Post (POST) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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DATE

Friday, August 7, 2026 at 9:00 a.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer – Matthew J. Mainer
Chief Operating Officer – Nicolas Catoggio

TAKEAWAYS

Net Sales — $1,948.0 million, representing a 1.8% decrease from the prior year period, reflecting volume declines in pet food and value cereal.
Adjusted EBITDA — $377.3 million, a 5.0% decrease versus the prior year period, primarily due to lower margins in the Foodservice and Refrigerated Retail segments.
Adjusted Diluted EPS — $1.78, a decrease from $2.03 in the prior year period.
Net Earnings — $63.4 million, a decrease of 41.7% from $108.8 million in the prior year period.
Fiscal 2026 Adjusted EBITDA Guidance — narrowed to a range of $1,560 million to $1,570 million from the previous range of $1,550 million to $1,580 million.
Fiscal 2027 Adjusted EBITDA Base — $1.48 billion, which accounts for approximately $80 million in items affecting comparability, including divestitures and normalized Foodservice earnings.
Post Consumer Brands Net Sales — $974.2 million, an increase of 6.6% driven by the contribution of $141.8 million from 8th Avenue, while organic volumes fell 7.1%.
Pet Food Volume — decreased 7.8%, driven by distribution losses and category declines in the dry dog segment.
Cereal and Granola Volume — decreased 5.5%, reflecting category-wide weakness and tactical adjustments to product pack sizes.
Foodservice Performance — net sales of $652.9 million decreased 6.5% as the segment lapped avian influenza-related pricing benefits, though volumes rose 4.3%.
Refrigerated Retail Net Sales — $184.5 million, a 21.1% decrease reflecting the sale of the Crystal Farms Business and lower egg demand following the Easter holiday.
Weetabix Performance — net sales were flat at $137.1 million, while volumes decreased 3.8% due to declines in private label cereal products.
Share Repurchases — 2.1 million shares were repurchased for $198.9 million during the third quarter, contributing to a 17% reduction in outstanding shares fiscal year to date.
Capital Expenditures — projected to range from $370 million to $390 million for fiscal 2026, including investments in cage-free egg facilities and the Norwalk, Iowa facility expansion.
Pet Food Market Share — targeted between 3.0% to 3.2% as the company stabilizes its nutrition portfolio and pursues cost-saving initiatives.
Manufacturing Network Optimization — management decided to shut down two peanut butter plants to streamline the 8th Avenue business, with the transition expected to impact fiscal 2028.
Marketing Spend Strategy — transitioned to almost 100% digital platforms, with no current investment in linear television support for cereal brands.
Refinance Rate Impact — the 10-year refinance rate benchmark rose 50 basis points in the last quarter, influencing a strategic shift toward debt reduction.
Net Leverage — 4.6x as calculated under the company’s credit agreement as of June 30, 2026.
9Lives Brand Strategy — one-third of the brand was relaunched to address margin challenges, despite competitive price pressures in the value cat segment.
Nutrish Recovery — gained market share over the last 13 weeks in the dry dog category despite overall year-over-year volume pressure.
SG&A Expenses — $326.1 million, or 16.7% of net sales, an increase of 4.5% compared to the prior year period.
Interest Expense — $108.2 million for the quarter, an increase from $88.5 million in the prior year period due to higher principal amounts and interest rates.

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RISKS

Mainer stated that rising interest rates create a cash flow impact for future refinancing, noting, “as we see rates continue to rise from a refinancing standpoint, that just weighs more heavily to say, hey, we’ve got to start allocating more capital to debt reduction to make sure we’re bringing down debt.”
Catoggio identified ongoing volume pressure in the pet segment, noting that the dry dog segment “is underperforming the category” and will remain a headwind for the brand portfolio.
Catoggio noted that 9Lives faces competitive pressure from “two of our main competitor brands actually hitting price points below our brand,” which management has chosen not to match to maintain margin discipline.

SUMMARY

Management at Post Holdings, Inc. (POST -0.05%) reported a strategic shift toward stabilizing pet food market share, optimizing manufacturing networks, and transitioning capital allocation toward debt reduction. The company narrowed its fiscal 2026 outlook while providing a preliminary fiscal 2027 base that reflects the normalization of its Foodservice segment and the impact of recent divestitures. Financial performance in the third quarter was influenced by volume softness in cereal and pet food, offset by the integration of the 8th Avenue acquisition. The company is actively pursuing cost-reduction strategies across its pet food footprint and remains focused on digital marketing efficiency to support core brands amid category-wide headwinds.

Catoggio indicated that the company will “go after cost aggressively” in the pet food segment by simplifying portfolios and harmonizing formulas now that market share has stabilized between 3.0% to 3.2%.
Mainer noted that capital allocation decisions are driven by rising interest rates and refinancing impacts rather than fixed leverage targets, leading to a shift in priority toward debt reduction over share repurchases.
Catoggio stated that volume performance in the cereal segment is expected to move closer to the category average of minus 1% to minus 2% as the company laps assortment and promotional efficiency adjustments.
Management confirmed the shutdown of two peanut butter plants as part of the integration of the 8th Avenue business, following the same playbook used to streamline cereal operations.
Catoggio indicated that marketing spend has transitioned almost entirely to digital platforms, stating that the company has achieved “more effective spend” while eliminating linear television support for cereal brands.
Management reported that the Foodservice business exited the third quarter with high inventories after taking advantage of favorable market conditions in the egg industry.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

HPAI: Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, a viral disease affecting poultry that impacts egg supply and pricing.
RTE: Ready-to-eat, referring to food products like cereal that require no further preparation before consumption.
PCB: Post Consumer Brands, the segment encompassing ready-to-eat cereal, pet food, and nut butters.
SG&A: Selling, General, and Administrative expenses, which include all non-production costs of running a business.
Adjusted EBITDA: A non-GAAP financial metric that excludes interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and other items to evaluate operating performance.
WIC: Women, Infants, and Children, a federal assistance program for healthcare and nutrition.
Malt-O-Meal: A brand of value-priced ready-to-eat cereal produced by the company.
8th Avenue: A company focused on private-label products including nut butters and pasta, acquired by Post Holdings.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Operator: Welcome to the Post Holdings Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Matt Mainer, CFO of Post.

Matt Mainer: Thank you, and good morning. Thank you all for joining us today for Post’s Third Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings question-and-answer session. I’m joined this morning by Nico Catoggio, our COO. Rob is unable to join us today as he is feeling under the weather and Daniel is actually with his wife who is going into labor. Before I turn the call to Nico, though, I want to remind you that this call is being recorded, and an audio replay will be available on our website at postholdings.com. During today’s call, we make forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that should be carefully considered by investors as actual results could differ materially from these statements.

These forward-looking statements are current as of the date of this call, and management undertakes no obligation to update those statements. The press release and written management remarks that support today’s call are posted on our website in the Investors section. This call will discuss certain non-GAAP measures. For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP measure, see our press release issued yesterday and posted on our website. With that, I will turn the call over to Nico.

Nicolas Catoggio: Thank you, Matt. Good morning, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Our third quarter results were slightly ahead of expectations, driven by stronger-than-anticipated performance in Foodservice, and we are maintaining the midpoint of our fiscal 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance while narrowing the range. From a capital allocation standpoint, we repurchased 4% of our outstanding shares, bringing our total fiscal year-to-date reduction to approximately 17%, while maintaining leverage within our target range. Looking ahead, we believe it’s important to provide early context for fiscal 2027. After adjusting our fiscal 2026 outlook for approximately $80 million of items affecting comparability, we enter fiscal 2027 with a comparable adjusted EBITDA base of approximately $1.48 billion.

While our fiscal 2027 budget remains under development, our preliminary outlook is for adjusted EBITDA that is relatively consistent with this level. Despite normalizing Foodservice earnings, the absence of divested businesses, anticipated inflation and ongoing volume pressure, we currently expect targeted pricing actions, cost savings and Foodservice line rate growth to support fiscal 2027 underlying EBITDA, generally flat relative to the comparable adjusted EBITDA base of approximately $1.48 billion that I mentioned before. With that, operator, please open the line for Q&A.

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

Andrew Lazar: I think to start off Nico you highlight a shift from what’s been a very aggressive share repurchase activity to really more of a deleveraging posture. I was hoping you could delve into this decision a bit more. Is it concern about the direction of EBITDA in the near term and some of the volume pressure given your ’27 outlook or something else? And does this change your ability or desire to go after cash accretive deals that may make sense?

Matt Mainer: Sure. I can take that one, Andrew. And really, it’s consistent with how we’ve always thought about capital allocation when it comes to M&A versus debt reduction, and that’s less a function of a leverage number and really more a function of what we’re seeing in interest rates and refinancing impacts. So while we don’t have a bond maturity for 4 years, we factor in the cash flow impact of refinancing that debt now at higher rates and what would that do to free cash flow.

And as we see rates continue to rise from a refinancing standpoint, that just weighs more heavily to say, hey, we’ve got to start allocating more capital to debt reduction to make sure we’re bringing down debt. So as we get to refinancing, we’re not seeing a deterioration of our free cash flow. Again, we’ll still maintain the ability to buy back shares opportunistically just in the current interest rate environment, it’s certainly going to be at a slower pace than the last couple of years.

I think on the counter, if we see rates somehow return and we’re back in a 5% refinancing rate, then our view would change, but that’s certainly the big driver and the primary win is how we look at it. Relative to the M&A point, I think another angle we view is where is a comfortable leverage level we could take leverage to and where is a comfortable starting point. And that gets us to a similar spot. Hey, mid-4s is somewhere we’re comfortable for, but we wouldn’t want to see that number rise because that would deteriorate some of the flexibility for cash M&A.

So I think that’s where the preliminary outlook for next year is more of a consideration. But again, I’d say, consistent with how we’ve always viewed it.

Andrew Lazar: Got it. And then Post has been obviously very proactive in optimizing its capacity and its assets in categories like ready-to-eat cereal to sort of stay ahead, so to speak, of sort of the structural declining category and maintain solid margins and cash flow. having already closed, I guess, 3 plants in cereal, given trends in the company’s dog food business and maybe some of the potential elasticity impacts of some of the pricing actions that you’re talking about here, I guess, are there some similar actions that you can or may need to take in sort of the pet food space around asset optimization sort of like you’ve done in cereal in the past year or 2?

Nicolas Catoggio: Thanks, Andrew, and it’s a good question. So let me start picking up. So we are constantly assessing those opportunities across every business and in particular in PCB. So before I get to pet, and I will answer that one, we also just made the decision to shut down 2 peanut butter plants. And that’s, again, to your point, it’s exactly the same playbook that we used in cereal. That’s as we integrated the AW business, and we streamlined that business and exited some business that we were literally losing money. We saw the opportunity to shut down 2 plants.

So that’s in the works that’s going to impact ’28 and order of magnitude is similar to what you saw in cereal in the past. So that’s on peanut butter. On pet, it’s a good question. So let me tell you that beyond footprint, we haven’t even scratched the surface in cost in pet, not the way we did it in cereal. And that’s because we wanted to wait until we have the confidence that we had a stable pet business. And we feel that we’re getting to that point.

We are now at a 3% market share and what we are confident is if we can stay in that level, and we think we can because some of the initiatives that we pursue to turn around nutrition are starting to actually show encouraging results. If we can stay in that, call it, 3%, 3.2% market share range, then now we can actually go after cost aggressively. And it’s more than just footprint. There are opportunities to simplify the portfolio, harmonize formulas and a lot of the things that we did in cereal that when you do that, then that will allow us to actually optimize the footprint.

So your question is — to your question, yes, we are assessing those. We are very confident that we have a lot of opportunities in pet, and we’re actually starting to now work on the pipeline of those opportunities.

Operator: Our next question is coming from Matt Smith with Stifel.

Matthew Smith: The narrowed guidance range for this year implies fourth quarter more or less in line with the performance here in the third quarter. You called out Foodservice continuing to move towards the normalized run rate, suggesting it steps lower on a sequential basis. So can you talk about where the offsets to that Foodservice moving lower, where you see a stronger EBITDA outlook as you look into the fourth quarter here?

Matt Mainer: The offsets to Foodservice pulling back in the quarter?

Matthew Smith: Yes, as we think about kind of the shape of the P&L in the fourth quarter and look ahead into ’27.

Matt Mainer: Yes. So it’s more of a — we saw refrigerated retail pull back a bit more than anticipated out of the Easter benefit in Q2 in terms of results in Q3. We see some improvement in that business in Q4 and really for the rest of the portfolio, pretty flat. So we’re not talking about significant changes overall.

Matthew Smith: Matt, the CapEx range moved a little higher at the low end for this year. Can you talk about that incremental investment? And as you look ahead to ’27, give a view of if CapEx remains relatively stable or moves perhaps even higher as you look at some of the supply chain work you’re undertaking?

Matt Mainer: Sure. I think just really a refinement of this year and the pacing we’re seeing on the CapEx range just lead us a little bit higher in the range from where we started, but that’s definitely a bit of a moving target. And again, a lot of these capital projects we’re trying to work through as fast as we can because they’re in the plan for a reason. When you think about next year, a bit too soon to say. I think just to add on to Nico’s comments, as you think about potential network optimization, that’s an area where if we see clear opportunities, there could be some additional capital spend to clear the way for those.

Outside of that, I would expect just continued investment in Foodservice and pursuing growth as we get our plan together for next year and the following year thoughts and then really more of a maintenance level across the balance of the business.

Operator: Our next question is coming from David Palmer with Evercore ISI.

David Palmer: Great. First of all, best to Rob, and congratulations to Daniel, big day. I want to ask you about the EBITDA guidance, just what’s behind the $1.48 billion for PCB, EBITDA down mid-single digits, assuming — should we assume that PCB organic sales down 3%, maybe mid-single digits down for PCB with that guidance? Is that reasonable?

Matt Mainer: I think it’s — again, I think we’ve got kind of a first look and ranges around our businesses, David, and just given the nonrecurring things we were seeing, we wanted to get some indication out there. I think we’re a little cautious to get into details around each business segment until we have a more formalized plan. But certainly, we continue to — we’ve commented in our release that we see growth in Foodservice next year offsetting some of these pressures we’re seeing in terms of inflation and volume pressures. So I think fair, there’s probably a bit of pullback in overall retail offset by Foodservice, but don’t really want to get into the by segment comments yet.

Nicolas Catoggio: Yes. And what I would add actually to Matt’s point, getting into the specific segments, but it’s a comment that applies to all of retail, our retail businesses. We expect, as Matt said, inflation, and it’s going to be a year where we’ll probably chase inflation. Typically to be able to price, we need to wait to see the inflation. That’s how you have the discussion with the retailers. So that’s what that kind of initial outlook actually reflects.

David Palmer: And sort of behind that is I’m looking at the long term here and volume trends for your all-in cereal business, including private label and volume has been down mid-single digits basically the last 2 years now. And I wonder if that’s just kind of how you’re thinking about that business going forward as an underlying assumption going forward, i.e., it’s not going to get better anytime soon or maybe the other, do you see some real tangible reasons why it could get better over the next fiscal year? And I’ll pass it on.

Nicolas Catoggio: Again, we still don’t know — we don’t have all the details of the plants. And what I can tell you is that I would expect the cereal volume to move closer to the category next year. The reason why we’ve been driving the category a bit in the last year, it’s a lot of decisions that we made. So one is we talked about it in the last 2 quarters. We adjusted the assortment to have better performance or efficiency in our promotions. That is worth 1 percentage point of the gap versus the category. So it’s significant. It’s 50% of the gap versus the category.

And the rest, as we mentioned, is we have some distribution in our Malt-O-Meal brand, and it’s kind of the SKUs, the lower velocity SKUs, but without going forward, the rest of the portfolio is performing really well. Our premium portfolio, we are gaining market share in our premium portfolio. That is great news. So I would anticipate moving closer to the category. Where the category is going to be, we don’t know. The good news is it’s actually slowly improving quarter after quarter. It’s getting closer to what we see as the long-term sustainable trend in the category of, call it, minus 1%, minus 2%. We are not there yet, but we’re getting closer.

Operator: Our next question is coming from Tom Palmer with JPMorgan.

Thomas Palmer: Maybe just follow up on something you touched on earlier in the call related to Andrew’s question. The pet business, you made mention that you like the progress that you’re starting to see. Could we maybe just get more of an update there on kind of the different brands and where we stand in terms of instituting changes and seeing those on-shelf changes?

Nicolas Catoggio: Yes, absolutely. So let me — if you take the year-over-year decline for that business, 60% of that is our value brands, and most of that is 9Lives. And we mentioned last quarter, we relaunched 1/3 of that brand that we were not making money on. We saw elasticities higher than what we anticipated. But at the same time, we like the margins, right? We like the margins more than what we used to, I would say. So we had to do it. We are actually working as we speak, and we are seeing good progress on kind of resetting the value proposition for that.

At the same time, the cat segment because it’s where the growth is in the category has been very, very active in terms of promotion. So 9Lives that stands essentially for value in the category has seen a lot of promotions, competitive promotions and with 2 of our main competitor brands actually hitting price points below our brand. We are not going to follow them. We are very disciplined when we think about promotions. So we don’t see that as something that will kind of remain like that over time. But in the short term, that’s a lot of the pressure that 9Lives is under.

Nutrish — so let me tell you the good news and — so the good news is where the brand is fully relaunched and we work — actively work our assortment to what we call our core assortment, beef, chicken and salmon, the brand is performing well. So our largest retailer is a good example of that. We very aggressively manage our assortment. We have what we call our mass SKUs they are on shelf. And they are losing market share year-over-year to now over the last 13 weeks, we are gaining market share.

So in dry dock, that’s what we measure as some other retailers where we are actually transitioning, we see a clear inflection point in the performance of the brand. Now the transition has taken a bit longer than anticipated. It’s been a bit more messy. And the other thing is there’s a clear difference in performance between, again, what we call our assortment and the flanker SKUs. So what we are working on is for the next reset is doing a lot more of what we did in this — one of the larger retailers that is working the assortment to actually focus on that core set of SKUs that performed really well.

Again, the good news is where will relaunch those, where they are fully transitioned, we are actually seeing a clear inflection point and those SKUs actually in the top third of the category, and that’s very encouraging.

Thomas Palmer: Great. I did have one other question on PCP. Just looking back over the past 4 quarters, a pretty meaningful pullback in marketing agency activity. As you look forward, since you’re going to start lapping that pullback, is there more to do? Or given some of these on-shelf changes, especially in pet, does it make sense to maybe invest back a bit? Just kind of curious your views there.

Nicolas Catoggio: Yes. So I would actually say there are 2 things behind that. One is we constantly work to improve the return on spend and the effectiveness of spend. So almost 100% of our spend now is digital and no linear TV. So we improve our returns. So that’s on the — across the portfolio, but mostly on the cereal side. So we haven’t pulled support out of the cereal brands. We just got more effective spend. In pet, some of the A&C pullback is essentially — it’s not necessarily A&C that we’re pulling out is we are actually deploying dollars differently.

So there’s more spend on in-store activation or select rollbacks and support — retailer support that is, again, dollars that move from A&C to, call it, trade spend to reset some of the equations that we talk about. Do we anticipate some support back in some brands? It’s brand by brand. We feel really good about the returns in our cereal brands, really, really good. And we’re going to be selective in our support in our pet brands.

Operator: We’ll move on now to Scott Marks with Jefferies.

Scott Marks: First thing I wanted to ask about is the Foodservice business and specifically on the profit side. I think despite the lapping the HPAI pricing adders and price realization being decidedly negative this quarter, you still put up a pretty strong profit number actually in line with what you did in Q2. So just wondering if you can help us understand the moving pieces there? Why was it so strong? And maybe why shouldn’t we believe that the actual annualized run rate is higher than the $500 million?

Matt Mainer: Sure. Very fair question. I think just to think about the $500 million run rate is really an estimate of what we see the current business earning power is under normalized circumstances. And I think you got to define the view of normalized circumstances is really, I’d say, 3 things. It’s our balance — I’m sorry, our business being back in balance from a supply and demand standpoint, really our inventories back to normal and then also underlying market versus grain-based egg pricing. Happy to say the first 2, so our internal supply and demand and our inventories, which we continue to build this past quarter are back to where we’d like to see them and in balance.

So we really left with that third piece, which is a bit of imbalance between market and grain-based egg pricing. And that’s really a function — all 3 were a function of HPAI last year and throwing the industry and our own supply out of whack. Again, I think the third piece, we believe, will correct itself just when you have a situation of oversupply is where we believe we are from an industry standpoint that is actually not going to survive long when you’ve got chickens, the cost to feed them is greater than what you can command on the open market. We expect people will take some actions to bring that in line.

So I think that collectively is how we really view the underlying run rate and how we view the business heading into ’27. Again, we feel we can fully grow off of that number in ’27 off the $500 million run rate. But that’s our attempt to try and carve those pieces out and get to what we see in underlying volumes and balance of the business where it’s running today.

Nicolas Catoggio: And Scott, one thing that I would add is in Q3, we probably took a bit more advantage of the market conditions than what we anticipated. So we exited the quarter with really high inventories. That’s part of what is reflected in that number.

Scott Marks: Understood. Appreciate the color there. And then maybe just as a follow-up, since you guys gave fiscal ’27 guidance, you kind of gave some tailwinds helping you, some of the headwinds that are offsetting. Just wondering if you can share any assumptions in terms of rate of inflation, where that’s coming from? Just any other building blocks you’re willing to share at this point?

Matt Mainer: Yes. I think we’re hesitant to get into any broad-based assumptions. We really just wanted to rebase ’26 to make sure we’re very clear on Foodservice run rate, where we’re seeing that and then also the impact of the 2 divestitures we made. I think beyond that, like I said, we’re in the middle of stages here and have some first looks and ranges, but really don’t want to get into underlying assumptions. I think broad brush, we see those all balancing out, and that’s why we’re saying a stable flat year to a rebalanced ’26, but really not in a position to get into a lot of details around those assumptions.

Certainly, as we get to November, we’ll be able to walk through much more specifically some of those assumptions.

Operator: Our next question is coming from Marc Torrente with Wells Fargo.

Marc Torrente: Maybe just asking the last one a bit differently. The flattish outlook into next year, are the inflation pressures and volume trends you’re seeing consistent with your prior expectations that you sort of walked through on the last call? And where is that mostly flowing through?

Nicolas Catoggio: I can try at least. So again, we’re still working on the budget. So we don’t have all the details. But I would actually say volumes are consistent with what we’re seeing. Inflation, I mentioned in the last call that we wanted to see — we needed to wait to have a bit more visibility. And I think what we’re seeing is coming in probably at the higher end of what we were expecting. So it’s within the range that we were expecting, but at the higher end of that range. And again, that’s part of what is reflected in that initial outlook.

Marc Torrente: Okay. I appreciate that. And then on Refrigerated Retail, could you maybe help us understand some of the weakness in the quarter? The underlying was down. I think that was mostly due to the pricing lap and holiday timing. But maybe just what does that business look like near term? And maybe quantify some of the impact from the Crystal Farm sale.

Matt Mainer: Sure. So yes, to your point, year-over-year, the Easter timing was a big factor. And then also as a reminder, in Q3 and Q4 of last year, we had pricing adders around AI that were beneficial for the business. And those just like our Foodservice business that were taken off as we got into fiscal ’27. So Easter and those pricing adders are the big year-over-year drivers.

And then in addition to that, which is more of the current run rate of the business, certainly, as we’ve seen across the portfolio, but on a relative size basis, just more impactful for Refrigerated Retail has been the impact of higher fuel costs and freight costs that we’ve seen and we talked about on our prior call. And then the other impact is around eggs. The dynamic there is we’re selling on the market. We’re a grain-based buyer of eggs, and you’ve got a dynamic where market prices have plummeted.

So it’s a tough situation to try and take pricing in to equalize those when the markets are suggesting price of eggs from a market standpoint is much lower than the dynamic we’ve seen here in Q3, and that’s really maybe the gap to expectations, both internal and external for Q3.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Rob Dickerson with U.S. Bancorp BTIG.

Robert Dickerson: So you put in the release last night and some commentary this morning on just kind of the ongoing volume weakness, but then offsets and part of the offsets will be pricing, but you’re also saying be kind of chasing the pricing a little bit because that has to come through first. So I guess just to clarify simplistically, it would seem like if there’s a little bit of pricing contribution next year, that would probably be later in the year, maybe more back half in the year.

And then secondly, if you could just touch on, broadly speaking, at least, kind of where you think you might still see some ongoing volume softness and then where you also might think you might have a higher probability of some of that pricing? Just kind of going through the different segments, at least for purposes of modeling.

Nicolas Catoggio: So I think you’re spot on. So our assumption right now is that pricing will be more towards the end of the year. Right now, where we see more of that happening is in PCB. But again, early on in the process. So — but that’s where we see most of the inflation and where we expect some pricing. Volumes, I think it’s going to be similar to what we’ve seen. So if you think about the categories, again, we don’t know exactly what the category is going to be, but cereal expected to decline probably 2.5%. But again, we don’t know.

I mean — and then in that, as a reminder, most of — so 2/3 of our portfolio, 60% of our portfolio is dry dog. That segment is underperforming the category. So if you think about dog it’s underperforming cat. So dog is declining, cat segment is growing. And within dog dry is underperforming. So that’s going to be a headwind. So that’s where we see some volume softness. But again, it’s more driven by the category than our brands. We feel that we are going to be moving towards that category average. But again, considering the mix of our portfolio.

Robert Dickerson: Okay. Great. Very helpful. And then just quickly back to the leverage versus buyback perspective right now. I think you said kind of comfortable in that mid-4 range around there. also said you don’t really have any big maturities coming due, but clearly want to be cognizant of the rate environment and how it impacts interest and cash flow, et cetera. So kind of all that said, though, is that think what you’re saying basically is kind of the cash allocated to buybacks, let’s say, over the next 18 months, just making it up, will be lower and then the cash to incremental debt paydown would be higher despite having kind of no maturity coming due.

Like you’re going to pay down debt, just not buy back as much stock. That is basically it.

Matt Mainer: Yes. I think you summarized it well. I mean that’s given our current view, and we’ll continue to look at where rates are going and refinance rates. But just in the last quarter, as an example, our 10-year refinance rate, which is our benchmark, what we look at, has risen 50 basis points. So that certainly goes into the model and the factor. So assuming rates stay elevated over the next year, that’s the right way to think about how we’re thinking about capital allocation favoring debt reduction over share repurchases. Again, we still have a pool of cash flow that we can deploy against share repurchases.

It’s just — and the balance is going to be more on the debt side in this interest rate environment.

Operator: Our next question is coming from Carla Casella with JPMorgan.

Carla Casella: You mentioned in the prepared remarks about gaining some share in private label in pet. And I’m just wondering how you think about private label in that business? Is that a bigger opportunity? Or is that something you’re just using to fill in space and kind of how you think about private label in general?

Nicolas Catoggio: In general, in pet, you mean?

Carla Casella: Yes.

Nicolas Catoggio: Yes. So if you remember, we lost some business 18 months ago, we were confident that we were going to recover some of that, and that’s essentially what’s happening. We have a fairly unique position in the category. We are a premium private label player. So we produce mostly premium products. And that’s a segment that is growing in the category. So we are well positioned. So we see more opportunities of that. And then the other opportunity is as we continue integrating the footprint, we see more opportunities of actually expanding private label as we leverage the full footprint that we have. So we feel good about that. That business is actually performing really well.

Carla Casella: That’s great. And I’m just wondering if you have any comments in terms of like in pet, where you’re seeing the pockets of strength? Is it mass, club, pet specialty, any kind of divergence in trends by type of retailer?

Nicolas Catoggio: Yes, it’s a good question. So the obvious one is e-commerce is growing — outgrowing every other channel. And it’s both the 2 pure plays, so that you know and also the retailer.com businesses. So all those are outgrowing brick-and-mortar. Within brick-and-mortar, pet specialty is still as a channel underperforming relative to mass. So the mass is doing probably slightly better than the average specialty is underperforming and e-commerce is clearly overperforming.

Carla Casella: Okay. Great. And then can you comment on SNAP impact either on the quarter and how you’re thinking about it for the year or if there’s like a timing issue of when you expect the greatest SNAP impact versus when it may normalize?

Nicolas Catoggio: SNAP, we’ve been — I wish I knew exactly the answer for that. So most people see it as a headwind. I personally have had this theory, and I think it’s what we’re seeing in the category. It’s probably consistent with that, that it could be a tailwind for categories like cereal because of affordability. Cereal is still one of the cheapest categories for breakfast and it’s definitely the cheapest way to actually have the right nutrients in your breakfast. So we longer term, I still see it as an opportunity. But the reality is there’s a lot of noise.

And I would add, it’s not only SNAP, there are changes in the WIC program, the women, infant and children program that also impact the category because there were changes to the dairy allocation that impact the category. So there’s so much noise. So I don’t have the perfect answer for SNAP. I see it as potentially an opportunity for cereal. And the reality is if you think about when SNAP change, that is in our Q1, that’s when we started seeing the category starting to perform a bit better.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s Post Holdings Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. Please disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day.