combined with a broad ecosystem of strategic partners, we can innovate faster, expand into new categories and serve customers with a breadth of assortment that few competitors can match.

Our competitive advantage extends way beyond manufacturing. With one of the European largest cold chain networks and extensive route to market, we can serve customers across the continent with efficiency, reliability and scale. Let me bring that advantage to life with one example, how we use species diversification to build a new portfolio pricing architecture. What began as an initiative to build supply chain resilience has become a competitive advantage. Over the last 3 years, we developed alternative farm-raised fish sourcing to diversify beyond Alaskan Pollock. We have continued investing in those capabilities and relationships.

Today, that foresight is paying off. Following significant inflation in Alaskan Pollock, we have access to a more affordable supply source. Working closely with farming partners, we have leveraged our deep fish expertise and our R&D capabilities to continuously improve quality. As a result, we have secured a high-quality Pangasius at a scale that we believe that's unmatched in the industry. That capability allow us to rapidly broaden our price architecture and introduce new consumer propositions across multiple price tiers, and we've achieved this in a matter of months. This is a powerful example on how our operations do more than ensure supply. It enables innovation, unlocks new growth opportunities.

Our supply chain creates differentiations even in categories that many may see as commodities. Peas are a great example. Through a long-standing relationship with our growth partners, deep integration in the value chain. We take peas from the field to freezer in just 2.5 hours. Along the way, they are washed, cleaned, quality screened and frozen fresh to guarantee that we keep all the flavor. This is a result of -- this results in a noticeable superior product that supports the quality credentials and brand proposition that Dior highlighted earlier today. Equally important is that we have been able to maintain these high standards while diversifying our sourcing footprint and strengthening our resilience. By leveraging our manufacturing network, we are expanding our sourcing base across Europe, reducing climate-related risks while continuing to deliver the quality that consumers expect.

This is another example on how our supply chain not only protects the business, but also creates competitive advantage. Looking forward, our supply chain will be a critical enabler for our expansion plans in a cost-effective and a capital-efficient way. We have a phenomenal supply chain that can deliver much more than it has done today. Currently, we are utilizing less than 2/3 of our capacity utilization across the network. This affords us the opportunity to apply our growth in an efficient way to unlock valuable cost savings and improving the network utilization.

We have built over the last year strong plans to improve our asset utilization. First, we are accelerating the in-sourcing of products currently manufactured by third parties. In some cases, external production provides capabilities that we don't have internally. But in many others, it reflects legacy decisions rather than current needs. Over the past year, we have taken aggressive actions to bring more production in-house where we have both capacity and capability to do so. As a result, the share of volume produced externally has already fallen to 22%, and we expect to decline below 18% by the end of '28. We are also optimizing our manufacturing footprint. Over the past year, we announced plans to close 2 facilities as part of our efforts to better align capacity and demand. Together, those initiatives are expected to increase network utilization from approximately 63% today to more than 70% by '29, improving efficiency, lowering costs, enhance returns on our asset base.

We also see significant opportunity to unlock more capacity utilization through growth. Our Pizza plans provide a great example. The new Pizza portfolio introduced in the U.K. last year leverage our existing asset base, the agility of our R&D team and the expertise of our trusted partners to make this opportunity a reality in an incredible short period of time. We took product from benchtop concept to retail shelves in just 7 months, delivering a superior consumer proposition at a highly competitive price point. The results speak for themselves. The product has since been recognized as Product of the Year and is helping to support our turnaround in the U.K. business. More importantly, because of the product was designed with scale and repeatability in mind, we are now rolling out the same platform across multiple European markets, leveraging our existing capabilities to drive growth with a minimal investment.

This is exactly how we intend to unlock greater value for our supply chain by utilizing our assets more effectively, moving faster than competitors and scaling successful innovations across our European platform. Our supply chain is also a critical productivity engine, generating consistently the savings that allow us to invest behind our growth. Between '24 and '26, we have delivered EUR 170 million of cumulative cost of goods savings. Looking ahead, we see substantial additional opportunity. We will further accelerate the productivity program over the next 3 years. We expect to deliver an additional EUR 180 million to EUR 200 million of cumulative COGS.

I want to emphasize that our cost savings targets are not simply aspirations. They are supported by detailed initiatives and execution plans that are already underway. The building blocks are quite simple, but very, very strong. First, procurement, our largest opportunity supported by a comprehensive program built around 7 value drivers, including 3 new levers: inbound logistics, customs optimization and supplier-led innovation. The biggest contributor, however, will be the supplier consolidation enabled by the ingredient and packaging harmonization. This is another benefit of our common platform innovation approach you heard about earlier today. Collectively, we expect these procurement savings to deliver between EUR 90 million and EUR 100 million savings over the next 3 years.

Second, manufacturing efficiency. As we discussed earlier today, we have actions to improve asset utilization. Combined with a broader productivity in our factories, we expect to reduce conversion costs and we will generate between EUR 75 million and EUR 80 million of savings. Finally, logistics. On this front, much of the work is already underway. And by '28, we expect to reduce the number of depots that we operate by 22%. Combined with our procurement and logistics initiatives, we expect to generate between EUR 15 million and EUR 20 million of savings in this area. Together, those initiatives support our target of EUR 180 million to EUR 200 million of cumulative COGS savings. Including our overhead efficiency programs, our total cost savings opportunity increased to EUR 200 million to EUR 225 million between '27 and '29, providing another important source of fuel for growth, profitability and shareholder value creation.

It's important to say that our productivity agenda does not come at the expense of quality or growth. In many cases, that initiatives are designed to support and accelerate it. Chicken Shop is a great example of it. We've initially launched the platform in the U.K. using a third-party manufacturer. Once the brand had proven its success and reached sufficient scale, we developed plans to bring the production in-house, improving asset utilization while reducing cost. But the benefits went beyond the manufacturing efficiency. The transition created the opportunity to renovate the brand and reformulate the product, leveraging our scale in close collaboration with suppliers, we were able to improve the recipe while simultaneously lowering the cost. The result was a win-win, a more efficient and superior product.

Here is another example. Earlier today, Dior shared our first -- our Fish Finger renovation initiative, where we improved the consumer experience with a crunchier, tastier recipe. The renovation gave us meaningful news to communicate and also strengthen our competitiveness, but more important, help us to return overall Fish Finger portfolio to retail sales growth. What she didn't tell you is that the initiative also generated cost savings. We were able to harmonize our coating systems and consolidate suppliers, simplifying our operation while improving efficiency. The results, another win-win, a better product for consumer, stronger performance in the marketplace and a lower cost for Nomad.

This perfectly illustrates our approach around the productivity. We are not reducing costs at the expense of consumer satisfaction or growth. We are finding ways to improve our products, strengthening our brands and lowering our cost base at the same time. Now I would like to move your attention to talk about our continuous improvement culture and how we manage our operations. Our focus on improving our cost base, increasing efficiency and allocating capital in a disciplined manner is not a onetime project, and this does not have an end date. It's embedded in our culture and reflected in the way we operate every single day. Over the past 3 years, we've accelerated our productivity by embracing a continuous improvement mindset across the whole organization. We are consolidating suppliers, optimizing the network, investing in high-return automation projects and continuously improving our processes.

What makes this particularly powerful is that we are achieving this without a disproportionate level of investment. We are becoming more efficient in how we deploy both our capital and human resources. The results are evident. For example, productivity per employee has increased by 16% over the last 2 years in one of our factories, demonstrating our ability to drive more output from our existing asset base while creating capacity to reinvest in growth, strengthen our competitiveness and support long-term margin expansion. It's important to say that the culture of continuous improvement extends well beyond supply chain. It's increasingly embedded across the organization and is generating meaningful overhead savings. The streamlining of the marketing organization is a good example, like Dominic mentioned earlier today. We have created a flatter, faster and more focused structure while we unlocked between EUR 10 million and EUR 12 million of savings.

We are also leveraging technology to automate process, improve productivity and reduce costs. Within our shared service organization, we removed approximately EUR 8 million of costs in the past 2 years through increased automation, adoption of AI embedded tools and process simplification. Across the business, the pipeline of overhead efficiencies continues to increase, giving us confidence on our ability to deliver between EUR 20 million and EUR 25 million of savings over the next 3 years, largely offsetting inflation. These savings are an important enabler of our value creation plan. They help to fund investment behind our growth priorities while supporting our earnings growth. With that, let me hand over to Ruben, who will walk us through the financial targets and the shareholder value creation framework in more details. Thank you.

Thank you, Eduardo, and good morning, everyone. As you heard from the team, there are plenty of opportunities. And all of that starts with the market. The opportunity is clearly there. On the left, on the next slide, you will see that the market growth is there, 3% to 4% growth already over various years over various categories and on a sizable market. Secondly, and equally important, we are going to increase our playing field 4x. And you heard Jon, Dior speak about that, the opportunity in Foodservice and hard discount, leveraging our Ice Cream and Pizza business beyond their current home markets, a synergetic play, which we'll now execute on.

Clearly, we will not execute everything on this overnight, but as a team, we are very excited about this. And that goes beyond just excitement. As Dominic showed before, we will drive this as incentivized share owners as hard and as fast as possible. Over the past year or so, the team on stage here has bought around USD 10 million in shares on the open market. So we walk the talk. And on this chart, you can see that the share price threshold that need to be achieved for Dominic and I to be granted our matching options. As you can see, the value creation that we need to create for our shareholders to benefit from this reward structure is substantial, but we are confident that we can achieve it, which is why we've put so much of our personal wealth into this company.

All of this, however, starts with living up to our commitments. Given the positive quarter 3 results, today, we increased our full year '26 organic revenue guidance. We now expect organic revenue to decline by 2% to 3% for the year versus our prior expectation of a 2% to 5% decline. As a reminder, organic revenue declined by 4% in the first half. So this outlook reflects a meaningful improvement in the second half, which is already evident in the third quarter with a growth of more than 1%. Our adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EPS and adjusted free cash flow conversion guidance is unchanged from what we provided with the second quarter results. As we said earlier, we want to rebuild bonus this year for this not to be a headwind for '27. Any further potential upside will be used for further bonus rebuild.

This is a year to strengthen our foundation, and we do not plan to flow any top line upside to the bottom line as our priority is laying the foundation for better performance beginning in '27. And as a reminder, we will see higher cost inflation beginning in the fourth quarter of this year, which will pressure our gross margin. Also, as a reminder, our EPS guidance reflects the impact of our new bond where we extended maturities in the summer. So let's look forward beyond 2026. As said, our category is strong. And on the right, you see the drivers mentioned by Dominic earlier. It's convenient. There's hardly no waste, therefore, provides good value, and it captures taste much better than chilled equivalents. These are important drivers for growth.

And then on the left, you will see the category growth as reported for Nielsen and Circana. The years after COVID, you will see were distorted and you see the high inflation. But over the recent years, you see the category between 2% and 3% growth, both driven by price and volume. This sets this category apart from other Packaged Food categories. For our planning assumptions, we have assumed a 2% to 3% range of growth. The plans are there. Dior and Jon took you through a high-level overview of our commercial plans, and I hope you agree that we have some compelling opportunities to pursue. We expect this plan to drive improvement in our market share. We still, however, have more work to do. We need to continue to strengthen our retail relations, lend our announced fish pricing actions with no meaningful customer or consumer disruption, drive a distribution inflection, all while strengthening our culture, speed and agility.

Therefore, walking first means a growth between 0% and 2%, which will be equally reflected into bottom line. Adjusted EBITDA growth will be 0% to 2%, and we will continue 90% plus cash conversion. Again, as a reminder, we are all shareholders, and we are incentivized to do more than this, but it starts with delivering on our commitments. For the years '28 and '29, we expect competitive growth of 2% to 3%, and we expect adjusted EBITDA growth to meet or exceed our organic revenue growth targets. We also intend to improve our earnings quality with reduced adjustment and higher ROI on the adjustments that are there. For example, restructuring initiatives that drive tangible cost saving.

This is a company which generates strong cash flow, and we are intensely focused on continuing that. We view this as a critical source of value creation for our investors. As such, we are focused on delivering a high quantity and high quality of adjusted free cash flow. We believe we can generate around EUR 550 million of adjusted free cash flow from '27 to '29, which at recent foreign exchange rates translate into nearly $650 million over the next 3 years or nearly 40% of our existing market cap. And then on capital allocation, we have a path to bring net debt to EBITDA down to 3.4x whilst maintaining our current dividend levels.

While our near and medium-term goals are pragmatic, they're also meaningful in the way that they reflect a materially positive top line and bottom line inflection. And as Dominic said, it's not an inflection point in waiting. It's an inflection point in the way, underpinned by the third quarter with 1% growth or more. We have seen recovery in our main markets like U.K. and DACH and good growth in both our Adriatics and Nordic region. So our top line guidance is rooted in the improvement we're already seeing today. The improvement will not be a straight line, however. For example, in the fourth quarter, we will lap some prebuying ahead of our '26 price increase, but we are encouraged by the improved underlying momentum. We're also already seeing improved earnings momentum as our top line improves, though that improvement is being masked by the rebuild of incentive compensation this year, which we expect to be up to 5% headwind. Therefore, the underlying step-up in EBITDA '27 versus '26 is lower.

And as a reminder, '26 is also a year where we had the impact of stopping bad behavior with sales incentive. So the good news is that the underlying earnings trend of the business is improving. And at this moment, for '27, we don't assume a big headwind of incentive rebuild. To deliver that growth, we will overcome inflation headwinds. As Eduardo discussed, fish costs have continued to climb for a reason of factors. We came into '26 well hedged through the first 3 quarters, but expect to see higher inflation predominantly due to fish costs starting in the fourth quarter of this year and continuing through next year. We have experienced mid-single-digit inflation over the past 2 years, but anticipate high single-digit inflation next year. This presents a headwind, but we have a number of actions already underway to overcome that, and I will come to that now.

As Jon discussed, a critical line of defense to inflation is leveraging our RGM capability. Pricing is, of course, an important tool in that. It's important to stress that our approach to pricing is fundamentally different than it was in '22, '23. On the left, you will see that in those years, we aggressively raised prices to preserve our gross margin as a percentage. Our gross profit per kilogram went roughly from EUR 1 to EUR 1.20. So we priced above inflation, and you see the impact this has had on volumes. We did this when competitiveness was relatively weak as measured by innovation levels and quality metrics. First of all, we will have a different approach, and you see that on the right. We will look at absolute cost and profit, euro for euro pass-through, not margin percentage. Secondly, we will balance profit versus volume and market share.

In some cases, given competition, we might be less aggressive on pricing. And in some cases, we will go more aggressive and drive profit. Now we're able to balance this because we'll drive productivity hard, as you've seen from Eduardo's section. And lastly, we have the tools in place, as Jon just showed, pricing corridors and models to predict results with real-time data. So our overall approach, therefore, is different. Secondly, linked to the current fish inflation, we've seen private label taking substantial price increase over the last months. We will take our pricing at the end of this year and assuming this goes well, the inflation should be covered from the start of '27. And as Eduardo mentioned, we have strategic advantages in terms of alternative species such as Pangasius.

As I mentioned, productivity is another important tool in our toolbox. It has been an important offset to inflation this year and also in future years, this will be the case. We have a long pipeline of savings that we expect to help us mitigate inflation, fuel investment in the business and support bottom line growth. Last year, we announced a 3-year EUR 200 million productivity program with supply chain savings accounting for the majority of these savings. As Eduardo mentioned, we expect to exceed that goal based on all the initiatives that he shared with you. We now expect our supply chain savings to reach roughly 3% of cost of goods sold per year through 2029.

As you can see, this is a meaningful improvement from the level of productivity that we were achieving in the past. Our productivity targets are not limited to the supply chain. You saw the examples in marketing, in shared finance, thanks to automation. So we have undertaken a number of initiatives over the past years to offset overhead cost inflation, and we have more savings planned for the next year and beyond. Because of this, we expect overhead expenses absent incentive compensation to fall as a percentage of net sales through 2029 as we overcome inflation and self-fund investment to hold costs flat while growing our organic revenue.

Our disciplined approach extends beyond the income statement and into cash flow generation and capital allocation. Historically, we have maintained a highly efficient CapEx profile with investment levels that compare positively to industry peers. Looking ahead, we expect to fund both our productivity initiatives and our growth ambitions without a material step-up in capital expenditures. The advantages of our existing skill and infrastructure is that much of the capacity needed to support future growth is already in place. As a result, we believe we can deliver our growth and profitability objective with relatively modest capital investments, supporting strong free cash flow generation and attractive returns on invested capital. And more productivity and expansion does not mean more exceptional P&L and cash flow adjustments. In fact, we have and will continue to meaningfully reduce our exceptional expenditures.

Our current plans are to cut our exceptional cash expenditures roughly in half within the next couple of years relative to '25. And our first half '26 results illustrate that we're already making progress against this goal. This is not an aspiration, but a goal we've already begun to achieve. The second point is that the vast majority of our exceptional expenditures will be linked to tangible projects driving returns. You've seen the savings in marketing, the savings in shared finance. We announced 2 factory closures. Therefore, our exceptional items are linked to savings that generate a good payback, and we will continue to do that. So quantity of adjustments down, quality up. Now it is possible that we find more projects in the future that will come with more exceptional expenditures than are in our current plans, but it will also come with more tangible returns. Ultimately, it's about driving ROI. So we are reducing our exceptional expenditures while improving the returns they are generating relative to the period '23, '25.

As I said earlier, this is a company which has healthy cash flow. In this slide, you see our dividend levels. Our dividend of $0.17 per quarter currently yields 6.5%. We will sustain our dividend payout, as mentioned earlier by Dominic. This is nearly USD 300 million in the next 3 years. The combination of our EBITDA growth forecast and lower exceptional cash expenditures is expected to yield higher deployable free cash flow. In fact, we expect our free deployable cash flow to grow at nearly 5% CAGR over the next 5 -- 3 years. This means we can comfortably fund our current dividend while generating nearly $200 million of incremental cash. And how are we going to use this excess cash?

Our near-term priority is debt reduction. Based on the growth and cash generation targets we outlined today, we expect net debt to EBITDA to go down towards 3.4x by the end of '29 at recent foreign exchange rate. Importantly, we are reducing net debt from a position of strength, not necessity. Nomad Foods generates strong cash flow. Our balance sheet is healthy. Thanks to our recent 2 successful refinancing of our term loan and bonds, we have no debt maturities until 2032. Approximately 70% of our debt is now fixed, and our current average borrowing cost is approximately 5.2%. In addition, we have around EUR 200 million of available liquidity through our RCF and have continued to have strong access to credit markets. In fact, the debt markets have consistently recognized the strength and resilience of our business, a level of confidence that we do not believe is fully reflected in our current equity valuation, though the plan we are revealing today is designed to change that.

The message I hope you take away from today in this section is straightforward. Firstly, we're not asking investors to rely on ambitious assumptions or distant aspirations. We are providing a set of meaningful credible targets that are grounded in the actions already underway across the business. Secondly, our objective is to deliver consistent top line growth and translate that growth into earnings expansion. Thirdly, we will generate strong free cash flow and reduce leverage. Lastly, we intend to maintain our attractive and dependable dividend that has become an important component of our shareholder value proposition. We believe this balanced approach, combining growth, financial discipline and shareholder returns positions Nomad Foods to create substantial value over the coming years. And again, we will not only drive this as management, but also as incentivize shareholders who have invested meaningfully over the last 12 months or so. With that, let me pass it back to Dominic for closing remarks.

As you've heard today, Nomad Foods is a company with exceptional assets, strong category tailwinds and a significantly larger opportunity set than we've historically pursued. We have leading brands, an unmatched position in Frozen Food across Europe, a world-class supply chain and categories that continue to benefit from powerful consumer trends around convenience, value, quality, taste and nutrition. Over the past year, we've taken a hard look at ourselves. We identified what needed to change, and we have acted decisively. We strengthened the leadership team, simplified the organization, aligned incentives with shareholders, improved execution and removed practices and constraints that were holding the business back.

But today's message is not about what we've fixed. It's about what we can become. We're expanding our addressable market, broadening the categories, channels and geographies in which we compete and leveraging our scale and capabilities more fully than ever before. Our ambition is clear: to be the Captain of Frozen, not simply through our scale, but through superior execution, innovation and category leadership. The journey has already begun. The inflection is underway, momentum is building, and we have a clear path to sustainable growth, expanding profitability and increasing free cash flow. We believe the value creation opportunity ahead of us is substantial. We're invested alongside our shareholders. We're confident in our strategy, and we are committed to delivering on our targets. We hope you'll join us on the journey. Thank you. And with that, we'll now take your questions.

Great. Thanks for doing all this. Maybe 2 things. First, for '27, you're looking for organic sales growth in a 0% to 2% range. Category outlook still 2% to 3%. So maybe still implies some share losses or some also conservatism. But where are those share losses now most acute? Is it a narrower range of areas where those share losses are happening? And how do you address those? That's a start.

So there are certain share losses which have occurred in certain markets, usually in very, very specific categories. So for example, if you take the more innovative formats of chicken in the U.K., the chicken shop format, for example, that's been growing very significantly. If you look at the traditional format of chicken in the U.K., that's been under more pressure. And that's one of the reasons why we're bringing in so many new formats during the course of this year. So that's coming through. However, what I would say is, though, that we've deliberately approached the guidance for next year in a way that we consider to be quite sensible and quite prudent.

Bear in mind that this is a company which lost market share year after year after year. We're now assuming essentially from '28 onwards, that we hold share in both value and volume. But some of these initiatives will take a little bit of time to come through, particularly because we're being very disciplined in terms of what we launch when and the level of support that we're putting behind them. So that's roughly where we are.

Great. And then on supply chain, 63% utilization that's moving higher with some of the 2 plant closures. You mentioned -- and I realize there's a lot of white space opportunity. So you've got the capacity to get after that and hopefully a pretty profitable way. But that still seems pretty low. I was wondering if there were other potential opportunities around asset rationalization even with the growth opportunities that you see going forward? Or is it -- because that just still seems like there's more opportunity there?

So the whole issue of our factory footprint is something that we're looking at very closely all the time. I think in the past year or so, we've shown a greater willingness to close factories than may have been the case before. But actually, whether we have the right factory footprint is something that we always assess. So we'll continue to assess that.

Yes. And just building on that, we're going to drive that hard. By the way, from 63% to 70%, if you look at a step up, that's quite a big step-up, and it's exactly what Eduardo shared. We're going to in-source more that is already on the way. We announced two factory closures in the last 12 months. Also, when people ask the question, what is different from the past, I think in the new leadership, we have become a bit more decisive and we're going to continue looking at factory network optimization. So there are a couple of things. And if we see opportunity to do more, we'll do so.

Great. Thank you. So when you think about the growth aspirations between now and '29. Is there a way to conceptualize how much growth you expect to get out of the existing footprint today versus how much growth is coming from those adjacencies and portfolio expansions?

So it's worth saying that the new portfolio adjacencies and expansions, they have the potential to give us very significant growth. But actually, even if they don't, and we manage our core business successfully, then we're still in fairly good shape as far as our guidance and aspirations go. Now if some of them do significantly better than that. So for example, if we launch pizza, and it gains some of the -- some of the early results, which have been achieved in certain markets where we've launched and then replicated in other markets, then that could also have a significant impact.

But actually, the things we're launching, we're doing in a very disciplined, coherent way. Coherent in terms of where we're launching and how we're launching them as well. And it's also worth saying a lot of them are simply lifting and shifting concepts, which have worked well in one market and putting them in another market. So that's how we're looking at it.

Okay. If I could follow up, perhaps for lack of a better word, one of the maybe more controversial expansions is the hard discounter especially with a private label partnership mentality. Can you talk a little bit more about the puts and takes, pros and cons as you assess that opportunity? And why investors should not look at that as a slippery slope with...

No. Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm glad you raised that. So whether one likes hard discounters or not. They're very big in Europe, and they'll continue to be very big. The biggest retailer in Europe is a hard discounter. Now there are two ways that one can approach hard discounters. And it's true that different companies have had different strategies and different ways of looking at it. One of them is either to pretend they don't exist or sort of hope that they will somehow collapse or we can ignore them and they'll go away.

And by the way, quite a lot of companies have taken that approach. The other one is to accept their existence, accept the fact that many consumers want to be there, but to manage them in a very thoughtful way. And the way they require to be managed is somewhat different to the way a normal traditional European retailer requires being managed.

Now there are two aspects to that and two aspects of what we want to do with hard discounters. One of them is to make sure that the distribution of our branded products, before we think about anything about private label, the distribution of our brand products is where they should be for the position that those hard discounters are within markets where we already operate.

Now as you know, most hard discount stores in Europe tend to have slightly smaller formats than traditional supermarkets would have. And so there's a requirement for a higher level of rotation per SKU than you'd have, say, in a Tesco or Carrefour. But the first step is to make sure that we work with those hard discounters so that we can provide the empirical evidence that it's very much in their interest to list our big SKUs. And there are many markets where we have quite big share where we have a pretty meaningless position with hard discounters now. So any -- and of course, if you're a consumer who shops in one of those hard discounters, you're unlikely to change simply because they don't have a Birds Eye or Findus or Iglo product.

So any new distribution there is an upside that requires management and it requires careful thought about how to get that. So that's one aspect of it. The other one is private label. And on private label, I think the point you made about the slippery slope is absolutely correct. Because if one manages private label in a thoughtless way, it can give a little boost 1 year and then a lot of trouble in the following year and following years. And we've seen numerous food companies fall into that trap.

In terms of the way we manage that, it's entirely different. So A, we would only ever be interested in long-term contracts. B, we would only ever be interested in long-term contracts wherein having those contracts, we significantly strengthened our relationship with the retailer with whom we have that contract; and C, it would have to result in a better position for our branded food business.

So instead of being a sort of a mechanism that you use very tactically to fill a factory, that's absolutely not what we would do. And actually, I would -- by the way, I personally sign off every private label contract, and I would personally not sign off something that did that. But if there's something which strengthens our relationship with a retailer, puts our branded position in a better situation, then we absolutely would consider doing that for the long term. And that's the difference. And by the way, increasingly in Europe, a lot of the smarter branded food companies are starting to play in that way as well. but it's very different from simply filling a factory in a year and then losing it in another year.

And maybe just building on that, so Dominic is absolutely right. I don't want you -- no one to walk away that this is the strategy, and we're not going for private label contracts because you've seen what we're going to do on pizza, we've seen what we're going to do on potatoes, food service, all of that. The other point I want to add what Dominic just mentioned, and it's a bit of losing our modesty. We actually did in-depth benchmarking on some of our cost base. So one of the elements also to have more sustainable long contracts with private labels to make sure you're competitive. We are the biggest fish buyer in retail by far.

We have the biggest fish factory by far. Also in terms of debt, we were earlier than private label to invest our R&D capabilities in alternatives PCs like pangasius. So if you actually do it in depth cost benchmark. And then you look at the utilization, where you expect the incremental cash dollars needed is not that much. That sets us actually up well to have a more sustainable kind of business.

Scott Marks, Jefferies. First thing I wanted to ask about, you highlighted today some of the price pack architecture initiatives you have in place going from one mainstream tier to multiple price points. Wondering if you can give us a little bit more color on that? What drove that realization for you? And how comfortable are you today with the capabilities that you have versus how much do you think you need to add to be able to hit all the different brands and products that you want to do that for?

No. Thanks, Scott. And so in terms of the capabilities that we have to launch the things to hit the right price points, I'm absolutely confident and absolutely comfortable. I think we're in extremely good shape there. What's different now versus how we looked at things before is we had effectively one mainstream price tier, which as you have shown in various times during the presentation, was often priced at an enormous premium versus the private label competition. Now we will always be at a premium versus private label.

That's why we're here. We're a branded goods company, and we deserve to charge a premium, both from the quality of our products and the strength of our brands. So that will always be the case. However, we did find that in certain products, particularly when some of the species in fish got really expensive like [ Cod ], it just got to the point where it was out of reach for some of the consumers and some of the families who wanted to buy the product. So because of the strength of our supply chain, because of the fact that we have a much deeper knowledge of fish and much better ability to procure fish than pretty well any of our competitors anywhere, including outside Europe, by the way.

This has given us the ability to launch different price tiers and to do it in a different way. And interestingly, pangasius, we spoke about quite a lot today. In terms of product quality, the pangasius we buy is an outstandingly good product. It's very white, very flaky very mild taste because the fishing practices we use are different to the fishing practices other people use where it can sometimes in competitive brands have a slightly muddy taste.

So by adopting this approach, A, we're making sure we manage the elasticities in a very thoughtful and coherent way. B, we're giving consumers a very decent product. And C, we're doing things that other competitors, whether they're private label or branded, would have great difficulty doing because they lack our scale. So that's the approach that we're taking.

Appreciate the thoughts there. Second question for me. You spoke today about a lot of changes that have happened at this firm, change in leadership, change in accountability, changing how you're running the business. Wondering if you can talk a bit to the culture internally. What is employee morale like? What has turnover been like? What has general environment been like? Because a lot of change can sometimes rub people who have been there the wrong way. So just curious, what are things like internally and how are folks reacting to all these changes?

Absolutely. So I mean the first thing to say is change is never easy for a decent-sized company like ours. But it was also very clear to us as a leadership team I think, to the external world and to the most thoughtful people internally within Nomad that carrying on the way we were was the road to hell. So it wasn't going to work the business wasn't performing. So actually, there really was a burning platform of things that needed to be altered and things that needed to be delivered. That's not to say the process of change has been comfortable for everybody because, of course, there have had to have been exits from the business, there have been changes in structures.

Some organizations, which were enormous. We suddenly -- we made much more lean. And so creating a level of uncertainty can always create some difficulties. I think what's good is when we look at the kind of senior positions, by which I mean the people you've met today, but also people in the next couple of levels below that. A very large number or in some cases, all the changes in that area have been made which allows the organization instead of wondering what comes next to focus on doing the job of succeeding in the market.

And we're seeing that reflected in the comments that we're getting from our teams, the level of engagement, and their views of the strategy that we're undertaking.

The final point I'd make on that, nobody wants to be part of a losing team. And so you might like your salary, you might like your colleagues. But actually, if you're losing day after day, week after week in the market, that's not a very fun place to be. We spent a lot of time with the kind of top 80 leadership within the business. We had a whole week with them talking them through what our strategy is. And it's been incredibly well received and I think has created a very high level of excitement. So it hasn't been straightforward, but I think we're exactly where I would want us to be at this point.

Peter Saleh, U.S. Bank BTIG. Thanks for all the detail today, very helpful. Two, maybe one clarification and a question. Is it fair to say that success in the adjacencies is not baked into your organic growth guidance going forward?

And then my question would be, the COGS savings is pretty substantial, EUR 180 million to EUR 200 million over the next 3 years. Yet there's going to be a lot of investment, I guess, in multiple SKUs and different channels and markets. So just trying to gauge your confidence in getting to that number given some of the investments that may be offsetting some of these savings.

Yes. So I think what you see in overall, and maybe it's a bit of balance we tried to achieve with this presentation and to hope that has come across, we see a lot of opportunities. We see a lot of opportunity in the market. We see, indeed, the opportunity in adjacencies. We also see the opportunities in these new territories. All of that will not happen immediately simultaneously. So there is a bit of a phasing. The other thing we need to be cognizant of is that we will be taking pricing in quarter 4. And although we're quite confident on that, we've seen private label taking price quite a bit in fish, there will be an elasticity.

So although there is kind of growth in adjacencies and we will tackle, you've seen here on stage our pizza, and it's actually a pity we couldn't bring our products into the U.S. But if you would taste the pangasius, 1 or 2 of you have tasted it, I think there's a lot in the pipeline there. But we want to make sure we also in our guidance have sufficient buffer for things we don't foresee and for the elasticity. So I think that's #1.

The second question was on how we're all going to fund this, right? Do you want to answer that? Or you want me?

No, I'm very happy to answer it. So the absolute level of money that we spend behind our brands, so see more or less advertising and promotion, is about 4% of net revenue. For a business of this size, that's quite a healthy amount. In fact, if you compare that to some equivalent businesses in the U.S., it's a very healthy amount. So we think the absolute spend that we're putting behind our brands is about right.

What wasn't right historically was that a lot of the spend was put behind things that consumers never see. So quite large amounts of money on advertising agencies, management consultants, internal projects, initiatives that don't necessarily affect consumer behavior in any immediate way. The second factor of that was that a lot of it was spent on very traditional media. So it was a sort of model: brief an agency, have a TV commercial, do it again.

And so there are 2 things that we've done since then. First of all, we've made sure that the percentage of working versus non-working A&P has been corrected. So now vastly more of what we spend, the consumers see, and the consumers have a touch point behind it. Secondly, we use modern media and the most advanced approaches with our consumers, completely different to what was the case before. And by doing things in that way, that allows us to make sure we're super efficient and that we have real cut-through in terms of the support we're giving behind our brands.

The other point I would make, though, on top of that is winning in some of these frozen categories isn't always just a game of how much you spend. There have been a number of -- particularly in pizza, a number of very insurgent European pizza companies that had a decent product with nice packaging and not much else, which went from nothing to quite high market share very quickly. So not all the frozen categories are categories where you need to spend tons of money, but you do need to be nimble with a good product and quick. I think the new Nomad is nimble, does have good products, and is quick, which gives me a reasonable level of confidence in these areas.

Keith Rosenbloom from Cruiser Capital. I think we all appreciate you guys providing us with a recipe for a life well fed. So thank you.

A couple of questions. You touched on the management incentive program that was effectively put in place where the 2 of your stock purchases get leveraged above certain prices. Can you just clarify what that is? That's the first question.

And the second question is going back to the $200 million of savings. I think there -- can you just give us -- you gave us adjusted free cash flow numbers. You gave us a commentary that you'd be able to buy back or you generate enough of 40% of your market cap in free cash flow over the next 3 years. Can you help us with the adjusted EBITDA numbers that correlate to that? I mean, we should be able to back into it, right? It's 90% free cash flow, you've told us. Just if we're saving $200 million over a course of 1.5 years or 2 years from where adjusted EBITDA was last year, what is adjusted EBITDA? What are those ranges in '26 and '27? You've given us all the components of it. Just can you tell us what you're guiding off of?

Do you want -- shall I do the first one, you do the second one? Would that be helpful?

Yes.

So in terms of the incentive scheme, so as we said, Ruben and I put significant amounts of our own wealth into this company behind this option scheme. By the way, there's -- you can get all the details. It's all publicly available. It's all online. So you can -- if you want all the specific details, you can find them.

The key point to make is below $16, we get absolutely nothing. So until we get to $16, there's no benefit from the scheme for Ruben and I. It gets more exciting at $17.50 and $20, and it gets very exciting indeed at $25. But below $16, there's not $0.01. And that's the main point. But again, all the information is publicly available, and we're happy to provide it to you.

Do you want to handle that one?

Yes. And just to build on -- and even at $16, look, as Dominic said. It actually starts to count really above $20 if you look at the multiples also in terms of potential dilution. Yes. And look, and then I think that would be a good problem to have, right, dilution impact if we're at $20 or when we're at $20, let's see.

Now to your point on the saving and adjusted EBITDA, I think this is an important topic. And we -- in the break, I got some questions on where is your operational leverage, you're giving a kind of top line and not to the kind of bottom line. And maybe start with that and then come how savings link to it. We need to be cognizant that in '22, '23, this company went for short-term profit. And by the way, with hindsight, everyone has knowledge. So -- and there were more companies that did that. But by doing so, we lost penetration. We lost consumers. We lost market share.

So what we're now saying is we want to be competitive in terms of pricing. Also the question of Stephen in terms of where are you seeing the market share recovery. We're seeing market share recovery in fish, where over years, we have been losing share. Are we there yet? No. But if you talk about inflection point, and that's because we are really looking, a, at these corridors; and b, kind of in our cost benchmarking, right, which links to the savings agenda. So we're quite cognizant that we need to make sure we balance profit with long-term penetration and market share position.

Now when we then would get leverage, we want to use that in our factories. We have around 60% utilization. That gives us more leverage, which we want to reinvest into the business and you get a flywheel going. That's one. Secondly, to get that leverage, we don't need to invest additional major step-up in capital expenditure. The asset base is there. The factories are there. We have the utilization, which is not where we want it to be.

Thirdly, we're going to reduce our adjusted kind of cash items and P&L items. So our reported P&L will go up faster and our cash will go up faster. And fourthly, let me also be clear and also a shareholder, we're not a philanthropic organization. So if we see room to let more to the bottom line, we'll do it. But I think this is an important point for us. We want to make sure we regain the competitiveness and get that flywheel going.

And this also links to your question on the savings. The savings are a means to have competitive pricing. And we had savings in the past, right? So Eduardo said, we had EUR 150 million, EUR 180 million. So it's a step up. By the way, other organizations are also doing savings. But we actually, I think, in the last year, didn't go for all the savings opportunities in the links because we're a buy-and-build company, a lot of M&A. We're now getting the synergies, closing factories. There's in-sourcing. There was a lot of autonomy for local teams to go to local co-packer. Well, the democracy stops a bit, and that's why we're able in 60 days to get meals. So it's not only a savings agenda, it's also an agility agenda. But back to the point, so we want to use those savings to deliver the bottom line. It's not on top. Does that make sense?

This is Will at CJS. Can you just add some more color maybe to the incentive changes you've made at the general manager level in recent quarters and how those are flowing through the business?

Yes, absolutely. So when I joined Nomad as CEO, I spent a lot of time in my first couple of months, traveling literally to every country, going around with key account managers on their visits to the stores and trying to understand how the really important frontline, particularly frontline salespeople were perceiving the business and what was going on. And there was one comment that really stuck with me, which was in Sweden, a key account manager in Sweden said to me, look, Dominic, I'd be better off encouraging my colleague in the U.K. who manages Tesco to do a good job because this person has a bigger influence on my bonus than I do.

Because, of course, Tesco is a very big account and the accounts he was managing in Sweden were quite small, so it didn't necessarily change the needle dramatically at group level. So there was a disconnect between personal action and personal accountability and how much money you get paid for the job you've done and for the job that the team that you're part of has done. As a result of that, we've now had a -- we've now developed a scheme where far more of the bonus is dependent on individual market performance. So if you work in Sweden, and Sweden does really well, you can get a great bonus. If your colleague in Norway does a terrible job and his team does a terrible job, they'll get no bonus.

And so that's the difference we're making. It's not hugely complex, but it puts individual and team responsibility at the core of things rather than a very nebulous idea of what the group does as a whole, which if you're a frontline salesperson, it's very hard to predict or have a big influence on anyway. So that's the change we made.

One financial question and a market question. As you delever, will the required debt that you will pay down increase your cost of debt or lower it? I mean, which tranche are you required to pay down first?

Yes, it's a good question. So 70% of our debt is fixed. The part which is not fixed is the euro part related to our term loan. So that's the debt we can only deleverage. And that is floating, so we have to look what the Euribor will do, but that's around 5.5%.

Okay. And then just going back to the big discounter question. Can you just give us an example of what you would see at a local Tesco on the market that's yours in a similar category versus the SKU that you might see at a discounter? I mean would you utilize the lower-priced fish, you're good versus your better and your best? I mean, how are you going to go to market but not confuse the consumer with this?

So there are 2 routes to that. So one of them is there are certain SKUs, which are so big and so significant that if a discounter doesn't have them listed, they miss out. So for example, peas in the U.K., spinach in Germany. These are branded products, which are so enormous that actually even if someone has a kind of principled objection to branded products, it's very hard to make a business case work without those being listed. And in those cases, those will be the same as are listed in mainstream retailers.

Now the second approach because, of course, hard discounters are inherently more price-driven than a mainstream discount -- a mainstream supermarket, sorry, like Tesco would be. And in approaching those, there are different ways to do it. So one of them is with price tiering, which we spoke about already. Of course, you could do price tiering across multiple categories in the way that we gave the example of fish, but the example of fish is a good one. The other one is in pack-price architecture. So for example, having bigger packs, sometimes much bigger than is available in a standard retailer, but available at a discount. And sometimes it's in a completely different format as well. So those are the -- those are the 3 avenues that one would normally pursue.

But one of the things we're doing in the conversations with the hard discounters now is to make sure that they're fully aware of the SKUs that they really ought to be listing and they're not listing. And as we said before, in some markets, we're in quite good shape. In some markets, we're in very poor shape with these hard discounters.

I'm sorry to keep -- but would it be dramatically lower in price on same SKU, same product than the local -- than your local existing large market share client?

Only if the discounter themselves chose to use their own money to put it at a dramatically lower price. We would certainly not sell -- so a big, large existing SKU in a market, we would certainly not be selling that to a hard discounter at a better price than we will be selling to a major retailer because, of course, as you point out, then the whole house of cards can come crashing down. And in any conversation we have, we're always acutely conscious of exactly what we're selling to each supermarket and at what price because there's a whole architecture around that, which needs to be preserved.

Okay. Well, on that, thank you for your interest. We're going to now wrap up the webcast and close that down, and we're going to close down this formal Q&A session. However, our leadership team, Dominic, Ruben and the rest of his team are going to remain available here for the next 30 minutes or so. So if you want to mingle and grab them and have a conversation, I fully encourage you to do so. Thank you so much.

Ladies and gentlemen, greetings, and welcome to the Nomad Foods Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Q&A Session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Jason English, Head of Corporate Strategy and Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thanks, Max. Hello, and welcome to Nomad Foods Second Quarter 2026 Earnings question-and-answer session. We've posted the associated press release, prepared remarks and investor presentation on Nomad Foods website at nomadfoods.com. I hope you all had a chance to review them.

I'm Jason English, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, and I'm joined by Dominic Brisby, our CEO; and Ruben Baldew, our CFO.

During this call, we will make forward-looking statements about performance that are based on our view of the company's prospects, expectations and intentions at this time. Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties, which are discussed in our press release, our filings with the SEC and our investor presentation, which includes cautionary language.

We will also discuss non-IFRS financial measures during the call today. These non-IFRS financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with IFRS results. Users can find the IFRS to non-IFRS reconciliations within our earnings release and in the appendices at the end of the slide presentation available on our website.

Please note that certain financial information within this presentation represents adjusted figures. All adjusted figures have been adjusted primarily for, when applicable, share-based payment expenses, related employer payroll taxes, exceptional items, foreign currency translation charges or gains and hedge ineffectiveness. Unless otherwise noted, comments from here will refer to those adjusted numbers.

With that, Matt, let's open the line to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Andrew Lazar with Barclays.

Maybe to start, Dominic, I guess, as you think through the back part of the year and the cadence of how you expect sort of market share to unfold because I guess that's the one area where as you note in your prepared remarks that some of the disruptions and whatnot in the first half led market share not to be where you wanted despite the category obviously accelerating nicely.

So I guess, is it unreasonable to expect market share to be more neutral by year-end? Or is there something else that would prevent this now that much of the retail disruption is behind you, competitors are also sort of starting to take price. I'm really just trying to get a sense of whether there is something more structural regarding the ability to hold or gain share as you go forward.

So Andrew, thanks for the question. So the retail disruptions were a meaningful headwind to our share in the quarter. And we certainly expect our performance to improve in the second half. As you pointed out, those disruptions are now behind us. And we're also encouraged to see the recent pricing actions of private label. That said, we still have more work to do to improve our competitiveness. We're making significant progress.

We expect to deliver better sales and market share performance in the third and fourth quarter, but it's probably going to take more time to get back to market share neutrality. I don't, however, see any reason that we cannot get there over time. In fact, we've developed what we think are very compelling plans that are designed to achieve just that. And we're looking forward to sharing those plans with you at our Analyst Day in October.

Got it. And then what sort of elasticity are you seeing thus far on your sort of more recent pricing actions? And just how do those compare relative to maybe historical levels?

So it's a little early to talk about where price elasticity is. Of course, in most cases, private label have only just increased prices, although we are starting to see quite meaningful price increases coming through. For example, in the U.K., certain retailers increasing 20% or 30% mid-July, Carrefour increasing on certain SKUs in France by 32%. In Germany, Aldi, Edeka and Rewe all raised prices by about 20% in most of the fish categories. However, we're still analyzing what the real sell-out data is. So at this point, it's a little too early to draw any meaningful conclusion.

But it sounds like you're being at least, correct me if I'm wrong, prudent with respect to elasticity assumptions in the way that you sort of guided to for the full year around organic sales.

Thank you.

Our next question is from Steve Powers with Deutsche Bank.

Going back to the retailer disruptions in Germany and France. I guess in the prepared remarks, you talked about them as being behind you being resolved as you did in response to Andrew's question, but then you also used language that alluded to like largely resolved. So I guess the question is just can you be a little bit more specific on exactly where we are today versus full resolution? And if not fully resolved, how much allowance that you've made for carryover disruption in the third quarter and second half?

So I think with the exception of certain tiny retailers and tiny markets, these are fully resolved. So certainly, in the case of Germany and France, we're now in good shape. So I think you can consider these as resolved.

Okay. Very good. Maybe you could also just talk a little bit about the ongoing productivity work that is going on within the business. As I think about the early earnings bridge into '27, I guess, I'm trying to get a sense of the biggest contributors to profit growth. And just, I guess, the ability of you to drive incremental productivity as part of that bridge, just how you're thinking about that and how your plans are evolving on that front?

No. Thanks, Steve. It's a good question. And let me also make the link to the question Andrew just made. So we are on track with our EUR 200 million productivity program. Also, if you look what we post in terms of our nonrecurring spend, you see, by the way, that, that has gone down. But what we are spending, we're spending on programs linked to productivity. We announced a restructuring in some of our marketing function.

You have seen that in quarter 2, we announced a factory closure. So we are moving ahead, and it is in line with the planning. And I think the other point to make is also linked to the elasticity is we're not pricing as much as what we used to do like '22, '23. We're using our productivity program to have competitive pricing to make sure that our price index doesn't go up further. We actually have seen our price index going down a bit, and that is because of that productivity program. So I think the overall message is we will continue to drive it, and it is on track, and we'll use it to be competitive in terms of pricing, and we're seeing the first results of that in the market.

Our next question is from Scott Marks with Jefferies.

First thing I wanted to ask about, in the prepared remarks, you called out some of the things that helped support your margin expansion in the quarter, and you actually spoke to some, I think, one-time benefits or phasing benefits that might reverse that later this year. So wondering if you can help us understand maybe what those are, what the magnitude is? And how should we think about timing for those to reverse?

Yes. I think -- thanks, Scott. I think the main message is you see a return to gross margin growth. That is driven by pricing kicking in. That's what we also said after our quarter 1 results. So that's fully going to plan. That's it. There's a bit of phasing. So we see a couple of million of phasing in our phasing of A&P and overheads, and we had a bit of variances on some technical stuff related to variances to your recipes, which is also EUR 1 million or EUR 2 million. But overall, I think the gross margin improvement is coming through to pricing, and there's nothing of a phasing effect there.

Okay. Understood. Appreciate the thoughts there. And then regarding the pricing actions, I think there were some comments in the prepared remarks about your team feeling confident in being able to take incremental pricing as we get to Q4 and into next year, just given what competitors have been doing, what you're seeing on the inflationary front. So just wondering if you can help us understand maybe have you started having those conversations yet? And if so, what's been the response from retailers?

Yes. So we have started having those conversations. And of course, it's worth saying that most of the inflation that we're seeing, so hence, most of the pricing is centered around fish. As I pointed out, we've started to see private label increase already over the past few weeks in a number of countries. And we've used some of this opportunity to allow our own price index to go down slightly. So the price increases we're talking about are cost-justified price increases. And so we feel fairly confident in our ability to take these successfully towards the end of this year.

Understood. And then maybe if I could just sneak in one more just on capital allocation. You noted a suspension of share buybacks to pay down debt. What leverage ratio do you believe is appropriate in the current environment? And do you have a time line to get there?

Yes. So we're not putting out a leverage ratio. As Dominic said also, when you go look ahead of the next years, we'll come back with our Analyst and Investor Day, which will be this fall. So allow me not to answer that fully. But I just want to be clear also what we made in our prepared remarks that we haven't done buybacks in the last quarter. We continue to do the dividends. We just announced that again, and we made it clear that we now will focus on deleveraging also to bring the interest payments and the interest cost down.

Our next question is from Jon Tanwanteng with CJS Securities.

I was wondering if you could go a little bit more into detail on your market share expectations. I think you said it might take a while to get back to neutral in terms of market share. I was wondering when you -- if you have any more specificity on when you expect to get there? Is it Q1 of next year? And is it in your plan at some point to start retaking market share and have growth above market?

So it's absolutely in our plan ultimately to start taking market share. We also -- and we'll be talking through those plans as we come to our Analyst and Investor Day in October. But as I said before, whilst we're making good progress and we certainly expect to be able to deliver better share performance in the third and fourth quarter, it's going to take a little more time to get back to market share neutrality. Of course, that's against the backdrop of very strong category growth as well.

So it is also worth pointing out that if you look at the category, the frozen category in our markets year-to-date, it's up 3.4% in value terms and up 1.6% in volume terms. Even in the last 3 months, by the way, up 2.8% in value and 1.1% in volume. So once we do get to that point that we're holding share or indeed growing share, it can have a significant impact. What we're not doing today is giving clarity about when that will be.

Okay. Fair enough. And then I was wondering if you could talk about any potential impacts from things like weather or other external issues like water shortages and how that might be impacting supply or demand in the current quarter, if that's anything more than you normally see.

I think Dominic just said it that the last 3 months, we've seen actually the category roughly in line where it is year-to-date. I think 3.4% versus maybe now the last 3 months, 2.8%. So it has come down a bit, but I wouldn't say it's a big difference. So that is one category remains strong. Second point is water shortages, we're not seeing that directly. We're having the harvest now. It's to be seen what that will mean. And again, I need to also come back to the point. The additional inflation we're seeing this year is some fish. If you also look at our cost of goods, a big part is there is related to proteins, which is basically chicken and fish, and that is less related to kind of water shortages.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Peter Saleh with BTIG.

Great. Dominic, I wanted to ask, you've been in the seat for a couple of quarters now progressing through this turnaround. What, if anything, has surprised you as you progressed? And maybe how has your thinking changed on the turnaround over the past couple of quarters? Anything you can share would be helpful.

Yes, happy to. I think a couple of things which I was aware of before, but have really been clear over the past couple of quarters. Firstly, the robust health of the category is in. So the fact that the category is in very decent levels of both value and volume growth. I think I was aware of it to some extent before I came, but actually, the fact that this has continued through all the geopolitical uncertainty that we had, the consumer uncertainty we've had and so on, that's been something which has been a very positive thing, which has come through.

Secondly, of course, during this time, I've had the chance to get to know the brands well. I've always known the brand as the consumer, but getting to see the real data behind the brand, the strength of the brand equity versus our competitor brands versus our private label brands has also been a very positive. So essentially, we're in a very strong category, and we have the best brands in the category. So those things are great.

It's also been clear to me though that within Nomad, to make ourselves a much more competitive company and a much more successful company, there have been significant changes which have had to come through. And you'll have seen, particularly in terms of the changes I've made to the leadership team and the executive team of the business. There was a need to bring in some very strong new talent whilst keeping the existing very strong talent that we had. And that's meant making a number of quite significant changes to the top of the organization. And that will also have corresponding changes to the culture that we bring about in the organization. But overall, I've been pretty happy with what I've seen, great category, the best brands in the category and now starting to get the organization to where we need to get to, so we can be really competitive in the market in a way that perhaps we haven't been so much historically.

Yes. And then just -- my second question, the retail disruptions appear to be behind you. You've implemented some more price. You've changed some of the leadership. I guess, over the next couple of quarters, what's the next area of focus for you? Is it more around innovation, the marketing side? Just help us understand where you'll be focusing your attention over the next 6 months or so.

So we've now produced what we think is a pretty compelling value creation plan for Nomad for the following years. And that includes really every aspect of the business from innovation to how we manage our marketing approach, how we drive our sales organizations across the business, how we improve our productivity and so on. As you can imagine, there's been an enormous amount of very, very intense work that we've put into this over the past 6 months.

And I think we've got to a point where we consider the plan we've got is a very good one, a plan that we're excited about and makes us quite excited about the future of the business. And that's what we're going to be presenting when we have our Analyst Day in October. But this will cover really every aspect of the business. So it's not the fact that we've had some things to cover for the moment, then we're going to cover others. This will cover the entire spectrum of what we're doing, and we hope that you'll be as excited about it as we are.

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to Dominic Brisby for closing comments.

Thank you all for joining us today and for your interest in Nomad Foods. I look forward to speaking with many of you in the days and weeks ahead and then seeing many of you at our Analyst Day this October.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Hello, and welcome to the prerecorded discussion of Nomad Foods Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Results. We have posted the accompanying press release and investor presentation on Nomad Foods website at nomadfoods.com. I'm Jason English, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, and I'm joined by Dominic Brisby, our CEO; and Ruben Baldew, our CFO. In addition to these remarks, we'll host an analyst Q&A-only session today at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. A replay of this webcast and our subsequent Q&A session will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website.

These prepared remarks will include forward-looking statements that are based on our view of the company's prospects, expectations and intentions at this time. Actual results may differ due to the risks and uncertainties, which are discussed in our press release, our filings with the SEC and in our investor presentation, which includes cautionary language. We will also discuss non-IFRS financial measures during the call today. These non-IFRS financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with IFRS results.

Users can find IFRS to non-IFRS reconciliations within our earnings release and in the appendices at the end of the slide presentation available on our website. Please note that certain financial information within this presentation represents adjusted figures. All adjusted figures have been adjusted primarily for, when applicable, share-based payment expenses and related employer payroll taxes, exceptional items, foreign currency translation charges or gains and hedge ineffectiveness. Unless otherwise noted, comments from here on will refer to these adjusted numbers. With that, I'll hand it over to Dominic.

Thank you, Jason, and good morning, everyone. As we preannounced last month, I am pleased with our second quarter results, which came in modestly ahead of our expectations. The quarter was an important one for Nomad Foods. We made meaningful progress on our operational priorities, resolved key commercial disruptions, strengthened our leadership team and continued to benefit from the attractive fundamentals of the frozen food category.

Let me highlight 4 key takeaways from the quarter. First, we successfully executed our pricing and productivity initiatives. Our recently implemented price increases drove a positive inflection in price/mix, contributing 3% to organic revenue growth during the quarter. At the same time, our productivity programs continued to offset a significant portion of input cost inflation as we advance towards our EUR 200 million 3-year cost savings target. Together, these actions contributed to a 110 basis point improvement in adjusted gross margin, demonstrating our ability to protect profitability while continuing to invest in the business.

Second, we resolved the retailer disputes that weighed on our performance earlier this year. As we discussed last quarter, these disruptions created a significant headwind to both revenue and earnings, resulting in out-of-stocks and reduced promotional activity across key customers for much of the quarter. Importantly, those issues were largely behind us by quarter end. Shelves have been replenished, promotional plans are being restored, and we have already begun to see improvements in market share trends. We expect that recovery to continue through the second half of the year.

Third, we continue to strengthen our organization and position the company for future success. During the quarter, we finalized the appointments in the executive team with half of my direct leadership team now new to the organization. They bring fresh perspectives, deep industry expertise and a shared commitment to building a high-performance culture focused on growth, execution and accountability. We also completed the restructuring of our marketing organization. As I noted previously, the function has become overly complex and inefficient. We have streamlined the organization, reducing nonworking A&P spend and shifted greater accountability closer to local markets. This will allow us to deploy more resources directly behind consumers, brands and growth opportunities.

Finally, we continue to benefit from strong category growth across Europe. Frozen food remains exceptionally well positioned as consumers increasingly value convenience, affordability, nutrition and great taste. Retail value sales for our category increased 2.9% during the most recent 12-week period with volume growth of 1.2%, while year-to-date value growth reached 3.4% and volume growth 1.6%. Growth has been broad-based across both categories and geographies. Frozen fish and vegetables are growing roughly 3% year-to-date across our footprint, while meals and poultry have grown approximately 7% and pizza 5%. Geographically, savory frozen food sales are growing across our major markets, including the U.K., Italy and Germany.

Simply put, we operate in an attractive and growing category, supported by some of the strongest frozen food brands in Europe. That said, we are not performing at our full potential. As shown on Slide 5, our value and volume share declined 90 and 75 basis points, respectively, during the most recent 12-week period, while retail value sell-out decreased 3.2%. Much of this underperformance was driven by the commercial disruptions in Germany and France that we discussed previously. Those disruptions are now largely resolved, but we still have more work to do to achieve the growth potential we believe our brands and categories can deliver.

While 2026 has been a year of rebuilding our foundation, we are already taking actions to improve competitiveness and accelerate growth. We are increasing investments in both renovation and innovation across our portfolio. For example, we have upgraded the coating on our fish fingers across multiple markets to deliver our crunchiest product ever. Consumer research consistently shows that crunchiness is a key driver of preference and testing indicates the renovated product significantly outperforms our previous offering. This is exactly the type of superiority-led renovation that strengthens brand equity while providing compelling news to take to consumers.

We also have a robust pipeline of innovation launching across Europe, including high-protein spinach products in Germany, expanded chicken offerings in the U.K., new seafood and meal innovations across multiple markets, further development of our ice cream portfolio and continued expansion of our pizza portfolio into additional countries. The specific products are important. More importantly, they reflect a broader shift towards innovation, stronger consumer relevance and a more growth-oriented mindset across the organization. As you can see, significant work is underway to improve our end market performance and unlock the full potential of our business.

At the same time, over the past several months, we have developed a comprehensive multiyear value creation plan. Nomad Foods possesses a unique combination of assets: iconic brands, a scaled pan-European supply chain, deep customer relationships and increasingly strong commercial capabilities. These are tremendous competitive advantages operating within a category with attractive long-term growth fundamentals. Our opportunity now is to fully leverage those strengths. We see meaningful opportunity to drive growth across categories, channels, geographies and consumers, and we have a clear plan to capture them. I look forward to sharing that plan and much more at our Analyst and Investor Day in New York this fall. With that, let me turn the call over to Ruben to review our second quarter results and outlook in greater detail. Ruben?

Thank you, Dominic, and good morning, everyone. Second quarter results show that pricing and productivity are working. Retail disruptions are normalizing and cash generation remains strong. Turning to Slide 6 and 7. Organic revenue declined 2.9% in the quarter, broadly in line with retail sellout trends. As expected, the inventory destocking and quarter end order timing impacts that affected first quarter results have now largely normalized.

Volume declined 5.9%, primarily reflecting the retailer disruptions we discussed previously. Importantly, we believe those headwinds are now largely behind us. Shelves have been replenished, promotional activity is resuming, and we expect the impact on volume trends to moderate as we move through the second half. Price/mix contributed 3% to growth during the quarter, reflecting the successful implementation of our planned price increases and a modestly favorable mix. Moving down to P&L. Gross margin increased 110 basis points, marking a return to year-on-year expansion. Pricing and productivity more than offset inflation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our cost management programs, while there was also some phasing benefits that will reverse later this year. Year-to-date productivity initiatives have offset more than 60% of inflation, keeping us firmly on track towards our EUR 200 million savings target.

Importantly, our approach to pricing today is very different from what it was during the peak inflation period. In 2022 and '23, we priced ahead of inflation to protect margin. This year, our aggregate pricing remains below inflation with productivity funding the difference. We believe this approach strikes a better balance between protecting profitability and maintaining competitiveness in the marketplace. While we continue to expect some near-term elasticity pressure following recent pricing actions, we remain encouraged by the competitive response we've seen thus far.

Turning to SG&A. Advertising and promotion spending was essentially unchanged year-on-year, while indirect expenses increased by just over EUR 8 million. Most of that increase reflects the normalization of incentive compensation. As a reminder, during the second quarter of last year, bonus accruals were reversed, making compensation a source of income in the period and creating a difficult year-on-year comparison this year. Excluding the bonus impact, overhead expenses were approximately flat versus prior year as productivity savings largely offset inflation and targeted reinvestment while we also saw a timing benefit. Adjusted EBITDA declined 4.3% in the quarter. Please note that the bonus normalization represented a headwind of more than 7% to adjusted EBITDA across both COGS and SG&A. Adjusted EPS was EUR 0.39, down EUR 0.01 versus the prior year period.

Turning to cash flow on Slide 8. Our adjusted free cash flow conversion ratio improved to 49% in the first half of the year compared to 43% in the prior year period. Our strong cash generation supported EUR 20 million of dividend payments during the quarter, bringing year-to-date dividends paid to EUR 41 million. As announced, our Board has also declared a quarterly dividend of $0.17 per share payable on August 27. During the quarter, we suspended share repurchases and shifted our capital allocation priority towards reducing net debt and leverage. While our balance sheet remains healthy and our leverage is well within our comfort range, we believe a lower leverage profile will enhance our financial flexibility, broaden our potential investor base and reduce interest expense over time.

In July, we further strengthened our capital structure by refinancing EUR 800 million of notes through the issuance of new long-term dated debt. The transaction was leverage neutral and allowed us to extend our maturity profile while also increasing the size of our revolver credit facility. We now have no meaningful debt due until 2032. Turning to Slide 9 and our '26 outlook. We continue to expect full year results to be in line with the guidance we provided last quarter. Specifically, we continue to expect organic revenue to decline between 2% and 5% and constant currency adjusted EBITDA to decline between 5% and 10%.

While our year-to-date performance has been encouraging, we remain mindful of the uncertainty associated with consumer elasticity following our recent pricing actions. We have begun to see competitors respond to our pricing, which is consistent with historical patterns. Although this is good news, it remains too early to determine the ultimate impact of those responses on volumes and market dynamics. In addition, while our inflation outlook remains in the mid-single-digit range, we expect inflation to finish towards the higher end of that range. Most of the increase is expected in the fourth quarter, where our hedge coverage was lower entering the year. We will address this inflation through pricing, and we are confident that we will be able to secure any incremental pricing that we may need to take while remain competitive.

As I noted earlier, we are pricing through much less of the inflation and relying more heavily on our robust productivity program. We intend to continue that approach in '27 and beyond. This is allowing us to better manage our relative price premium. In the recent weeks, we have seen competition taking additional pricing actions in the market, and this gives us further confidence to also take additional pricing actions starting by the end of this year. However, given the timing of these actions, we expect the main benefit of that will come through in 2027.

And we're not only focused on price, but also the quality of the price-value spectrum. We are in a better position than in '23 from this perspective as well. Our product superiority was approximately 40% in 2023 and it's now closer to 60% and our innovation moved from approximately 4% of net sales in '23 to 6% this year. Turning to adjusted EPS. We have updated our outlook to reflect the impact of our recent refinancing transaction and higher variable rates. We now expect adjusted EPS to be in the range of EUR 1.38 to EUR 1.53 compared to our prior range of EUR 1.47 to EUR 1.62. This revision is entirely attributable to higher interest expense and does not reflect any change in our operating outlook.

Over time, we expect to offset much of this impact through continued debt reduction and lower leverage. In closing, we are encouraged by our first half performance and the progress we are making across the business. We have strengthened our foundation, improved execution and begun to shift our focus towards accelerating commercial performance. With leading brands, favorable category dynamics, significant productivity opportunities and a clear value creation agenda, we remain confident in our ability to unlock substantial long-term value for shareholders. We look forward to sharing more of that at our Analyst and Investor Day this fall.

Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Happy to welcome back Nomad Foods. So at least one new face. Chief Executive Officer, Dominic Brisby, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having us.

As well as welcome back, Ruben Baldew, Chief Financial Officer.

Thank you.

Thank you, guys. Let's dive in. I guess you have now been CEO for almost 6 months or you've been with the company for almost 6 months as well. I guess let's just start very high level with kind of first -- not so first impressions, but big takeaways at this point and big priorities that you've set for the company.

So I mean, the first impressions are, when you look at Nomad, what you have is a company which operates in a category which has many things going for it.

So the categories have been in growth year after year after year by 2% or 3% first quarter of this year, by the way, by 3.8%. So the category is in very good health. If you look at the brands, our brands in frozen are significantly stronger than any of our competitors when you look at the brand equity.

We're also of a significantly bigger size than our competitors. And so there's an awful lot that's good about the company, and there's an awful lot to love about the company. However, it's also clear to say that Nomad has absolutely not performed in line with its potential. So everything I've been working on with Ruben and with the rest of the team is to get it back to its full potential.

And there have been a few areas which I've been focusing on since I joined. The first is to get a very strong team in place. And so you'll be aware that I've made a number of changes to the executive team, particularly in the commercial areas. So 3 new regional presidents, who have a much stronger, much more aggressive commercial stance than probably was the case before.

If you look at the marketing capability of Nomad previously, a lot of the campaigns were a slightly old-fashioned in their media, but also lacking certain cut-through in their execution. So I brought in a very high-caliber new Chief Marketing Officer.

Interestingly, he was previously CMO of Publicis, but also who's a genuine expert on AI who's come into the business. So strengthening the team has been very important. Secondly, making sure that we're looking at the business in the right way. And that means changing certain things quite quickly, which had happened previously, certain bad behaviors which needed to be eradicated.

So for example, putting stock into the market at the quarter end. That's something which is extremely unhelpful from a commercial point of view. But it takes a bit of pain to get out of it. We chose to take the pain in Q1 this year. So we've chosen to eradicate those bad behaviors and clean up the mess related to them, which, of course, had an impact, but it puts us in a much better shape going forward.

And then making sure that we have a plan for the coming years, which we'll be presenting in our Investor Day in New York City in October about how we can grow our business to a much greater extent than has been the case before. Of course, we're in a category which is already in growth, which is not that common in our sector right now, but the category is very healthy. But Nomad has been losing share within that category.

And turning that around means having the right innovation -- it means going into the right new geographies. If you look at Nomad, we're strong kind of in Germany and everywhere to the west of Germany and to the south of Germany, but not much to the East. Making sure we have the right retailer partnerships. This has been something where Nomad has been quite weak historically.

And then finally, making sure that we drive the right culture. Now the Nomad culture has been a very friendly culture, very collaborative and very inclusive. So there are good things about it. What it hasn't been is a culture that's really driven performance. And now this is not something which I want to claim will change overnight because it won't.

There's an awful lot of work to do on this, but we've made big steps on this. And when I look at where I hoped to be in the changes we're making in Nomad in the middle of this year, we're more or less exactly where I hoped we would be. And certainly, as we go into the remainder of the year, we're very confident in terms of what we'll deliver.

Got it. Great. On the team aspect, on the team changeovers you made, are you done? Or do you have more work to do to round out your leadership?

So at the kind of executive team level, so among my direct reports, we're done or largely done. There'll be -- I mean, so we've announced the existence of a new Regional President for Central Europe. That person will be announced during the course of this month and will start in July. There'll be a new Chief People Officer starting in October.

But then at the top level, those changes will be done. Of course, we're working out how to get the best talent and the best structures further down the organization, but at the top level, we're done.

Great. So I guess, what are the milestones to watch for between now and Investor Day and year-end? And you obviously have fiscal '26 guidance in place. But what does success look like exiting '26? Like what are your mile markers?

So as we exit '26, there are very clear things that we need to have done. We need the right people in the right jobs, doing the right things. We need to have made meaningful inroads in terms of changing the culture. We need a very solid and coherent ambitious multiyear plan, which is what we'll be presenting at the end of this year. We need to reset some of the retailer relationships, and we can talk a bit more about that, if that's helpful.

We need to have eradicated all the bad behaviors and cleaned up the bad behaviors, which is in the case -- in the example I gave is largely done. And as a result of that, we need to enter the new year gaining a level of -- a significant level of top and bottom line growth. And of course, in the meantime, the other thing which we need to do is Nomad is a business which has historically shown a remarkable ability to disappoint, and we want to delight not disappoint in the meantime. So that's also something which is very important and which we'll be focusing on.

Yes. Okay. So maybe in that context, I'll put a pin in the retailer because I do want to come back to that. But Ruben, on -- there's been a lot of questions post 1Q just on the timing dynamics through the year, sell-in versus sell-out dynamics and the disconnects there.

Maybe just ground us in what we should expect through the year in terms of normalization of those trends just so that we don't have unintentional disappointments.

No, I fully, fully understand the question. So maybe take a step back and it links to what Dominic was just saying. If you look at Nomad, maybe at the end of '23 over '24, there were the sales incentives at the end of the quarter and actually increasing stock levels of trade.

And last year, you've seen that we actually started to destock. That's also clearly no victory lap because we need to improve our competitiveness. But last year, our sell-out was flat. Our sell-in was minus 2%. And the difference of that majority was destocking. Now what Dominic just said in quarter 1 is the quarter where we actually stopped those sales incentives.

And what you then see in quarter 1, in December '25, there was still a bit of ordering of retailers ahead of price increase. So you have then the dip in January. In March, we didn't do sales incentives. So you have that dip. So the quarter 1 is where we took our medicine. So a big part of that decline we saw minus 5.3% was of that.

Again, sellout in quarter 1 and [indiscernible] lapse was flat. There's a bit of phasing in there. But underlying, we're taking our medicine. We also had a bit of a retaliation because actually, we said, look, in this negotiation, we want to also send a signal to the retail that we're holding our back and we're taking the pricing seriously, and we want that to come through. That's now behind us.

So in the first weeks of May, all the pricing has now landed. Orders are fully back from retailers. Then if I can combine that question a little bit what to watch for in the remaining of the year. So quarter 1, we took our medicine. We stopped the kind of retaliation. We stopped the sales incentive.

In quarter 2, you see that coming now back fully from the first week of May. Then in quarter 3, what you will then see is pricing fully coming through. You remember last year, we had a bit of a disappointing out-of-home ice cream, a bit of weather, a bit of unrest. So on mix, you should see an improvement. So that will also, therefore, help kind of a step-up in absolute profit.

Good. Yes. Okay. And on the -- I mean, the other big question in the here and now, I think, is the pricing that you've put in place relative to consumer demand and concerns about volume, concerns about share loss, concerns about private label reaction in the market. How are you -- what's your base case? And what have you seen so far to hopefully validate that base case?

Yes. Before we go to that, I want to make one point quite clear and also with new leadership of Dominic and with hindsight, everyone has knowledge. But if you look how Nomad priced in '22, '23, you can actually see that our gross profit per kilogram went up after inflation.

So with Heinz, you could say we overpriced. We've seen always private label following. It can be time like 3 months, 6 months, 7 months, but they didn't follow to the same extent because they didn't have to. And I want to be absolutely clear, now we will not overprice.

And this is also why we're so passionate around our savings program where, for example, in March, we announced that a lot of our marketing where we saw duplication, we see savings opportunities there. You might have seen as a post balance sheet event that we announced the closure of a factory.

So we're passionate in terms of driving savings in order not to overprice. Now it's too early to see when private label follow. We see now our price in the first weeks of May coming through to retailers. It's then at their discretion to increase pricing. We do think that the inflation we're seeing and the pricing we're taking is generic inflation.

So it will hit private label at least to the same extent. It's a bit too early to see when that will come. But I also want to make clear that in terms of our guidance, we've taken kind of sufficient buffer to cope with that.

Okay. Very good. Very good. Dominic, let's go back to retailer relationships and evolving them from, I think, what has been more of a transaction relationship to now one where you're looking to, I think, for lack of a better word, become more partners with those retailers, joint business planning, more ingrained with retailer strategy. I guess how does that play out from an execution standpoint?

What are you doing to make that evolution? And where is it going to show up in terms of in-market change that's going to benefit the brands?

Yes. So like -- I mean, like any relationship, if one only looks at it from one own perspective, it may not end well. And I think talking to retailers, and I've been spending an awful lot of my time going around speaking to different retailers across Europe. One of the consistent pieces of feedback I'm getting is that historically, Nomad would come to the retailer looking at things very much from their point of view, I need to increase prices, I need to launch this brand, but wouldn't necessarily look at things from the retailer's point of view.

And of course, in that transactional relationship, when things are tough or when things really need to develop together, you're not going to be the first person the retailer comes to. And so what -- and by the way, this isn't going to happen overnight. But what we're now saying to retailers is we want to work with them to grow the category together with them, but also to bring innovation and excitement to the category.

If you look at the frozen food aisle in Europe, it's not that different to how it was when I was a kid. It's many similar products, even the merchandising is not that sophisticated. If you look at it in the U.S., if you go to a Walmart or particularly through a Trader Joe's or someone like this, it's a genuinely exciting place to go shopping. It's got wonderful innovation, wonderful different types of products.

And so we need to work with the retailer to make the category more exciting to help them grow the category, but also where they have other objectives, whether it's ESG objectives or other objectives to help them achieve those. Now once we do that with retailers, and this has worked very well in the previous company I was in as well.

Once we do that with retailers, then, a, things start from a position much more of trust than of transaction. Secondly, we have the depth of insight that we can really use to help them grow things. And thirdly, nobody really can do this except us in terms of frozen because we're the absolute undisputed leader in frozen in Europe. And when we started raising this with retailers that we're very keen to work with them on this, we found we're really pushing against an open door. So there's a great thirst for retailers to have the expertise of Nomad to help drive this and to help behave in a different way. And this will certainly help the retailer, but it will certainly help Nomad at the same time.

Yes. Is it -- where are the gaps to get there? Is it getting the right information to have that conversation with the retailer? Is it the ability to execute on the innovation that is demanded by that information? What -- where are the gaps?

So it starts with a deep understanding of what the retailer actually wants. So how they see the role of the frozen category within their business. Secondly, using the benefit of our data, which is probably second to none within this category and our deep consumer insights, which we certainly have in Nomad to help see where there can be scope for cooperation.

Thirdly, being willing not to take a one-size-fits-all approach. Now of course, a very small retailer, we might need to do that. But where there's a very significant retailer, either very significant in one country or very significant across Europe, we have to have the willingness, which we now do, to invest in both people and teams support at the point of sale, making sure that we may give them exclusivity in certain products for periods of time and to move that relationship forward in that way. So making sure that we hit Nomad's objectives, but also making sure we're very clear about what the retailers' objectives are and how we carry them out.

Yes. It sounds like you have the capabilities. You just need to build the trust and understanding with the retailers to be able to enact plans that have a benefit for both of you.

So we certainly have the data. We certainly have the insight. I think we're now bringing in people who have deep capabilities. So for example, Simon Ball is running the U.K. business now. He spent his entire career in food. He spent a big chunk of his career as a retailer himself and has literally grown up with the retailers. So to have that level of depth of understanding, I think, will help us.

And it's interesting that the strength of retail varies somewhat within the Nomad markets. In the U.K., we've got a long way to go. In Germany, we've got a long way to go. So we're making sure we put particular investments in those areas.

Got it. On the marketing front, you mentioned some changes already from a personnel standpoint. There seems to be just a lot of simplification that you're trying to achieve in marketing. Maybe walk us through what you're changing. And I guess, what does better marketing look like for Nomad?

Yes, quite right. So if you look at where Nomad has come from in marketing, Nomad has a good set of cards to play. So if you look at brand equity, if you look at awareness, if you look at the level of household penetration, we're way, way above in the frozen categories, any of our branded competitors. However, it's also the case that Nomad has taken a pretty old-fashioned approach to marketing, a lot of TV commercials rather than doing things properly on digital via influencers.

And actually, if you look at the communication, I spent a lot of time when I was looking at this job myself, looking at the quality of the communication. And I came to view that if I was not personally very interested in Nomad Foods, it's likely I would have not remembered a great deal of it. And so there clearly needed to be changed.

Now there was also added to that the fact that there have been enormous numbers of people in marketing across Nomad with very dissipated authority and trying to focus on numerous different brands at the same time. So all people with good intentions working hard and trying to do the best. But what it meant is that the budgets were split, dissipated among enormous numbers of places instead of focusing on the things that really make the difference.

Now if you look at our A&P as a percentage of net revenue, it's about 4%, which is -- it's not a dramatically high number, but it's a perfectly reasonable number for a business of this type. However, then when I came and looked beneath the surface of this, about 40% of this was spent on what we call nonworking A&P.

So sort of research projects, management consultants, agencies, all of this kind of thing. So one of the first steps has been to reduce that nonworking A&P, put it towards working. The next step is to make sure that we have real cut through in what we're doing. We're using the right media to target the right consumers effectively.

And concurrently with that, we've also heavily reduced the total number of employees in marketing. mainly because we want people to be forced to focus on the things that matter and be forced to defocus on the things that don't matter.

So almost 50% in the past kind of month or so, almost 50% of the people who were working in marketing, we've now exited the business. That's also helped as a cost-saving measure, but the greater measure is it will force us to be focused.

Yes. What about when you dug into the marketing and you looked at it by geography, by brand, is the spending proportional? Or is that also work that has to be done?

No. So that's also been reallocated, and we've taken immediate steps to reallocate that this year, so we get more bang for our buck.

Now as we go into next year, one of the things we're focusing on, which won't come -- and obviously, we'll talk about at our Invest Day, but it won't come as a surprise. We're looking at how we can expand our total addressable market, which are the categories which really need big support which are the categories which might be lower margin and need less support.

And also, the other thing which I'm very keen on is you'd expect Nomad as an international food company or even any kind of international consumer goods company that we'd have a fairly similar portfolio from market to market and a fairly similar set of brand propositions, and we don't.

So if you look at the U.K., we cover most spaces in terms of frozen food. If you look at Germany, almost 90% of the business is fish and vegetables. But people in Germany also eat chicken and they also eat pizzas. So before we need to -- before we start doing anything really clever, there's also the ability just to lift and shift existing successful products and brand concepts that we've got from one market to another.

Yes. To some extent, that's been talked about before. It's not a new concept for Nomad, but it hasn't maybe happened at the pace that it could have. What have been the constraints and how quickly do you think you can actually make good on that, those things?

So I'm certain we can make good on it quickly. And you'll see for me and my team, a force of well in doing that. There have, however, been some constraints in terms of how Nomad's operated. I mean one of them, which I've spoken about previously is the sort of presentation of Nomad as a kind of health food company.

Now I should also stress that that's not completely wrong. So I think we're very fortunate in Nomad that particularly when we're looking at some of these big consumer trends, about 70% of our net sales comes from lean protein and vegetables.

And as we look at the impact of GLP-1, as we look at the fact people need to eat more protein, that's a very good position to be in. However, even if you eat a lot of protein and vegetables every day, it may still be that on Friday night, you'd like to have a slice of pizza.

And when we're selling pizza, it needs to be pizza that taste good and people don't tend to eat pizza because of its health benefits. So we're very happy to be selling very healthy products, and we think it's a great source of competitive advantage. But within that, we also see room for indulgence and for people to have the occasional treat within that. And so we're kind of unshackling the business in terms of some of our guidelines there.

Is there a now versus future state health versus indulgence split of the portfolio that you see? And how big is that expanded addressable market if you were to make it on it?

Well, so my view is it's our job to give the consumers what they want rather than to tell them what they ought to eat. And I consider we have a right to play in every frozen category, certainly in every savory frozen category, ice cream, you may question, but certainly in every savory frozen category. So where the business is now and where we anticipate it will be, you'll see us pushing into more categories than we are in now and doing that in a fairly ambitious way.

Okay. Is there a -- from a just ramping up, if you were to put pizza in Germany, at what point do you have to build capacity in Germany or find partners in Germany to produce? Or can you ship and you have enough capacity in other places to supply?

I think it's one of the things with Nomad is we're not short of -- one thing we're not short of is capacity because if you look at the business over the past few years, volumes have gone down. The number of factories have stayed fairly similar. And so actually, we have a very good amount of capacity in all the categories where we operate. So that's not an issue.

And one thing that we've -- I mean, literally from this year, been rather more forceful on is the willingness to close factories where they're not operating at capacity. And still, if you look at the size of our business and the number of factories we have, certainly, Ruben and I and the Chief Supply Chain Officer see further scope for efficiencies there.

Okay. And to the extent that it grows, it obviously almost helps pay for itself because your fixed cost utilization goes. Very good.

Ruben, kind of on topic of margins, can we talk a little bit about the cost inflation outlook that you're seeing and how it's evolving given dynamics in the Middle East and direct and indirect impacts of that. I guess what is your latest cost outlook and how that impacts maybe to some extent, the second half, but then also how it impacts how you're plotting for '27?

Yes. So cost outlook is mid-single digit. That was -- at the start of the year, we said around mid-single digit. Maybe that's gone up by 1% or so, but we're still around that mid-single digit.

Also I want to be clear, a couple of things. One is where we are now, we're 80% to 90% covered. So if anything, if it hits us, it's kind of second half quarter 4. So it's not a -- we got it covered for this year. The other point I would say is -- if you look at our cost base and especially if you look at raw materials and packaging, a lot of our cost base is actually protein fish.

And Alaska Pollock comes from the ocean between Russia and U.S., nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz. So I'm not saying there's 0 impact, but actually, what we're seeing on our commodities, proteins, fish, also harvest-related crop, it's not a big impact for this year. And where we are seeing inflation, it's more on fish. And then to the point, we will make sure we drive cost savings.

We'll make sure that we also have alternatives like we see opportunities to do savings projects potentially on our fish that we won't price more than private label. And honestly, I think, Steve, for 2027, it's just too early because the scenarios on how long this conflict will go through, how it relates to our bill of material, again, a lot of our spend is actually in things outside things relate to the Strait of Hormuz, it's just too early to tell.

But I guess, I mean, I would -- I don't -- to the extent that costs do build in snowball, it doesn't strike me that you -- any of your exposure would necessarily put you at a disadvantage relative to your company, if anything, maybe the opposite.

Exactly because there's also -- where we see currently a bit of more inflation is on fish, and we actually think we might be hit less than private label because we know some of the private label sourced from a different kind of supply base where energy is actually more impacted, and we might have a bit of coverage on the dollar exchange rate.

So we'll keep a close eye on what we're seeing in private label, but we should not have more inflation than private label.

Okay. Cash discipline, not new to Nomad.

Not at all.

And strong free cash flow conversion has been a hallmark. I guess as we're thinking through the transition of this year and the growth initiatives that Dominic has conceptualized for the future, I guess how are we thinking about cash generation?

I guess, what should we anchor on as just the drivers of free cash flow durability, both to fund shareholder returns, but also fund these growth initiatives?

Yes. So as you said, this company has had a good cash delivery, good cash conversion. We have a guidance out there for 90%, which we're driving hard, and we're committed to. So that's one. If you look underlying on some of those drivers, we're happy with the progress on working capital.

We see improvement also what Dominic just said on the basics in place, better commercial teams in terms of forecasting and how that helps on inventory. But I think the big driver, and it's also something we said at the end of last year is outside the cash conversion, which is on adjusted profit. actually, we see a big opportunity to lower the cash expenditures related to nonrecurring.

And we used to spend almost EUR 80 million, 8-0 in nonrecurring, and we said we can half that. And maybe this year, it's not exactly half, might be going down from EUR 80 million to EUR 45 million. And we're delivering on that. So it's not only talk. If you look at our quarter 1 nonrecurring, it was EUR 9.9 million.

And actually, within that, because I'm quite passionate that we don't use that as a parking lot just to put expenses in, EUR 5.5 million, EUR 6 million was related to what Dominic just mentioned, this marketing organization where we saw duplication. That will give us a saving almost of more than EUR 11 million, but also leads to that speed of decision-making and all of that. So we see also going forward for next year, the opportunity to lower our nonrecurring, and we're happy with our cash delivery.

Okay. Are there -- we've talked in the past about different muscles that have been revenue growth management. Dominic referenced strong data foundation for consumer insights.

Are there investments that you need to be made, maybe not in the very immediate term, but that you see on the horizon in order to build capabilities where you think there's a tremendously unappreciated ROI or areas where you feel like you're just behind the curve?

So if you talk about investment like fits and all of that, actually, one of the drives why I said we can go down from a kind of EUR 80 million to EUR 40 million in nonrecurring is we're quite passionate that if we talk about transformation project, it's about processes first, data that follows after that and then systems.

And we want our own teams to run that instead of a team of consultants and external people. And we're executing on that. So I'll give you an example. In our finance processes, actually the team themselves are looking at invoices which are being processed touchless, where you lose -- AI is a big buzzword and you use technology like OCR and the invoices get recognized and it's touchless processing. That leads to savings.

But it's actually run by the local finance team, and they make those initiatives themselves. How we do journal entries. We have a CMO who has huge experience in terms of AI, how you mimic consumer cohort. And we don't think we need huge, huge investments on that base. We need our local teams, our own functional teams to be curious to use what we have there in terms of data and then use existing tools on AI, which are out there for not huge price tax.

Dominic, with the cash that's generated right now, it doesn't make sense for a lot of reasons to be focused on inorganic opportunities. But as you think of the 3- to 5-year outlook, how much of what you see on the table can be accomplished organically and versus rounding up the portfolio potentially with inorganic initiatives?

So, as you said, right now, until we prove ourselves, we're quite clear, we don't have the license for inorganic growth. And also, we're going to be highly disciplined on anything we do. And of course, while we're so cheap, are less cheap, it's not going to happen.

As we look to the future, of course, we're building up a plan. And we believe there's enormous scope to grow organically. But as we get valued higher and the business begins to perform and the market sees this, there are many opportunities that we could see. But right here right now, our focus is on running the business properly and delivering organic growth as we go forward.

Yes. Given that, I mean, the historical focus from an inorganic perspective of Nomad has been either bolting on adjacent geographies or bolting on adjacent categories within the existing geographies. Any reason to think differently than that in terms of when the time is right for that to be the focus of the company?

I mean I think those are the lowest risk forms of M&A, the forms of M&A, which are likely to have the most synergies. So the answer is probably not. However, once everyone can see what Nomad can do, I wouldn't take other things off the table either, but not in any immediate sense.

And in the near term, prioritization for excess cash, I would assume, is -- I mean, after reinvestments in these organic initiatives is to buy back the existing stock. I mean, other than the dividend?

So we have been doing buybacks. Last year, we did a bit of buybacks in quarter 1 because the stock is cheap. By the way, it's not only the company is buying stock, also Dominic and myself put money where our mouth is, and we bought shares ourselves. So that's always something we're going to look at, but we also have to be cognizant of the fact that the leverage was in quarter 1 around 3.9. So we're going to thoughtfully balance that with our leverage and make sure we're not overleveraged.

Okay. Remind me, do we have -- any maturities coming due? Or is the maturity schedule?

So we did a refinancing H2 last year on the term loan. So they are now refinanced, I would say, pretty good terms. Our bonds will come up for maturity in June 28. Now clearly, we're not going to wait like 6 or 12 months before. So we're looking at that.

That is a bond of EUR 800 million with a coupon of 2.5%. With the refinancing last year, we had a bit of excess liquidity. Our cash flow is pretty good. So we have to look, will it be a ticket size of EUR 800 million or potentially less. And we're looking at that, and we're not going to be penny-wise pun fully to try to save the last million of interest versus maybe missing the market.

Okay. I didn't mention this I didn't go here earlier, and maybe I should have it would have flowed better. But on the -- you've reaffirmed your EUR 200 million cost efficiency goals, and I think you've said those are on track. I guess, as you as you go further into the program and as you make additional changes, I mean, are there -- I guess, what are the biggest remaining cost pools within that program? And is there upside potential?

Yes. So look, if you look at the EUR 200 million, and again, we'll come back in autumn with a more extensive communication on our next 3 to 4 years program and the drives within that, including the savings project.

But if you look at what we communicated last time, EUR 200 million, within that overhead was 20 million to 35 million. We're on track. And I think we're more tracking towards kind of the higher end of the range than the lower end of the range. The remainder of that was clearly supply chain. And within that, you had EUR 100 million of procurement, and I think that's roughly equally phased. I think again, and it comes a bit back and you asked -- you had the question, okay, how do we avoid that not everyone has an opinion.

Well, what Dominic just said with the executive team, they are executive members. And we actually run the business with the 2 of us, 3 presidents in the region, CMO and supply chain. And there, we make the decision. So there, we're going to have a trade-off.

Look, we have an opportunity to do an harmonization of a coating project because we use different coatings because in the past, there was a lot of local initiatives that could generate X million of savings or with some potential fish inflation, we could do something with Pangasius and launch a snacking range.

By the way, you also make sure it's not a one-dimensional price discussion. You actually help the retailer. So we're going to drive all of that. So I think in that program, the procurement savings, we have been delivering. We will continue to deliver by making the right trade-offs in terms of price, value and quality. And then there's all the factory bid.

And what Dominic just said, if there's one thing we don't have an issue with is capacity. So we're looking at in-sourcing. We're looking at closing factories. This company has not been closing factories. Now in the last 12 months, we announced 2 closures. We'll look at more closures. Third bit is we're going to look at rightsizing the bigger ones.

And maybe the last bit, and that comes back to our strategy. There are certain channels like food service or maybe we go for branded hard discount a bit harder to make sure we fill factories because to your point, it's a fixed cost base we can leverage. And actually, by leveraging that, we become more competitive in our branded retail. So yes, we're going to do that.

Okay. Just a couple of minutes left. Then I want to go back to essentially culture and the changes you're trying to make. Nomad has been a business that's been through a lot. I mean, a lot of businesses have been through a lot in the last half a decade plus, but Nomad seems to have -- we've seen lots of change.

And what we're talking about now is a lot more change. How has the organization responded? What is the energy behind the changes? And how are you positioning the future directions to energize rather than alienate the employee base?

It's a very good point. And you're right. I mean, Nomad had plenty of change before I took over and it's had even more now. What we're seeing is, of course, in any organization where change takes place, that can be quite difficult. And it can be difficult on a personal level, particularly if there have been restructurings going on. And I think that's been no exception in Nomad.

The other thing is, and I said this publicly in Nomad the other day, there may be some very, very fine people and superb human beings who decide that being in a more aggressive, more commercially agile business may just not be for them.

And it's not a reflection of them as people, but that's an absolutely fine outcome. However, what we are seeing increasingly now is that as the team start to see the changes we're making, start to see the caliber of the people we're bringing in, start to pick up the first snippets of the strategy because, of course, we haven't either internally or externally publicly gone through it. They started to see that this is going to be a very exciting place to work.

And also that from a kind of personal value creation perspective, but also as a kind of exciting place to be, this is going to be a very fun journey for the next few years. And the one thing I would say is when you look at least in market share terms or if you look at it in household penetration terms or if you look at it in share price terms, Nomad hasn't been a winning team over the past few years.

And there's nothing more fun than being part of a winning team. So everything we're doing is to turn Nomad into a winning team. We're convinced that we will do. And actually, what we're seeing internally is that the right people are getting very excited about this and very energized by it.

Very good. So now we really have a couple of minutes left. Maybe it sounds like we're going to pick up a lot of these threads in October. But I guess what would you leave investors with as kind of the key to be continues to think about as they think about Nomad as an investment opportunity from here?

So it's pretty simple. So frozen food in Europe is a superb category, growing year after year, quarter after quarter by 2% or 3% a year, in fact, a bit more than that recently. Nomad has the best brands in the category by far. We have the best products in the category by far.

And yet Nomad has lost share over the past few years. Everything we're doing now is to regain and rebuild that market share. Even if you believe that we can only hold market share in this growing category, this still will be transformative for the share price. And if you believe, which I hope people will start to believe as we prove it that we can do more, this can be very, very exciting indeed. The measure of how exciting it is, is how much the insiders have invested.

And you can see its public knowledge, the 2 Chairman have invested, Nonexecutive directors have invested, Ruben has invested, I have invested. And to me, this is much more powerful than any narrative we can give. We're very excited about the future of Nomad. We believe it trades heavily below its intrinsic value, and we believe there's a lot of upside.

It's a perfect way to end it, and we're right on time. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Thanks.

Ladies and gentlemen, greetings, and welcome to the Nomad Foods First Quarter 2026 Earnings Q&A Session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Jason English, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Hello. Good morning, folks, and welcome to Nomad Foods First Quarter 2026 Earnings question-and-answer session. We've posted the associated press release, prepared remarks and investor presentation on Nomad Foods website at noomadfoods.com. I hope you've all had a chance to review them. I'm Jason English, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, and I'm joined by Dominic Brisby, our CEO; and Ruben Baldew, our CFO.

During this call, we will make forward-looking statements about performance that are based on our view of the company's prospects, expectations and intentions at this time. Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties, which are discussed in our press release, our filings with the SEC and in our investor presentation, which includes cautionary language. We will also discuss non-IFRS financial measures during this call today. These non-IFRS financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with IFRS results.

Users can find the IFRS to non-IFRS reconciliations within our earnings release and in the appendices at the end of the slide presentation available on our website. Please note that certain financial information within this presentation represents adjusted figures. All adjusted figures have been adjusted primarily for, when applicable, share-based payment expenses and related employer payroll taxes, exceptional items, foreign currency, translation charges, gains on hedges and hedge ineffectiveness. Unless otherwise noted, comments from here will refer to those adjusted numbers. With that, Ryan, back to you. Let's open the line to questions.

[Operator Instructions] We take the first question from the line of Scott Marks from Jefferies.

I wanted to start just to ask about the quarter itself. It seems like some of the disruption tied to price negotiations came in a little bit better than feared. I know you called out some strong growth in markets outside of U.K., France and Germany. So just wondering if you could help us understand to what you attribute the better performance? And how should we be thinking about that level of potential disruption for Q2 and beyond?

Thank you for the question. This is Dominic. So the quarter did come in slightly more better than we were expecting in terms of category growth. So it came in at 3.8%, which was stronger than we'd expected. And as a result of that, our top line performance was slightly better than we've been planning for and drove upside through the P&L. Going forward, we continue to anchor to a category growth of roughly 2%, which is consistent with what we saw last year.

We're encouraged by our strength year-to-date. But as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, some of that is likely due to various factors such as an earlier Easter this year, some A&P phasing and so on. And of course, the broader economic and consumer backdrop remains pretty dynamic. So we don't believe now is the right time to start embedding more optimistic planning assumptions.

If you look in terms of what's been happening with retailers, so we told you last quarter that we were planning for some disruptions as we implemented our price increases given that this is a fairly normal occurrence in many European markets. And those planning assumptions that we made ended up being prudent as we did experience some disruptions, primarily in France and Germany. And they weighed in on both our sell-in and more recently our sell-out performance.

Now a couple of retailers temporarily suspended orders for some of our products and canceled some promotions. And this resulted in some out of stocks when combined with low -- which when combined with low promotions negatively impacted our market share in March, which also continued through April, weighing on shipments in that month. And you also see that in Nielsen when the next batch of Nielsen data is released. The good news is that those issues are now behind us and were anticipated already in our full year guidance. We've now secured our planned pricing. Our shelves are being restocked, and we have robust promotional plans in all our markets for the remainder of the year.

Understood. I appreciate the context there. Maybe next one, you made a comment in your prepared remarks about previously operating with a more narrow portfolio focus, but now kind of removing some of those obstacles. Wondering if you can share a bit more context about this strategy and what exactly you mean by that?

So we'll be able to be much more expansive on precisely what that means and when -- when we have our Analyst and Investor Day in the fall. But to give you a rough view of where our thinking is heading, previously, Nomad had quite a strong focus on products which in one way or another could be described as healthy. And some of those worked very well.

However, we consider our ability is to be a real champion of frozen food. And of course, some frozen food is very healthy, but sometimes as part of a very good and very balanced diet, you may choose to have the occasional treat or the occasional product or brand that is less healthy. So we're going to give ourselves more flexibility in doing what is commercially successful rather than simply driving a health agenda. So we'll give you much more details of that later in the year.

Understood. And then maybe if I could just squeeze in one more. Obviously, there's been a lot of volatility, especially around energy costs and inflationary pressures tied to the Middle East conflict. Wondering if you can just help us understand how you see that impacting your business, whether for this year or beyond.

Yes. Very, very happy to. And you can imagine this is something we've been giving a lot of thought to and a lot of focus on. And really, when we're looking at the situation in the Middle East, we're looking at it through three lenses. So firstly, supply chain disruptions. Secondly, impact on consumer demand; and thirdly, cost inflation.

And if I may, I'll deal with those three topics in order. So first of all, supply chain disruption. So on that, we've seen no impact on our business. Our products are produced locally. And whilst our procurement is diverse geographically, none of it's been adversely affected by the Middle East situation at this point in time. If you look at it from the lens of consumer demand, so we're watching the situation very closely, but we have not yet seen any evidence of consumer demand for our categories being impacted.

In fact, as I said now, the growth has been rather greater than we were anticipating in both volume and in value growth. So this isn't a large area of concern for us going forward. Our categories deliver strongly on value for money, which has historically at least made us relatively insulated from economic volatility versus some other food companies. So as you can imagine, the focus and our focus is on the third point, which is cost inflation.

And as you know very well, the cost of fuel, the cost of fertilizers, the cost of resins have all moved higher. And the situation is very fluid. But as of today, our direct and indirect exposure to these costs is manageable, and we've got good coverage through most of 2026. As a result, our overall COGS inflation rate for this year has picked up by less than 1% and remains within our mid-single-digit outlook. However, we do expect to see that incremental inflation will start to roll through our P&L in the fourth quarter and into fiscal 2027 if current conditions carry on.

However, as we're demonstrating this year, we have the ability to pull various price levers and various revenue growth management levers to manage commodity cost inflation. We've also got a very robust productivity pipeline that will further generate substantial cost savings next year. So as a result, as we look at it at this point in time, although it's very fluid, we see it as an eminently manageable situation for Nomad.

We take the next question from the line of John Baumgartner from Mizuho Securities.

Maybe first off, thinking through the downside risks to 2026. I'm wondering if you can speak maybe first off to the expectations for the Adriatics here in Q2, Q3, given maybe some of the more local economic disruptions in that area? And then B, thinking about the U.K. and Europe more broadly, I'm curious, Ruben, I think during past periods of economic dislocation, we've actually seen that benefit frozen food demand.

And so I'm curious with your pricing in place now, where you're seeing price gaps, how are you thinking, generally speaking, about the competitive environment this year? Do you anticipate other branded competitors probably able to raise prices following you? Just broader thoughts on just consumer sensitive pricing here.

Ruben, do you want to do Adriatic and I'll do private label, would that work?

Yes, yes, sure. So in Adriatic, at this moment, we're not seeing macroeconomical or geopolitical issues hampering our business. The execution and results are fully in line with our plan. So that's, I think, one important point. The second point is also if you look at our full year guidance and a bit of step-up, we expect the step-up in H2 in terms of profitability to come.

And one of the elements is also in H2 and especially in quarter 3, we expect a positive margin mix because last year, the summer was slightly disappointing. Now we're not planning for an excellent summer, but all other things equal and normal, we do expect then that Adriatics can deliver value for us in quarter 3, thanks to an improved sell-out and sell-in of our out-of-home ice cream business.

And then if we look at your point on private label, so of course, it's early days and a lot of our price increases have only just hit shelves or just beginning to hit shelves. So in certain markets, we've begun to see private label move already. In others, we're still waiting to see what happens. But we've embedded the risk of delays in our guidance.

And the likelihood is actually, when you look at it in real depth is that the private label players are experiencing as much as, if not more cost inflation than we are. So for example, in fish, many private label producers source double frozen fish from China. And the cost of that has risen far more than it has for other sources of fish. So we do tend to believe it's a question of when and not if they will raise prices. So that's roughly how we're seeing things.

Okay. And then I'm curious, Dominic, as you dig deeper into the business, and I know you're making changes to marketing, and I think there's been some discussion as well about improving joint business plans and some of the point-of-sale engagement. I'm curious how retailers look at this category, frozen food right now? Because it feels that some of the retailers, they focus more on the fresh business.

When you think about frozen and engagement, I mean, to what extent are you seeing, I guess, the balance of benefits for you being multi-category exposure relative to certain categories that stand out where you can drill deeper. I guess how are you thinking about those joint business plans with retailers from here?

So it's still fairly early days. But in all the discussions that I've been having with retailers and that the team have been having with retailers, we're seeing a great thirst from them to work closer with us as the clear undisputed leader in frozen food in Europe to work with them how to grow the category and not how to grow the category, how to grow the category more.

I mean 3.8% category growth in the quarter is pretty impressive in itself. But one of the things that came across with Nomad historically was that the relations sometimes with retailers have been a little transactional, whereas what we really need to do is to work out with the retailers how to grow the business and how to grow the category with them. And interestingly, you'll have seen we've made certain new appointments. And we've consciously chosen people who are very good at that and who have a clear record of doing that.

So for example, in the U.K., and of course, the U.K., as you know, it's by far our biggest individual market. So the person we put in as President of the U.K., who's reporting directly to me, someone called Simon Ball, has spent pretty much his whole life in food in the U.K., but on both the manufacturer side and the retailer side. So he has a much deeper understanding of how retailers think what they want and how they operate versus what many people in that position would have.

So we're seeing great desire from retailers to work with us. I think a certain sense of positivity that we're very keen to work with them. And so the early indications are positive. And it's worth saying even without this, even without the full force of the Nomad muscle and the Nomad Intellect, which we're bringing in, the category is still growing by itself. So the retailers are pretty excited.

We take the next question from the line of John Tanwanteng from CJS Securities.

Nice job on the quarter. I was wondering if you could talk about trends in Q2 so far, what you're seeing from a consumer's perspective? And then on top of that, when would you expect your sell-in to start to track the sell-out and how that progresses through the year?

Yes. So maybe let me answer that. And maybe just first macro and it links to what Dominic just said on trends in the consumer. we see a category which is healthy year-to-date, 3.8% growth, also growth in volume, plus 1.5%. So that is strong. Clearly, as Dominic said, we're monitoring the situation in terms of potential uncertainty on inflation on what is happening geopolitically.

But at this moment, we don't have any data suggesting that the consumer would trade down or would lead to a decrease in the category in itself. So that's one point. Then if you zoom in a bit more specifically at our numbers, both sell-in and sell-out, as Dominic said, we have executed and implemented the price increase in line with our plan and in line with guidance. But as is normal in certain regions, we did see disruption. And that disruption will flow into quarter 2, specifically in the month of April.

But the good thing is we have now closed our negotiations. So from May, we now see the shipments fully back on. But that will weigh on the quarter for itself. That could be a couple of basis points. That's one. A bit minor overall, we see a bit of shipments in Easter, but it's not that big, it could be 0.5%. So those are a bit the trends for us specifically. And then the other big point, which we already said for the full year and also reflected in our guidance, we see generic inflation.

And as Dominic said, specifically, for example, in fish, we see quite a bit of inflation. So it's not a matter if private label will follow, but when. However, what we've seen in the past, there's often a bit of a time lag. Now our products will now with the price increase, the consumer prices will go up. That's clearly at the discretion of the retailer. We expect private label to follow, but there will be some time lag and that elasticity impact will weigh in quarter 2.

Got it. And I have a follow-up, if I could. I was wondering if you could talk maybe a little bit more about the risk in your supply chain from inflation and financial pressure. I understand that you secure a lot of your costs ahead of time. But I'm just wondering if you thought about yields or material financial constraints and how those might flow through and if there's a risk to your ability to secure supply even if you have contracts in place.

Yes. So look, we've looked clearly in depth at our contracts and which contracts have the ability to reopen. I think in our business, and you have to understand a lot of our commodity spend is linked to agricultural livestock, fish, which is much more linked to season than really linked to input costs. So we see a bit less of exposure there. I think the big point where not only us, but more companies are looking at, okay, what would be the indirect impact of this.

And that, again, as Dominic said, is not a big impact for '26, but how could this flow into '27 with the cost of fertilizers, with the cost of petrol and fuel with potential impact of labor inflation and how that will go into the cost price of our products into '27. And we're monitoring that, but I think it's just too early and too fluid to give an element of numbers there. we do expect it to be elevated versus what we're seeing in 2026.

Ryan, we think we lost you. You still there?

Am I audible, sir?

Yes. Now I hear you, yes.

[Operator Instructions] As there are no further questions from the participants, I now hand the conference over to Dominic Brisby for his closing comments.

Thank you all for joining us today and your interest in Nomad Foods. I look forward to speaking with many of you in the days and weeks ahead and then seeing many of you at our Analyst Day this fall. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference of Nomad Foods has now concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.

Hello, and welcome to the pre-recorded discussion of Nomad Foods First Quarter 2026 Earnings Results. We have posted the accompanying press release and investor presentation on Nomad Foods website at noomadfoods.com. I'm Jason English, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, and I'm joined by Dominic Brisby, our CEO; and Ruben Baldew, our CFO.

In addition to these remarks, we'll host an analyst Q&A session today at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. A replay of this webcast and our subsequent Q&A session will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website. These prepared remarks will include forward-looking statements that are based on our view of the company's prospects, expectations and intentions at this time. Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties which are discussed in our press release, our filings with the SEC, and in our investor presentation which includes cautionary language.

We'll also discuss non-IFRS financial measures during the call today. These non-IFRS financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with IFRS results. Users can find the IFRS to non-IFRS reconciliations within our earnings release and in the appendices at the end of the slide presentation available on our website.

Please note that certain financial information within this presentation represents adjusted figures. All adjusted figures have been adjusted primarily for, when applicable, share-based payment expenses and related employer payroll taxes, exceptional items, foreign currency translation charges or gains and hedge ineffectiveness. Unless otherwise noted, comments from here will refer to those adjusted numbers.

With that, I'll hand it over to Dominic.

Thank you, Jason, and hello, everyone. I'm happy to join you here today for my second quarterly earnings call as Nomad's new CEO. I'm eager to share what my team and I have accomplished since my start as CEO on January the 1st. But first, let's review the quarterly results. First quarter results were slightly above our internal expectations, and we remain confident in our ability to deliver on the full year organic sales and adjusted EBITDA guidance we provided last quarter. As we noted in this morning's press release, we now see a slightly higher range of adjusted EPS outcomes given our share repurchase activity in the quarter.

As previously discussed, two mechanical factors shaped first quarter results. First, some retailers built inventory in December ahead of our price increase, which created a headwind in early Q1. Second, we ended our historical practice of shipping ahead of consumption late in the quarter to better align sell-in with sell-out. Whilst this resulted in a sharp year-on-year decline in shipments at quarter end, we believe it is a healthier and more efficient operating model.

As a result of these dynamics, organic sales declined 5.3% in the quarter, while retail sellout was flat. We believe retail sellout is a better indicator of underlying demand. Pricing benefit was limited in Q1 due to the timing of our price increases. And when combined with ongoing cost inflation, this led to a lower gross margin compared to prior year and a 23% decline in our adjusted EBITDA. While clearly not where we want to be, these results were modestly better than we initially expected and leave us runway to demonstrate the earning power or momentum of the business as we move forward. As you can see on Slide 4, our overall category remains very strong at 3.8% this quarter. This is an acceleration from the 2% growth, we saw last quarter with a stronger growth driven by volume.

An early Easter likely inflated March volumes, but category growth was tracking at 3% before March. Our category remains very healthy. Turning to our performance, as you can see on Slide 5, we experienced a temporary market share setback this quarter with our value share contracting by 60 basis points year-on-year and our volume share falling 20 basis points. This was the result of select retailers pausing orders and promotions to pressure price negotiations.

Our initial guidance for the year had already contemplated the risk of disruption, but this has come as no surprise to us. Cost inflation remains real and industry-wide. We therefore, maintained our resolve to secure pricing consistent with our long-term track record. And I'm happy to say that we've now successfully secured the price increases assumed in our plans and therefore believe this temporary and anticipated disruption is now behind us.

Our end market performance has varied by market. We underperformed in Germany and France this quarter, due largely to price negotiation disruptions. And while the U.K. remains soft, trends improved meaningfully versus last year. Elsewhere, we saw low single-digit growth in Italy, Austria, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland, mid-single-digit growth in Serbia, high single-digit growth in Norway and mid-teens growth in Croatia.

I also want to highlight the strength of our cash generation. Adjusted free cash flow conversion increased year-on-year, reflecting our progress on cash discipline. This enabled us to repurchase EUR 24 million worth of shares, fund our dividend, currently yielding approximately 7% on an annualized basis, and still end the quarter with EUR 283 million of cash. The incremental share repurchase activity also enabled us to increase our EPS guidance for the year. Beyond the numbers, we are moving decisively to strengthen the company's foundation. During the quarter, I made significant changes to the leadership team and advanced key external hires. We announced two new Regional Presidents reporting directly to me, and earlier today, we announced our new Chief Marketing Officer. Later this summer, we intend to name a third regional President.

Once complete, half of my direct reports will be new to the organization, bringing fresh thinking and deep industry expertise. We have also begun restructuring our marketing organization, which have become overly complex and inefficient. By the end of summer, the marketing organization will be approximately half its prior size with greater accountability pushed into the local markets. This will reduce nonworking A&P and will allow us to reinvest more directly behind consumers and brands. Collectively, these actions are about simplifying the business, accelerating decision-making, and reallocating resources towards growth. They are also contributing to our ongoing progress against the EUR 200 million three-year cost efficiency goal that we announced last September. Over the past several months, we have conducted a deep assessment of our growth potential, and I'm increasingly excited by what we found.

We see various opportunities across channels, countries and segments for incremental growth. Nomad Foods has a strong pan-European footprint with a broad range of categories and capabilities. But in many of our markets our portfolio has remained very narrow, given a strong focus on our core. And there were similar constraints within our existing categories, where we held ourselves to exacting nutrition standards, even in categories like pizza, where consumers craved indulgence rather than health. We are removing some of these obstacles. It is liberating and will unlock new avenues for growth as Nomad begins its next chapter in its second decade as a public company. I'm eager to share all of this and more with you in detail at an Analyst and Investor Day in New York this fall.

I believe you will find our plans and potential compelling, and I believe you will agree that this growth potential is not being appreciated by the market today. We intend to change the perception that our business is declining over the long term, and plan to create meaningful shareholder value by delivering improved results in the quarters and years ahead. As a testament to my confidence, this past quarter, I purchased 377,000 shares of Nomad Foods in the open market, while Ruben bought 72,000, adding to the open market purchase he made last September. This was in addition to the 500,000 shares that each of our co-founders purchased during the quarter.

Also, as indicated earlier, we're implementing new incentive compensation plans. Our aim is to ensure that employees within our markets are rewarded for the results they can control. And at the executive level, we are incentivizing more share ownership to ensure alignment with shareholder interests and foster a culture of ownership. This has also allowed us to recruit top-tier talent. I'm eager to share more at our Analyst Day later this year. But for now, let me hand it to Ruben to take you through the quarterly results and outlook in more detail. Ruben?

Thank you, Dominic, and good morning, everyone. As Dominic mentioned, we delivered first quarter results that were modestly better than our expectations.

As you can see on Slide 6 and 7, our organic revenue declined by 5.3%, lagging retail sell-out that was flat year-on-year in the quarter. The difference between sell-in and sell-out was due to the two dynamics that Dominic discussed. First, an inventory destocking by some retailers in January. This followed the December buy-in ahead of our price increases. This impact was amplified by the price negotiation disruption at a select few retailers. Second, a realignment of order patterns at the end of the quarter. As we discussed in February, when we reported fiscal '25 results, this is the first quarter when we began to reduce end-of-quarter sales incentives to better align orders and shipments. This negatively impacted results this quarter but is not expected to have a material impact on quarterly results going forward.

Moving down the P&L. Our gross margin declined by 210 basis points this quarter, as we experienced only a partial benefit of a price increase while continuing to see meaningful cost pressure. We expect the cost pressure to continue, but both price and productivity are expected to have a more positive contribution to gross margin for the remainder of the year. The combination of the organic sales decline, gross margin compression and a modest A&P timing benefit as investment shifted from the first quarter to the second quarter led to an adjusted EBITDA decline of 23% year-on-year. Adjusted EPS was EUR 0.23, EUR 0.12 lower than the prior year.

Turning to cash flow on Slide 8, our adjusted free cash flow conversion ratio was 36% for the quarter, a healthy increase from the 24% conversion ratio in the first quarter of '25. Some of that was driven by different phasing of our interest payments. However, we are also seeing underlying improvements on working capital coming through. The improved conversion ratio allowed us to fund EUR 20 million of dividend payments, EUR 24 million of share buybacks, equating to 2.7 million shares while building to EUR 283 million of cash on our balance sheet. Our balance sheet and cash flow profile remain healthy, and as a reminder, we have no debt maturities until 2028.

And last week, we announced that our Board of Directors declared another cash dividend of $0.70 per share payable on May 28, 2026, to shareholders. Turning to our guidance for 2026 on Slide 9. We continue to expect to deliver organic sales and adjusted EBITDA results in line with the initial guidance we issued last quarter. As a reminder, we expect full year organic revenue to decline by 2% to 5%. Constant currency adjusted EBITDA to decline by 5% to 10%. We have increased our adjusted EPS guidance range to EUR 1.47 to EUR 1.62 from EUR 1.45 to EUR 1.60 due to the incremental share repurchase activity completed in the quarter. At recent exchange rates, our revised adjusted EPS guidance range for the full year translated into $1.72 to $1.90.

Turning to adjusted free cash flow. We continue to expect a conversion ratio of 90% or greater for the full year. We expect organic sales and adjusted EBITDA growth rate to be below our full year target in the second quarter, driven by the rephasing of A&P activities in quarter two and some residual impact from the price negotiation disruptions early in the quarter. This remains consistent with the expectations we had coming into the year. We look forward to delivering more robust results in the second half of the year.

And I now look forward to sharing our strategy plan and multiyear growth targets at our Analyst and Investor Day this fall. This remains a growth advantage business with great products, strong brands, and category tailwinds. We are excited to share our plans to harness this full potential and unlock meaningful value creation for our stakeholders. Thank you for your time.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to the Nomad Foods' Fourth Quarter of 2025 Q&A Conference Call. Please be aware that today's event is being recorded.

I'd now like to turn the floor over to your host, Jason English, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, and welcome to Nomad Foods' Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Question-and-answer Session. We have posted the associated press release, prepared remarks and investor presentation on Nomad Foods website at nomadfoods.com. I hope you've all had a chance to review that.

I'm Jason English, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy. I'm joined by Dominic Brisby, our CEO; and Ruben Baldew, our CFO.

During this call, we will make forward-looking statements about the performance that are based on our view of the company's prospects, expectations and intentions at this time. Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties, which are discussed in our press release, our filings with the SEC and our investor presentation, which includes cautionary language.

We will also discuss non-IFRS financial measures during the call today. These non-IFRS financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with IFRS results. Users can find the IFRS to non-IFRS reconciliations within our earnings release and in the appendices at the end of the slide presentation available on our website.

Please note that certain financial information within this presentation represents adjusted figures. All adjusted figures have been adjusted primarily for, when applicable, share-based payment expenses and related employer payroll taxes, exceptional items and foreign currency translation charges and/or gains. Unless otherwise noted, today's comments from here will refer to those adjusted numbers. There it is, the fun part is out of the way.

With that, operator, let's open the line to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Jon Tanwanteng from CJS Securities.

The first one I would ask, if you could, is what are the underlying components of volume and price in your guidance? And if you could go beyond that, perhaps what's your thoughts on net pricing versus inflation after the year?

Yes. So we have a guidance. Thanks for the question, first of all, Ruben speaking here. So our overall guidance is a net sales guidance. We're not breaking it down in terms of volumes and in terms of price, but I can give you a bit more context.

As you've heard this morning also in our prepared remarks, we are guiding for a negative decline. And the main reason for that is the following. Firstly, we're in the midst of our negotiations, our annual negotiation. And this is normal with -- as it is normal with negotiation, we're seeing some delay and disruption and retaliation. We think that's temporary, but that will have an impact on our guidance. Second bit is that big part of our inflation actually is in Fish. We're seeing cost inflation in Fish. So we will be taking pricing on Fish. We expect competition to follow. But as we've seen in the past, there might be a time lag, and that's actually the biggest contributor to our negative guidance. And thirdly, as Dominic shared, this will be a year where we will be driving change, change to make Nomad the better company in terms of driving opportunities, but with change does come disruption.

Now the first 2 points links to your question on volume and price. We do expect price to be a contributor. But also when we talk about price, there's mix in there. We will be continuing to drive potatoes growth. So that will be a bit of an offset there. But we also expect negative volume because of the reasons I mentioned, especially on taking price in Fish and the price lag of our competition.

Understood. Looking beyond '26, how should we expect normalized growth to look like, especially relative to the long-term targets you put out last year, especially if you take all these initiatives to improve your operating structure and efficiency?

So this is Dominic. Thanks for the question. So first of all, to be clear, I fully expect us to return to growth in 2027 and 2028, and I see tremendous growth potential for this business. What I'm not going to do right now is to commit to specific numbers or ranges currently. We're currently in the process of putting together multiyear plans in terms of what we're going to deliver and how we're going to deliver them. And I'm excited to have the chance to share these with you at our Analyst Day later this year. At that time, we'll be much more specific in terms of what we're going to do, what our building blocks are and what our multiyear targets are.

But just to put this in context, a measure of how much I believe in this business and how much Ruben believes in this business is the fact that over the coming weeks, we're both going to be making substantial share purchases in the company. So 2026 is a transition year. It's a year in which we're enacting a lot of change, but the long-term future in our mind looks very positive.

And our next question comes from John Baumgartner from Mizuho.

I wanted to ask, Dominic, in the prepared remarks, there was a reference to, I think, strengthening relationships with retailers and doing better at the point of purchase. And I'm curious, some of the commentary over the past 6 to 9 months from some of the larger retailers in Europe, it seems that they're focusing quite a bit more on fresh food. It seems as though they're focusing more on investing in private label quality as opposed to just, I guess, competing on price. How do you think about -- I guess, how do you see the retail environment changing? Are you seeing retailers managing these categories differently? And how do you think about the reinvestment required to get people back to that fresh food case -- the frozen food case, excuse me?

Yes. So first of all, thanks for the question. So I think the overall behavior of European retailers hasn't changed dramatically over recent months or even the past couple of years. What we do see, though, is a continuation of an existing trend. There's nothing new about retailers wanting to make sure their private label offerings are high quality.

And the focus on fresh has been quite a big theme in Europe as well. Now some of this is retailer driven. Some of this is driven by us as well as a clear leader in frozen. And certainly, we see a few opportunities, a, to strengthen our position at the point of sale and to strengthen our position with retailers, but also to make sure that we're creating excitement and animation at the point of sale. That means making sure that we roll out some of our great innovations, for example, Chicken Shop, which is working well in the U.K. There's no reason why that can't work well across Europe, creating more animation and more excitement.

Secondly, making sure we have more disruptive and exciting positions at the point of sale to drive people into the frozen aisle, but also to make sure when they're there, they have something exciting to look at and focus on. And in terms of investments, there are some areas where this will require investment, and we've factored significant investment within our plan for this year to drive greater strength at the point of sale. But there's some where it won't require great investment. They'll just require more smartness from our side. For example, making sure that our packaging is not only much better than private label, but much better than the competitors as well and much better than we've been before.

And particularly when you're walking through the frozen food aisle, because of the nature of packaging because it's generally not transparent, we have an opportunity to communicate much more on the packaging than would be the case in other categories. So we see a chance to be much more aggressive there than we have been before. This is something we're working on significantly. But in terms of retailer behavior, we're not seeing any dramatic shift versus where retailer behavior has been over recent years.

John, this is Jason. I would just add a comment about the opportunity to shift growth back out of fresh into frozen, at least that was my interpretation. I would just note that the frozen category is actually delivering very robust growth for our retailers. Throughout last year, it grew 2.4% across our overall footprint, which continues to track above overall food. So there are still healthy category tailwinds and step into some markets like Italy category growth of 3%; Germany, 4.5%. So we are fortunate to be in a category that is delivering growth for retail partners and that obviously affords us opportunities.

Okay. Okay. Great. And then just a follow-up on the supply chain side on the fish business. We've seen some reports in Europe about some, I guess, disruptions on the IT platform and some digital systems on illegal fishing catches. Are you seeing any disruptions on the inflow of trade at the ports in Europe at this point? Or is that a nonevent for Nomad?

No, that's not an event for us. If you look at our ingredients and main items, we don't see that for our supply.

There was disruption, John, as you noted, it was reported in the Financial Times. And the programs, the policies that were being put in place that caused those disruptions have been temporarily suspended until they can be resolved. So the disruption was short term in nature and not long enough to impact our business or frankly, we don't believe it impacted the category or any of our competitors either.

Our next question is a follow-up from John Tanwanteng from CJS Securities.

I was just wondering if you could provide more detail on the pricing negotiations and when you expect them to conclude? Number one. And what the -- if that's going to be a rolling thing through the next few quarters or if it's going to be all over before Q2?

So in the case of most European retailers, the price negotiations are happening right now. There are certain exceptions in certain markets and with certain customers. But for the most part -- there are a few exceptions, but for the most part, we expect most of that to be included -- to be concluded during the course of Q1.

Got it. And as a follow-on to that, assuming your competitors do follow you, how do you expect share to change throughout the year? Is there a point where you expect volume or value share to start coming back to you guys as the year progresses?

I mean, obviously, we have no idea what our competitors are doing in terms of pricing, although we monitor it carefully. The key point from our side, of course, we have a fairly meaningful differential in price versus private label. The key point from our side is to make sure we give consumers strong reasons to pay. There are a few ways that we do that. First is through making sure our products are superior. Our products always have been superior, but actually during the course of this year, they're going to be even more superior, for example, with the new coating on fish fingers, which we're rolling out. Secondly, to make sure that our brands are stronger. Again, our brands have always been stronger if you look at our brand equity metrics, but we see opportunities to be much more effective in terms of how we spend our A&P.

And thirdly, it comes back to the point I made a second ago, making sure that at the point of sale, we're noticeably stronger, noticeably more noticeable and noticeably more disruptive than anyone else. And this is what we're going to be focusing on.

Okay. Great. And then last of all, it's good to see you committing to open share repurchases, but I was wondering if there's any change to the corporate capital allocation plan and if repurchases remain the priority for you guys?

So our top priority is to invest in the business to maximize our organic growth potential. And so we're very clear about that. Beyond that, our priority is going to depend on the circumstances. So as you know, buybacks have been a priority for us as we believe that our shares are trading well below their intrinsic value. And we continue to have an appetite to repurchase shares at current prices, but we're going to balance that carefully against our leverage ratio and our broader liquidity needs.

We're also looking forward, M&A could potentially reemerge in the future if various conditions change, for example, if we're less cheap and deals are less expensive. The one thing I can assure you of and the one thing I want to be very clear about is that either way, we and the Board are absolutely intent on allocating capital in ways that we believe maximizes shareholder returns.

[Operator Instructions] And it's showing no additional questions at this time, I would like to turn the floor back over to Dominic Brisby for any closing comments.

So thank you all for joining us today and for your interest in Nomad Foods. I very much look forward to meeting many of you in the days and weeks ahead. Thank you.

And with that, we'll conclude today's question-and-answer session. We do thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.

Greetings, and welcome to the Nomad Foods Third Quarter of 2025 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Also, please be aware that today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Jason English, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hello, and welcome to Nomad Foods Third Quarter 2025 Earnings question-and-answer session. We've posted the associated press release, prepared remarks and investor presentation on Nomad Foods website at noomadfoods.com. I hope you've all had a chance to review them. I'm Jason English, Head of Investor Relations and I'm joined by Stefan Descheemaeker, our CEO; Ruben Baldew, our CFO; and sir Martin E. Franklin, our Co-Founder and Co-Chairman.

During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements about performance that are based on our view of the company's prospects, expectations and intentions at this time. Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties discussed in our press release, our filings with the SEC and in our investor presentation, which includes cautionary language. We will also discuss non-IFRS financial measures during the call today. These non-IFRS financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should not be read together with IFRS results.

Users can find the IFRS to non-IFRS reconciliations within our earnings release and in the appendices at the end of the slide presentation available on our website. Please note that certain financial information within the presentation represents adjusted figures. All adjusted figures have been adjusted primarily for, when applicable, share-based payment expenses and related employer payroll taxes, exceptional items, foreign currency translation charges, or gains. Unless otherwise noted, today's comments from here will refer to those adjusted numbers.

With that, operator, let's open the line to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question here will come from Andrew Lazar with Barclays.

Welcome to Dominic. Maybe to start, one for you, Martin. Nomad discussed quite a bit at our September conference about medium-term goals, productivity and even said the company expected to deliver positive EBITDA growth in '26. Obviously, since then, Nomad has changed CEOs. And investors, I think, are rightfully asking whether those commitments sort of are still relevant, as oftentimes a new CEO appointment can signal the need for some form of a profit reset. So I guess my question is whether Nomad still stands by those recent comments at this stage.

Thank you for your question. I would say a few things. First of all, these commitments and if you like, internal commitments and goals are ones that are approved and studied by our entire Board, not just our CEO. We made a few commitments that I think are important that are consistent and what we've talked about already in our prepared remarks. Our EUR 200 million multiyear efficiency target, obviously, it still stands and is still actively being worked on, I think, quite successfully. The second, our medium-term goals to compound EBITDA in low single digits. Those goals continue to be in place and you have to excuse me.

And third, accelerating free cash flow growth by delivering EBITDA and also -- and importantly, while reducing exceptional items. So I think all of these goals are in place. Obviously, when we bring in a new CEO, it's our CEO's prerogative to evaluate everything in fairness to Dominic, he's in the company for 3 days. He doesn't take over as CEO until the year-end, but we brought in Dominic because of his growth orientation and in the business. So I'm excited to have him and only see this as being a positive in terms of our metrics of performance.

All right. And then maybe as a follow-up, I know I think private label trends tends to lag branded price increases when Nomad's led with them. And sometimes that's led to some temporary market share weakness in the past. I guess how is Nomad balancing sort of the pricing that you're going to be taking next year with keeping share momentum? And maybe can your higher level of productivity help offset some of the inflation such that maybe more modest pricing can be enacted than otherwise that might have had to have been the case?

Yes. Thank you, Andrew. Let me take that question. So first, the kind of price lag and dynamics. If we look at the last 3 months, last 6 months, last 9 months, we've seen our price index versus competition and our competition is mainly private label slightly go down, so 2%, 3%, which is helpful in the context that we have to take pricing. I do have to say that's the average of an average. So of course, you always have to go a bit more in the detail per country and the specific product, but there has been a bit of catching up of private label. So that's one thing.

I think more importantly, and you were already given half of the answer, is what are we seeing for next year. And we've been clear that the inflation we're seeing most of the pricing we're going to take in quarter 1, '26. Now a couple of things there. The inflation in total is not the same level of inflation. We said it before like 2 years ago. We're looking around cost price inflation of around single digit. And that's probably at this moment what we're looking at.

Second point, also when you compare, and that's also probably the question behind your question on competitiveness and not going too aggressive in terms of pricing and losing share, our RGM capabilities versus 2, 3 years are in a better place, and we said it before, we will do this very surgically. Third point is what you alluded to. We've launched this cost competitiveness program, and Martin also mentioned of EUR 200 million, and we still passionately stand behind it. And by the way, this is not only a forward-looking program. You also heard in our remarks that in quarter 3, but also in quarter 2, we are delivering lower overheads, compensating for inflation even when you correct for the bonus release. So that cost competitiveness program, we will drive forward, and that will help for us to make the right trade-offs in how much should you price versus where actually do we have some offset in savings.

We will also look at pricing, how that links with the renovation. So if we're looking at some renovation with different superiority, different product quality, we try to link that to pricing. So there's also new news both for retailers as well as consumers. And the last remark, just to be clear, I think it's just too early days to really see what the effects are. We are sending out the price as we speak. We have already sent to certain customers in certain countries. There's a bit of difference overall. And we can come back more on that when we release our quarter 4 results in the new year.

And our next question will come from Scott Marks with Jefferies.

I just wanted to follow up on a question that Andrew asked about reiterating some of the medium-term targets. I think as we think about '26, with pricing coming in, Dominic taking over and some of the other dynamics that you've laid out. Just wondering how we should be thinking about '26 preliminarily in terms of maybe cadence of the year or when we should be thinking about some of these newer initiatives kind of that are kicking in.

Ruben, do you want me to take that?

Well, I can do. I build on -- let me just build on what Martin already said. So I think what Martin just said, and it's also your question, Scott, we launched a program strategy in September, which is not only the program of Stefan or of a CEO, it's something endorsed by the entire Board and our whole internal program. What Martin just said, look, we will passionately drive a EUR 200 million competitiveness program. We will see the benefits of cash flow. But it would also be unfair to make a lot of additional comments concretely on '26 with Dominic just coming into the role. But there is a clear focus on the top line recovery and some of the effects we're seeing this year will help also for next year. And overall, we expect results to be better next year than this year. How much that will be completely is more for when we announce our full year results in early next year.

Okay. Appreciate the answer. And then second question from me would be, you called out, obviously, some challenging dynamics in the U.K. with the expectation for some of those to stabilize. As we think towards the Q4 and low end into the guide, if results were to come in, let's say, below what you're anticipating or above what you're anticipating, maybe what would be the reasons for that? How should we be thinking about kind of like the risks and the potential upside risks as well?

Yes. So we've said today, we're confirming, reiterating the guidance, albeit at the low end of the guidance. The low end of the guidance on the top line implies a quarter 4 between minus 1.5% and minus 2%. And let's just take a step back. If we look at our sell-out, our sell-out year-to-date is plus 0.2% -- if you look at our sellout -- and by the way, that's plus 0.2% in a year where we're not happy. It's a year where we've seen the impact of the weather, both as well in our savory business, savory frozen food in Northwestern Europe as well, we're not so happy with the ice cream performance more in quarter 3.

Despite that, our sellout is plus 0.2%. We also said part of that is transitory, and we see the market recovering and also our own sell-out numbers. If you look at the last 3 months, value is plus 0.5%. Our last 3 months volume growth is plus 0.7%. So our sellout is not where we want it to be, but it is positive and actually it's slightly improving. And that you have to see then to an implied guidance of minus 1.5%, minus 2%. Now, what gives us confidence that we're able to hit that. If you look at our difficulty plan, and you've also seen that some of it in the prepared remarks, we improved the product quality of our pizza business in the U.K. That's one.

We started around September with our new campaign in the U.K. It's a bit too early to tell, but the first positive, the first signals are positive. We see distribution increases in Italy, but also in France. So we're now 1/3 of the quarter is now behind us. To your question, what needs to go well, wrong, what could change it. There's a bit where you could look at pricing. We've increased the prices of our chicken range in the U.K. because we said a lot of the pricing will be taken next year. It's a bit depending what competition will do, so that could go up or down a bit, but I think those are probably the big ones.

And our next question will come from John Baumgartner with Mizuho.

I'd like to stick with private label, but I'm curious more about the competitive aspects because market share has always been high, but it hasn't really increased in your categories for the better part of the decade prior to the cost of living crisis. And even now it seems to have sustained momentum even as price inflation has moderated. So I'm curious, what are you seeing from retailers? Is private label competing differently aside from price? Is the innovation more refined? Is the quality improving? Are there differences in non-price factors that you're seeing over the past 24, 36 months? Because it does seem that maybe there's an evolution here from store brands.

Thanks for the question, John. I think it's... When you think about this category, frozen food, it's a very good category. Category is growing nicely year after year. But definitely, private label is a big thing. And I think the learning from my 10 years is basically, you have to be -- I mean, every day, you have to be non-complacent. And you have to make sure that you have the right value equation, which is partly price and partly obviously, renovation, A&P and all the rest of it.

And when you think about, let's say, this year in the U.K., for example, we lost it a bit. And I think exactly what Ruben mentioned in terms of renovation of fish fingers, in terms of renovation of pizza, in terms of some renovations of packaging in peas, for example, that's exactly what we're doing right now, which is to come back with the right value equation. That together obviously with to Ruben's point, which is pricing-wise, we are slightly better compared to where we were a few months ago, a few quarters ago. I think that's where we think we can do a better job.

But definitely, to your point, it's not only pricing, it's the non-pricing peas. And that peas is when I compare '26 with '25, starting now actually, I mean, our program is much better. And let's face it, I think we can be hard with ourselves. I think '25, I don't think we've been good enough in terms of value equation. And that's why we're doing all these renovation in pizza, for example. And what we can see is in the U.K., well, even we've compare ourselves with premium, we are superior with the takeaways. We intend to do the same with the second part, which is thin. We intend to come with the renovation, a superior fish finger, which is a big thing for us.

The fish finger is around 40% of our fish business. which is really big. And it's going to hit the market together with the sizing in Q1. So that's the kind of things we're doing. We're doing things. We're renovating the packaging in peas. Peas we have -- definitely, we have a superior product. But definitely, I don't think it can do better in terms of packaging. So it's -- philosophically, it's very simple. I think our job as branded people, we need to bring additional value compared to private label. And if we don't do that, obviously, we lost our relevance. And that's, I think the program for '25, '26, second half of '25 and definitely '26 is going to be much better than what we have.

Our next question will come from John Tanwanteng with CJS Securities.

I was wondering if you could talk about the decision to keep the majority of your repricing to next year. You've previously demonstrated the ability to go to your retailers and make adjustments ahead of that annual negotiation. Maybe first, what drove that decision this year not to do so? And second, does that give you any incremental leverage or ability to make up a portion of that inflation that you ate in '25 as you talk to your retail next year and within, obviously, the context of end demand elasticity?

Well, let me contextualize a bit this decision. Put yourself back in 2022, where between March and June, every month, we had another $50 million additional COGS. And so whilst all the negotiations, the prenegotiations with all the retailers in Europe were behind us. Well, it was simple. It was force majeure, and we decided to reopen everything. And by the way, we not only reopened it once, but sometimes twice, even 3 times. And we did it, and it worked overall even in countries that are probably a bit more difficult like France and Germany. This time, it's very different. It's not force majeure. It's just an additional COGS that came in the middle of the year and the negotiations were behind us. And quite frankly, we took the commercial decision not to take it this year. I think it would have been a mistake to reopen the negotiation for something which was not considered as a hyperinflation. So that's why we did it. But definitely now, obviously, we need to take a more holistic approach for next year, how much we need to price, also combine also with the renovation program and the whole 360 approach. That's obviously for next year.

Okay. Great. And then second, could you talk a little bit more about some of the cost saving items over the next quarter and year and how they phase in and possibly net out between your cost restructure, the resumption of bonus accruals and then how that nets out with also the savings realizations as well?

Yes. So it links a bit to our overall $200 million program. That $200 million program, vast majority of that sits in supply chain, around $170 million invested in overheads. Overheads, you already see some savings coming through this year, which is really about making the organization simpler. We've done restructuring in some of our functional support areas. We're also looking at non-people costs where we also now started with the indirect procurement team and getting savings out of that one. So that's the first part.

Then if you look at supply chain, we actually have already been delivering quite a bit. It's a step-up in supply chain from EUR 145 million to kind of EUR 180 million, EUR 175 million. The big step-up there is procurement. And it's not that in procurement, we're all tomorrow going to have huge consolidation in the fish supply base. But if we look at elements like ingredients, like packaging, some other ingredient base, we think we can further consolidate our supplier base, and that's the big driver of the savings there. The other part is in our factory footprint, we've lost volumes. So there, we're going to do 3 things. 22% of our volume still sits at CoCopac, and we think we can in-source that. So we'll do that.

Secondly, we see some of our bigger factories where we have an opportunity to rightsize both cost and asset base. And thirdly, and again, it's not only promising. You've seen in our year-to-date results that we announced a closure in one of our smaller factories, which not only helps from a profit perspective, but also from a cash perspective. So we're doing that, and we will continue to do that. How we allocate that to the P&L is exactly linked to the question of Andrew, we're going to be surgical where we think that saving needs to be used not to price for the last piece of inflation and dampen some of the supply chain impact or we say, look, in areas like, for example, peas, where we know we have good quality, we're going to invest more in communication or like what Stefan mentioned, we see in fish thing is that we have an opportunity to improve quality, and we're going to use those savings to improve product quality.

And our next question will come from Steve Powers with Deutsche Bank.

So you've spoken a little bit about this indirectly, but the implied fourth quarter guidance does contemplate an acceleration on a 2-year basis. And I guess you've spoken a little bit about where your confidence comes from that. But I guess just a little bit more clarity or a little bit more color as to how you think you're protected against downside just because the comparison is a bit more difficult.

I understand the question. Maybe it's also good to understand '24 comparator, and it's how far back do you want to go versus '23 comparator because we had the same discussion, I think, last year when we delivered a 3% growth in quarter 4, which is the background of your question. If you look at the year before, actually H1, the year before was minus 2%, and in H2, we had a minus 8%. So you also have to look at the comparator of the comparator, which sounds a bit as we're going back very many years. But in the end, it's looking at run rates, and we knew that the comparison run rate wasn't the strongest.

The second point, which for me is a crucial point, we are not happy with this year. We know we had the destocking. We had not the greatest ice cream season, but our sellout is plus 0.2%. If you look at the last 3 months, it's a plus 0.5% growth in volume plus 0.7%. That is vis-a-vis a guidance implied of minus 1.5%, minus 2%. So there's some call it buffer, but some difference there. And secondly, if you then look at our activity program for the fourth quarter, there is a lot with additional distribution. There's a lot where we're stepping up quality in pizza. There is the mass brand in the U.K., U.K. specifically because we're not happy with the U.K. performance, and that's not something which will be solved in 4 to 12 weeks, but we see stabilization of shares, which also gives confidence. I think, yes, that's probably all the context and color I can give at this moment.

Perfect. Okay. That makes a ton of sense and it's confirming. I guess the other question I wanted to ask about was just around capital allocation priorities. I think your comments over the course of time, especially recently have been pretty consistent about how you plan to deploy capital, obviously, supporting the dividend and prioritizing share repurchases. It seemed like in the prepared remarks that there was even more emphasis on that capital allocation prioritization. And I do note that in the recent refinancing that you executed, I think there was an extra $150 million or so raised with that. So should we infer that, that will be deployed towards buybacks? Or are there other uses of that extra capital?

I'll take this one. It's Martin. I don't know how many companies you're able to buy at 6.5 PE, but I think while we're in that ZIP code, we're going to be buying back our own stock. We see obviously a far higher intrinsic value of the company than the equity markets give us credit for. I think we said that in our prepared remarks. And obviously, the credit markets really do recognize the strength of the company and its cash flow. So we will be continuing to be bought by stock in the past. We're going to continue to buy back stock until we feel that the markets are fairly valuing the company. And obviously, the extra $150 million of cash that we have gives us more liquidity to do so.

And with no remaining questions, I'd like to turn the call back over to Stefan Descheemaeker for...

Well, thank you all for joining us today. This has been my 40th earnings call with the company, and it will be my last. The past 10 years have been dynamic with the good, but also challenging times, but the company has persevered through it all, emerging from each challenge stronger than before. It held true during Brexit, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the more recent period of hyperinflation, and it will be true again this year. This year was more challenging than we initially expected, but I'm already seeing the companies begin to bounce back. The foundation for improvement has been laid, and I'm excited to see Dominic build upon it as the next CEO. The best is still ahead for Nomad Foods. And with that, thank you, and goodbye.

Hello, and welcome to the prerecorded discussion of Nomad Foods Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Results. We have posted the accompanying press release and investor presentation on Nomad Foods website at nomadfoods.com. I'm Jason English, Head of Investor Relations and I'm joined by Stefan Descheemaeker, our CEO; Ruben Baldew, our CFO; Dominic Brisby, our Group Executive President and CEO-elect; and sir Martin E. Franklin, our Co-Founder and Co-Chairman.

In addition to these remarks, we will host an analyst Q&A session today at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Stefan, Ruben and Martin will join this session. A replay of this webcast and our subsequent Q&A session will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website. These prepared remarks will include forward-looking statements that are based on our view of the company's prospects, expectations and intentions at this time. Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties, which are discussed in our press release, our filings with the SEC and in our investor presentation, which includes cautionary language.

We will also discuss non-IFRS financial measures during the call today. These non-IFRS financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with IFRS results. Users can find the IFRS to non-IFRS reconciliations within our earnings release and in the appendices at the end of the slide presentation available on our website.

Please note that certain financial information within this presentation represents adjusted figures -- for all adjusted figures have been adjusted primarily for when applicable, share-based payment expenses and related employer payroll taxes, exceptional items and foreign currency valuation charges or gains. Unless otherwise noted, comments from here will refer to those adjusted numbers.

With that, let me hand it over to Stefan.

Thank you, Jason. Third quarter results were in line with our recent expectations. And even though we're not reaching our full potential right now, we did have numerous areas of strength in the quarter. We had a soft start to the quarter with unfavorable weather depressing category growth in Western Europe in July, and we faced a few disruptions to our high-margin immediate consumption ice cream business in Southeastern Europe.

On top of that, as we have previously discussed with you, our commercial plans in some of our Must Win Battles, especially in the U.K., have not been as robust as we would like. As a result, our organic sales declined 1.6% this quarter. The organic sales decline was compounded by a lower gross margin, which contributed to lower adjusted EBITDA.

As a reminder, we have elevated input costs this year and have chosen to wait until fiscal 2026 to enact most of our price increases. This has created a temporary margin pressure that we experienced in the third quarter and last year high margin comparison did not help. We have and will continue to take several steps to build upon our strong foundation for improved results going forward.

In September, we announced increased efficiency goals to be realized from 2026 to 2028. And I'm happy to report that this initiative remains on track. This will give the company the fuel and flexibility needs to invest in the business and drive steady and predictable bottom line growth. And while medium-term targets focus on delivering EBITDA and free cash flow growth, the team recognized that they will need to deliver healthy and consistent organic sales growth to achieve those goals.

Organic sales growth has been challenged this year-to-date, but there are many reasons to believe that the company's performance will be better going forward. First, Nomad continues to benefit from an advantaged category. Frozen food in Europe has consistently grown in the low single-digit range and remains supported by the trends of taste, nutrition, convenience, value and sustainability.

And while category growth slowed due to unfavorable weather earlier this year, as you can see on Slide 4, our category footprint has returned to 2% growth. It is much easier for the company to achieve organic sales growth when it has category tailwinds at its back. Of course, the team aims to grow in line or ahead of the category over time, and there is more work to do, but progress is being made. As you can see from Slide 5, our market share has been range bound over the past 12 months.

We're pleased to have held volume share this past quarter, but we can do better from a value share perspective. The softer value share performance has been driven by the softer results in our Must Win Battles. Much of this has been concentrated in the U.K. Our U.K. sales have declined by 6% year-to-date and declined 7% this quarter. U.K. has accounted for roughly 80% of our net sales decline year-to-date and nearly 90% this quarter. This has been driven by several factors.

As you can see from Slide 6, we achieved very robust volume sell-through in measured retail channels in the U.K. throughout 2024. This was largely driven by promotional activity that we and many of our branded competitors participated in. The collective investment expanded the category. Late last year, we and our retail partners began to pull back on promotions given rising costs. The reduction in promotion support pressured our volume growth as well as the growth of our category while fueling some recent trade downs to private label in the market. That headwind was magnified this past summer by the unfavorable weather. This has been a large headwind for us this year, but the good news is these are cyclical headwinds and not structural, and we are already seeing improvement as we cycle them.

You can see from Slide 6, our U.K. retail volume and value sell-through have successfully stabilized in the most recent period. Easing comparison are helping, but so too is our new master brand advertising campaign that was launched in August. Early performance indicators are encouraging, and this serves as a great example of how the company can make our A&P investment work harder by supporting multiple product lines with an umbrella campaign.

Our new advertising is being accompanied by new product news. In fact, innovation and renovation remains on track to reach approximately 17% of sales this year, and the current plan is for this to go even higher next year. Much of these efforts will support our Must Win Battles, including news behind our core fish finger portfolio starting in the first quarter of next year. We also continue to innovate behind our growth platforms.

Highlighted on Slide 7, you can see the great progress being made in diversifying Nomad's portfolio. Growth platforms achieved net sales growth of 34% this quarter and are up 39% year-to-date. The company has built its chicken portfolio into a large and profitable must-win battle in the U.K. and last year began to leverage the learnings in that market to expand its chicken portfolio in Italy and Germany. I'm happy to say that it is working.

We continue to achieve fantastic growth with our chicken portfolio in both Germany and Italy. And we're having similar success in prepared meals, which is another important growth platform in many markets. For example, our retail sales of meals have doubled in Germany year-to-date, and our protein bowls recently began to hit shelves in the U.K. and will roll out more broadly next year.

Given these initiatives, recent category acceleration and our stabilization of retail sales in the U.K., I'm confident the company will demonstrate improved results in the fourth quarter.

With that, let me turn it over to Ruben to take you through our results and outlook in more detail. Ruben?

Thank you, Stefan, and good morning, everyone. Let me get right into the results. As you can see on Slide 8 and 9 for the third quarter, reported net revenues decreased by 2.2% to EUR 752 million. Organic sales declined 1.6% with volume declining 0.5%, while price/mix was minus 1.1%, driven by unfavorable mix.

As Stefan mentioned, we had a soft start to the quarter as the negative weather impact we saw last quarter carried over into July. Also, our Ice Cream business in Southeastern Europe declined by 7.5% this quarter due primarily to less favorable weather than last year and unrest in Serbia. We were happy, though, to see our overall category growth improved as the quarter progressed and pleased that we returned to net sales growth in September, albeit aided by an easy comparison as our sales were depressed late in the quarter last year following our ERP transition.

Moving down the P&L. Our adjusted gross margin was modestly higher than quarter 2, but compressed by 420 basis points year-on-year. The largest headwind to our gross margin has been inflation, which more than offset our productivity gains and RGM benefit. As a reminder, we have seen several input costs move higher year-to-date with poultry prices among the most notable increases. Most of our price increases, however, have yet to take effect as we decided early in the year to wait for the annual negotiation cycle with retailers to address this.

Last month, we began to announce our price increases to the trade. These will take effect in early '26 and when combined with our productivity plans will position us better to offset inflation next year.

Moving down the P&L. Adjusted operating expenses declined by 12% year-on-year in the third quarter. A&P expenses were down double digit in the quarter, largely due to quarterly phasing. Recall that A&P was up double digit in the first quarter and year-to-date, our A&P is flat year-on-year as a percent of sales.

Overhead expenses shrank by 9% year-on-year in the quarter as productivity offset underlying inflation and we reduced our bonus accrual given year-to-date results. Adjusted EBITDA decreased 14% year-on-year to EUR 143 million, while adjusted EPS fell 11% to EUR 0.49. Our diluted shares outstanding were 8% lower year-on-year in the quarter, which when combined with lower year-on-year interest expense, helped us minimize the EPS decline.

Turning to cash flow on Slide 10. Our adjusted free cash flow conversion ratio was 35% through the first 9 months of the year versus 47% in the same period as last year due to lower adjusted EBITDA and different phasing of cash taxes. As a reminder, it's common to see our cash delivery in this range at this time of the year due to seasonal factors.

Turning to use of cash. We continue to return cash to shareholders. Through the first 9 months of this year, we have repurchased EUR 151 million of shares and paid out EUR 70 million of dividends. This collective return of cash to shareholders through the first 9 months of this year is a 100% increase compared to the first 9 months of last year. I would also note that I personally purchased roughly $1 million of shares in September, which you will see when we file our annual 20-F early next year.

And last week, we declared a quarterly dividend of $0.17, which is 13% higher than the same dividend last year. We also recently completed the refinancing of much of our debt. The offering was met with high demand by the credit markets, which we view as a testament to our healthy and consistent cash flow. We were able to lock in attractive rates while extending our maturity schedule and increase capital allocation flexibility. We also expect our earnings to benefit from lower financing costs each quarter going forward.

Turning to our guidance for '25 on Slide 11. We are tracking towards the low end of our existing organic sales growth, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS ranges given year-to-date margin pressure and our desire to establish a clean base for '26. We expect full year organic sales to be near the low end of our flat to minus 2% range, which implies modest improvement in fourth quarter relative to our year-to-date performance.

We expect our adjusted EBITDA to be near the low end of our existing minus 3% to minus 7% outlook, implying a low single-digit decline in the fourth quarter. And we expect adjusted EPS to be near the low end of our EUR 1.64 to EUR 1.76, implying comparable year-on-year EPS in the fourth quarter. At recent exchange rates, our revised adjusted EPS guidance range for the full year translates into approximately $1.89 to $2.02.

Turning to adjusted free cash flow. We continue to expect a conversion ratio of 90% or greater for the full year. This guidance excludes any impact of our refinancing, where at this moment, we are finalizing the details of cash interest payments and the potential positive benefit on EPS and timing impact to cash flow, if any. We do not expect these effects to be material though.

In conclusion, while this was a challenging quarter for certain areas of our business, we feel good about the underlying health of our overall business. Our category is healthy. Our retail sales are stable. Our pricing actions are in flight and our productivity momentum is building. We remain focused on controlling what we can control to drive profitable sales growth and improve free cash flow conversion.

With that, let me turn the call back to Stefan.

Thank you, Ruben. First, I want to say thank you to all our fantastic employees who have made Nomad a great place to work and help build into a leading company over the past 10 years. As most of you know, this will be my last public conference call with the company as I am transitioning from CEO to Board member beginning in January. I'm proud of what we've built over the last decade. We have been strategic and deliberate in our portfolio choices and have built Nomad into the pure-play scale leader in the European savory food market.

We have the best brands in one of the best food categories in the industry and have built a team of top-tier talent and arm them with the resources to win. We have accomplished a lot over the past decade. We achieved 9 consecutive years of uninterrupted sales and adjusted EBITDA growth through 2024 and now on track to have roughly doubled our EPS over the past decade. This is a track record that all of us at Nomad can be proud of.

Looking forward, I'm excited about the company's growth potential over the next 10 years. We have built a very strong foundation by being a successful buyer and builder of businesses over the past decade. We now need to accelerate organic growth as we move forward. With that in mind, I believe now is the right time to transition our leadership to someone whose skill set is ideally suited for our next chapter of growth. Because of this, I began to work with Martin and Noam to explore a CEO succession process earlier this year. After months of review, I'm confident we found the right person. I'm excited to introduce you to Nomad's next CEO, Dominic Brisby, who has joined us as our Group Executive President and will become our next CEO on January 1. He brings a growth-oriented mindset and track record of delivering results. I'm excited to watch him unlock new opportunities at Nomad. Dominic, over to you.

Thank you, Stefan, and hello, everyone. I'm now officially 3 days into the job and will not be taking questions just yet. My priority over the next few months is to meet my new colleagues throughout Europe and immerse myself in the business. There is a lot I must learn, but there is also a lot I know about the company, which attracted me to this opportunity.

First, I love these brands. Like all Europeans, I grew up with Nomad brands. They are iconic with unparalleled equity in their categories. They are exceptionally valuable with fantastic growth potential. Second, I love the category. I've worked across several businesses in both Europe and North America, and I'm excited to be stepping into a category with so many tailwinds at its back.

Secular trends are reshaping the industry, and this company sits at the intersection of several big themes. The wind is at our back with evolving nutrition, sustainability and value trends, and I'm excited to harness these tailwinds. Third, I'm excited about the timing of this opportunity. I see the hard work that the organization has done to accelerate its innovation and renovation, strengthen its marketing muscle and build a robust efficiency pipeline. A strong foundation to build upon has been laid, yet the opportunity for improvement is not being valued by the market. I see underappreciated growth potential.

I'm excited to unlock that potential and create tremendous value for our shareholders in the years to come. I hope that many of you listening to the call today will join me on this journey. I'm confident that it's going to be a fun ride. And I want to personally thank Stefan for agreeing to work with me as we transition over the next 2 months and then continuing as an engaged Board member beyond the transition.

This company achieved nearly a decade of uninterrupted growth under Stefan's leadership, a truly exceptional accomplishment. I'm fortunate that I will have his advice and counsel as we turn our attention to accelerating growth in the decade that lies ahead. I look forward to sharing more with you in the new year and meeting many of you in person.

With that, let me pass it to our Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Martin, for closing remarks.

Thank you, Dominic, and hello to all the investors and Nomad employees who have joined us on the call today. I'm joining today to provide some perspective and expectations that I and my fellow Board members share. First, I want to say thank you to Stefan for all that he has accomplished since the founding of Nomad Foods. He has helped us build this company into what it is today. It is time for change as we lean into accelerate our organic growth, and I would like to welcome Dominic Brisby as our new CEO-elect.

As Stefan noted, we've been working together to find his successor since this past summer. The search was extensive as we canvassed both our internal and external options. We met Dominic early in the process. And while we continued our search out of due diligence, we kept being drawn back to him. We were attracted to his growth-oriented mindset and impressive track record of delivering results. And maybe even more importantly, we were impressed by how strong the external feedback loop was for him.

People who worked either with him or for him in the past had great things to say with many highlighting his ability to energize an organization and unlock new opportunities for growth. That's the type of energy we need today because I'm confident that Nomad has substantial untapped growth. Clearly, there is a disconnect that exists between what the equity markets believe Nomad is capable of and what we believe the company can accomplish. There is even a disconnect between the equity and credit markets as reflected by the contrast in our successful refinancing compared to our depressed equity valuation.

The majority of our debt maturities are now extended out to 2032 at attractive rates. At recent foreign exchange rates, we expect the company's cumulative free cash flow to exceed our current market cap before any of that new debt comes due. Credit markets see that, yet our equity value is dislocated from this.

Equity markets are valuing Nomad as if it is in secular decline, but let's step back and objectively look at a few facts. The reality is that Nomad has important tailwinds that give it an advantage relative to other food companies. First and importantly, Nomad is in a growing category. You can see the data in our slides. The category has consistently grown low single digits, and it once again is growing low single digits.

You heard Stefan and Dominic talk about the secular tailwinds, and you see it translating into real growth. Second, the company has healthy brands. Our brands have the #1 leading brand equity in our categories in 13 of our 15 markets, and we are the strong #2 in the other two markets. They are strong, and they have been nourished. Our A&P investment ratio as a percentage of sales is 4%, which places us in the top tier of food companies. And this is translating into market share.

As you see in the data, while there have been ups and downs, the company has been able to stabilize its market share. The company's volume share is roughly flat over the past 3 months and 12-month periods, and retail value sales are growing in both of those periods. It can be better, but this is not a bad starting point for Dominic. Third, we have robust productivity plans and pricing power.

The biggest issue this year has been our gross margin. The company is absorbing EUR 90 million of inflation pressure this year. That's a huge headwind to EBITDA growth. Productivity has offset some of that, but the lack of pricing has created a headwind. Our price index to private label is now at a 3-year low, and our sales team is landing new price increases now. This will be a game changer for next year.

And as a reminder, the company has established a EUR 200 million efficiency goal over the next 3 years, and the Board stands by this commitment. This will give the company a lot of flexibility to offset some of the inflation and reinvest where needed. Given all of this, I can confidently say that I expect our financial results to be better next year.

Dominic and his team have work to do, but the foundation is there, and we believe accelerated growth will follow. Our valuation, however, tells me that the equity markets do not believe this. So what do we do? First, Noam and I who collectively own almost 16% of the outstanding shares, either directly or indirectly, remain steadfast owners. We hold the vast majority of our original shareholdings and have fully shared in the declining value of our equity. We have lived through ups and downs and have every intention of working to drive the company to recapture the value from past highs and beyond.

I personally have chaired a company through such a cycle. And today, it is stronger than ever, trading at or around all-time highs. Secondly, because of this dislocation, we've been prioritizing share repurchases as the primary use of Nomad's cash flow after dividends are paid. This will remain our priority for capital allocation as long as our stock remains so undervalued.

And lastly, it is our core mission to have the equity markets appreciate the strength of this company as much as the credit markets do, and we expect to earn that appreciation by delivering better results starting next quarter. I will leave it there.

In closing, we have built a tremendous foundation, and I truly believe now is a great time to be an investor in Nomad Foods. There is enormous upside from here, and Noam and I plan to work with Dominic to ensure that opportunity is realized. Thank you everybody.