Oil-Dri Corporation of America Q2 Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call - Strong Cash, $22M EBITDA and Operational Resilience Through Winter Storm Fern

Conference Call Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings discussion for Oil-Dri Corporation of America. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there’ll be a question and answer session. If you’d like to ask a question during the session, you need to press star one on your telephone. You will then hear an automatic message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw yourself from the queue, please press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, President and CEO, Dan Jaffee. Jaffee, please go ahead.

Dan Jaffee, President and CEO, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Thank you and welcome everybody. We are in virtual mode, so we’ve got people dialing in from all over. I’m gonna introduce them. We very much appreciate you guys getting your questions in early. That gave us a chance to develop our responses and prioritize. So thank you for doing that. With me today is Susan Kreh, our CFO and CIO. Aaron Christiansen, our VP of Operations. Chris Lamson, Group Vice President of Business to Business and Strategic Growth Initiatives. Wade Robey, VP of Agriculture and President of Amlan International. Laura Scheland, Vice President and General Manager of our Consumer Products Division. Bruce Patsey, our Vice President of Fluids Purification. Mervyn de Souza, VP of Research and Development. Tony Parker, our VP, General Counsel and Secretary. Leslie Garber, our Director of Investor Relations.

I’m gonna turn it over to Leslie for our safe harbor provision.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Good morning, everyone. I also just want to note that Jonathan Blake, VP, Corporate Controller, is also on the call today. On today’s call, comments may contain forward-looking statements regarding the company’s performance in future periods. Actual results in those periods may materially differ. In our press release and in our SEC filings, we highlight a number of important risk factors, trends, and uncertainties that may affect our future performance. We ask that you review and consider those factors in evaluating the company’s comments and in evaluating any investment in Oil-Dri’s stock. Thank you for joining us. Now I’m turning it back over to you, Dan.

Dan Jaffee, President and CEO, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Great. Thank you, Leslie. As always, I’m gonna have a few comments, but I’m really gonna turn it over to the team to walk you through a lot of the details and what went on in the quarter. Very proud of the results. We had a very strong quarter, especially given the way we navigated through the storm called Fern. I’m not gonna get into that too much because I know Susan’s gonna cover it, Aaron’s probably gonna cover it. All I’m gonna say is it was another validation of the commitment and the caring that our global teammates have for doing everything they can to create value from sorbent minerals and help deliver value to our shareholders. We had a lot of heroic effort. We absolutely emphasized safety first, making sure that everyone took care of their family.

They were without power. They were without water, some for some period of time. It was really a dynamic situation, and we navigated it very, very well. I’m just very proud of the team. Susan, I’m gonna turn it over to you to walk us through the quarter.

Susan Kreh, CFO and CIO, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Sure. Thank you, Dan. In order to preserve the most time for the Q&A portion of this call, I’m going to highlight a few financial matters and then address any of your other questions during the Q&A session. During our second fiscal quarter, Oil-Dri continued to deliver strong financial performance. However, when I reflect back on the second quarter, what makes me so proud to be a part of this team is how everyone, especially our operations leadership, handled the situation with Winter Storm Fern. They played a team game and demonstrated agility in using our entire plant network to service our customers, and they did so while embracing the core values of our culture.

Those core values shone brightly when the first thing that the operations team addressed as the magnitude of the storm impact unfolded was the safety and well-being of our teammates, followed closely by a focus on taking care of our customers, both of which are key pillars of our WE CARE values. Aaron, I hope your team is listening and that they know how much the rest of us appreciate what they did to handle such a major disruption and handle it so well. Switching gears back to financial performance, I wanna highlight our continued ability to generate strong cash flows. During the second quarter of our fiscal year 2026, Oil-Dri generated EBITDA of $22 million, which was in line with the $22 million of EBITDA generated during the same quarter a year ago.

For the first six months of fiscal year 2026, Oil-Dri has generated cash flows from operating activities of just over $28 million. Our strong ability to generate cash was an enabler in building our inventories. The elevated levels of inventory going into January played a key role in being able to service our customers, while several of our production facilities experienced outages resulting from Winter Storm Fern. Our strong cash position also supports our continued investments in growth and infrastructure projects in our manufacturing facilities. We ended our fiscal second quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $47 million.

Our outstanding debt at the end of the second quarter, including current maturities of notes payable, was $40 million, meaning that at this point in time we have more cash than debt and we are extremely well positioned to make continued investments in our business to support our strategic growth initiatives, such as a couple of the new product launches that we will see in the second half of this fiscal year.

In summary, our strong financial performance and our strong cash position, coupled with our deep cultural values of being a team-based organization with a focus on our people and our customers, enabled our resiliency during a major weather-related disruption. Again, I’ll say, I’ll take your questions during the Q&A if you have any specific accounting or financial questions. With that, Dan, I will turn it back over to you.

Dan Jaffee, President and CEO, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Okay, great. Before I open up to the Q&A, you know, we had a great board meeting yesterday, and I wasn’t being facetious when I said, look, the one constant I’ve been doing this job since 1995, so I haven’t been promoted in 31 years. You’ve seen a lot of dynamic growth the last 3-5 years, and a lot of that was seeds that were planted maybe three years before that. You know, for the fun of it, I was clicking on my app this morning, and if you look at our one-year growth rate on the stock price is 36%. When I click to 2, it jumps to 88%. When I click to 5, it jumps to 258%.

I am sincere in saying that is a direct result of the incredible work that our team does on a global basis every single day, led by the people you’re hearing on this teleconference. When you invest in Oil-Dri, you’re investing in the team, and we have a phenomenal team, and I just want to thank them publicly for the incredible job they do. Leslie, I’ll turn it over to you now for the Q&A. Leslie, I’m not hearing you.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: I’m here. I’ll open up the floor for Q&A. Please submit your questions using the Ask a Question field on the webcast and click Submit. Our first question comes from John Baer from Ascend Wealth Advisors, and he asks, "Several years ago, Oil-Dri made it known that considerable CapEx costs would be undertaken over a 3- to 5-year period to upgrade and modernize plant and equipment. Recognizing there are always unexpected developments that pop up, how far along is that effort? Have the major initiatives been accomplished, and can we expect that those costs will diminish over the next few years?" Aaron, will you please take that?

Aaron Christiansen, VP of Operations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Thanks, John. I appreciate the question. As we approach the completion of our fourth year of elevated capital spending, I’d say the program has really progressed as intended. We’ve executed our plan with strong discipline, addressing some foundational areas of the business, including revitalizing portions of our mine fleet, advancing power, air, and other critical infrastructure work, and prioritizing core processing assets. Really importantly, we don’t view this as a discrete project with a defined endpoint. Although prior communicated as a 3-5-year endeavor, that was an initial belief. Our approach to capital allocation ongoing is to increasingly anchor to our long-term replacement cost of our asset base with a focus on sustaining high uptime, optimizing capacity, and consistently meeting customer service expectations. I often say to Dan and Susan, I am the steward of our asset base and manufacturing plants.

The reliability and service performance that our customers experience is directly tied to having a manufacturing network that is flexible, continually ready to perform, and that remains central to how we think about capital going forward. Susan and Dan both paid me significant compliments in the way we managed through winter storm Fern. I’ll make a direct connection to the ability to have our entire asset base ready to perform when we mash the pedal, coming out of that storm and to use our plants in a way that’s flexible, and somewhat atypical in the weeks that followed the storm. I hope that answers your question, John.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Perfect. The next question comes from Ethan Starr, and he asks, "What’s the sales increase in agriculture and horticulture products, and is the increase in sales sustainable? Are you still finding new customers who want to include Verge granules in products they manufacture?" I’m gonna turn that over to Wade.

Wade Robey, VP of Agriculture and President of Amlan International, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Yes. Thank you, Leslie. Thank you, Ethan, for that question and for noting the excellent performance we’ve seen in that division, the first half of this year. There’s really two parts of the market that we serve, and I’ll segregate those for you real quick. The first is the, what I’ll call the broad acre market, which would be directed at grains, oilseeds or pulses, and that’s the large scale farming side of the business that we target with the fine ag products that we sell. The second would be on the turf and ornamental side, where we focus with engineered granules like Verge. In both cases, we’ve seen good performance out of those segments, in the first half of the year.

The broad acre side is really driven, mostly by planted acres, and we’ve seen increases in those planted acres over the last year, which allows our ag retailer partners, who are our customers, to service more acres, and that drives sales. That’s been good growth, and we expect that to continue kind of normal to historic patterns. On the turf and ornamental side, it’s again the engineered side of the business where we target with Verge. That’s been good as well for us, and we’ve seen new product opportunities for us or new application opportunities for us come in, specifically with some new customers we’ve been developing. Those granules are used in products like insecticides or in products like specialty fertilizers for the turf and ornamental markets. Those markets have both been strong.

We remain very bullish on the growth of that side of the business as well.

Overall, we expect to see good performance over the next couple of years as we continue to expand with current customers and they expand their respective markets as well.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Great. Thank you. The next question comes from Robert Smith from Center for Performance Investing, and we also have a couple of other questions that are similar. Will there be new product introductions of note during the second half? Which areas, and can you share any color of expectations as to their importance? As always, thank you. I’m gonna have Laura Scheland cover that.

Laura Scheland, Vice President and General Manager of Consumer Products Division, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Sure. Hi, good morning. Thanks for the question. At Oil-Dri, we’re always dedicated to innovation and improved consumer experience with our robust R&D and product development teams, as evidenced by our recent and new product launches in the past fiscal year and this fiscal year. I’m excited to report some updates there. You know, in recent past years, we launched our EPA-approved antibacterial litter and excited and pleased with the progress and increased distribution during this fiscal year. Also last quarter, I reported out on 3 new Cat’s Pride Crystal items that test better than competition with 30 days guaranteed odor control. We are pleased with these items and performance in the market and the distribution that’s growing. Very excited to announce a new expansion of our Crystal litter portfolio.

Just in the past month, launched a new health monitoring litter that provides great peace of mind to consumers. We’re excited to see our proprietary health monitoring formulation that we put a lot of effort to develop not just what’s currently in market, but even improved formulations for real vibrant color indication. In addition, last quarter, I reported on our new Cat’s Pride Scoopable Pail that launched in the fall at Walmart. Well, in the second quarter, we added an additional Cat’s Pride Total Odor Guard Pail exclusively at Walmart, and excited with that expansion of branded items. Additionally, we also just launched a new line of Cat’s Pride Max Power Pro items that are exclusively online in our standup bags and are designed and optimized for e-commerce fulfillment.

Really excited about the progress of our innovation, that’s, you know, geared to offer consumers the best experience, but also to partner with our strategic customers to satisfy their needs and desires and kind of maximize for a growing e-commerce segment as well. Thank you.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Great. Thanks. Next question comes from Hari Manikandan from Copeland Capital Management. Can you give more details on underlying drivers of weakness in renewable diesel sales? What are the bottlenecks to both capacity and EPC? When can we expect it to reaccelerate?

Bruce Patsey, Vice President of Fluids Purification, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Yes, I’ll respond to that. This is Bruce Pacy. Currently, you know, the Blender’s tax or the Blender’s rebate was removed and a producer’s rebate was put in place. This caused a little disruption at some of the renewable customers and actually reduced production as they were trying to figure out how much money they would get back from the federal government. We did see a slowdown. Secondly, the feedstock oils that were brought into these plants changed a little bit, and no longer is there a rebate for feedstocks that come over from China or foreign markets into the U.S. With that, their plants are just adjusting.

Currently, there’s a 45Z rebate been put in place, and as these companies start to work with that more in the future, I’m sure we’re gonna see some growth in that renewable market in the coming quarters.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Great. Thank you. The next question comes from Ethan Starr. Are you selling the co-packaged lightweight litter to the same customer you sell other co-packaged litter to, or is it being sold to multiple customers? Christopher Lamson, please address that.

Chris Lamson, Group Vice President of Business to Business and Strategic Growth Initiatives, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Thanks, Leslie, and thanks, Ethan, for the question. Unfortunately, our contractual obligations, Ethan, really don’t allow us to share either the name of the brands or partners that we’re working with. But that being said, I’d really like to take the opportunity to highlight, you know, the revenue that you saw and we mentioned in the press release is really a culmination of a multi-year cross-functional effort from our team and the partner to bring our first offering in the lightweight segment that is, in fact, a contract manufacturing item for us. While we’re really excited about the new business and the revenue and profit stream it should create for us going forward, we’re just as excited about really what it does for the lightweight segment.

You’ve heard, you know, me and more recently, Laura, talk time and time again that really our strategy is about growing.

The lightweight segment. We’ve got a nice sized pie of it, and we’ll continue to have that nice sized pie of it, but we really wanna grow that pie. We think, candidly, as much as there’s a big revenue gain here, we also think having a strong player with strong brands participating in the segment with a great product that we’ve worked with them to develop over the last couple of years will continue to do just that. Laura would, I think Laura would tell you because she told me that that segment growth is really continuing to work. If you looked at Nielsen data, you’d see that growth rates in the lightweight segment are well ahead of the rest of the segment.

In fact, it’s the single biggest driver of growth in total cat litter over the last year. We’re both pleased about the revenue, and we’re pleased about the strategic impact this will make for us for a long time.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Thank you.

Chris Lamson, Group Vice President of Business to Business and Strategic Growth Initiatives, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Yeah.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: John Baer asks, "In the recent 10-Q, you indicate that the year-over-year six month per ton manufacturing costs were up, but per ton transportation and packaging costs were lower. Can you speak to the current trends in your manufacturing costs as well as transportation and packaging cost trends? Are the latter improvements due to your efficiency efforts or the macro environment?" Aaron, will you please address that?

Aaron Christiansen, VP of Operations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Yeah, John, that’s another thoughtful question. There’s a few elements in your question I’ll try to unpack one at a time. Starting with manufacturing costs, the year-over-year comparison reflects a combination of timing and normal volatility, with no real single underlying driver or trend. As both Susan and Dan and I already talked to, we experienced meaningful operational disruption late in the quarter from Winter Storm Fern, which included temporary production outages at multiple U.S. plants, which created some short-term fixed cost absorption pressure, as well as some variable costs that came with the event. In addition to the timing of the weather, the winter storm late in January, labor-related inputs, in particular benefits, continue to be an area of cost pressure for us, which is not uncommon in the industry. I mean, we’ve seen that flow through our results.

I’ll add here, our repair costs continue to stabilize directly related to your prior question, and the ongoing reinvestment in capital into our asset base. Turning to transportation, we do operate in markets that naturally fluctuate, and recent periods reflected a more balanced freight environment. That being said, we tend to view freight per-freight performance less through the lens of spot conditions and more through execution and how we take advantage of those spot conditions. I’ll take a moment to thank, recognize, and acknowledge our freight and logistics team for the great work that they do to align the right carrier partnerships, network design, and operating discipline to consistently meet customer service expectations to our wildly high on-time performance that commonly exceeds 90%.

Maintaining a strong on-time performance while managing freight costs requires daily coordination across the organization that remains a core operational focus for us regardless of those market conditions. We wanna always be better than market conditions through our operational execution. On packaging input costs, input costs have been relatively stable overall, with offsetting pressures across different materials and sourcing categories, including tariffs. I will remind the audience here that a very large portion of our manufacture or our packaging costs or packaging materials are domestically sourced. We’re less exposed to tariff costs than many competitors. Our focus here as elsewhere is on structural capability, standardization, specification, diversification, where appropriate, and supplier engagement and partnership. Rather than short-term commodity movements, we are focused on long-term strategy with the right partners.

Those efforts help us manage variability over time, but we don’t view them as eliminating exposure to broader cost dynamics. Overall, we continue to manage the business for reliability, service, and long-term operating resilience, recognizing that cost inputs will move differently across categories and time periods.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Thanks, Aaron. We have two questions regarding Amlan, one from Ethan Starr and one from Robert Smith. I’m just gonna read one of them because Wade Robey will touch on both. Despite the rough quarter for Amlan, what progress are you making with Amlan, and do you expect sales growth for Amlan over the long term? Wade?

Wade Robey, VP of Agriculture and President of Amlan International, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Yes, thank you, Leslie, and thank you to both of you for that question. I appreciate the opportunity to address the performance in the first part of the year for Amlan. As was mentioned in the press release, we did lose a key account which has impacted our performance to date quite a bit, which is reflected in the numbers. This is really a function of the extraordinarily large size of the accounts that we target in many cases, really around the world, not just in the U.S. market, but in LatAm and in Asia Pacific as well. These accounts are really enormous in size.

That benefits us greatly on the positive side when we gain a new account, but can hurt us on the downside if we lose an account, albeit temporarily. In this case, we did have an account loss early in the fiscal year, very early, in fact. Since then, we’ve been working very hard to recover that business with our distribution partner. They’re actually the seller of the products to the account directly through our distribution network. The second thing we’ve been doing, which we always do, which is work to broaden the base of our customers. This has the best effect long term to mitigate the impact of any single account loss. Really those two actions is what we’ve been focusing on.

None of this in any way changes the outlook we have for the business or the excitement we have around these markets that we’re targeting for Oil-Dri. The animal nutrition, animal feed additive markets are very, very large. They’re around the globe, as you know, and they tend to be high margin, high-value markets. We’re continuing the strategy, continuing our approach, and are just working hard to recover the loss that we saw early in the year.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Okay, thank you. Next question is from Robert Smith. From what you see now, what are the headwinds and tailwinds of the oil and gas situation, first with respect to the fluid segment and then corporate-wide? I’m thinking of sustainable aviation fuels, renewables, and then costs. I’m first gonna have Bruce Patsey address that, regarding renewable diesel and fluid purification, and then I’m gonna turn it over to Aaron Christiansen about costs. Bruce?

Bruce Patsey, Vice President of Fluids Purification, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Yes, thanks for the question. The conflict is causing increased fuel costs, obviously, for us at the pump. This also helps increase the margin for our end users that are using our products to make renewable diesel. We are seeing a slight uptick in orders right now as they’re trying to produce more oil to get out into the market. The tailwinds, I guess, for our end user in this case would be if this price stays up high for a long time, the suppliers of the feedstock oil are gonna pass increases on to them, which will then affect and negatively impact their margins. At this point, if it stays a 30-60-day issue, I think we’ll see an uptick with that business. That’s my answer. Thank you.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Great. Aaron?

Aaron Christiansen, VP of Operations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Leslie, I’ll speak to it from a cost perspective. Robert, I’ll remind you and other investors that several years ago, Oil-Dri resumed the practice of forward buying a portion of our consumed natural gas, very mathematically and algorithmically. We purchased strips of natural gas that buffer and dollar cost average our forward exposure. I deliberately continue to avoid the word hedge. We’re not trying to beat the market. We’re trying to dollar cost average over time and then buy our organization time to understand where prices are going. Where appropriate, pass those costs along in the marketplace as utility costs rise over a period of time. Periods like we’re experiencing right now are the points in time that our current strategy provides me great comfort, knowing that we’re not exposed to substantial changes in cost short term.

We have time to react as we see where prices go longer term.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Thank you. Okay, we have one last question from Robert Smith. Are you already at work using artificial intelligence in the microbiology center to identify targets for new product development for your clay? Mervyn, I’ll turn that over to you.

Mervyn de Souza, VP of Research and Development, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Thanks, Leslie. Appreciate the question, Robert. I think we all know artificial intelligence has become a household term now that’s impacting almost every walk of life, both with positive and negative outcomes. Across Oil-Dri and within the R&D team, as I’ve mentioned in the past, we have a very thoughtful and deliberate approach when it comes to the use of AI to drive us towards both increased efficiency and effectiveness. We’re working on integrating both human and artificial intelligence into our day-to-day operations as they become relevant, both for new product development as well as for improving our existing products to deliver innovative solutions to our Oil-Dri customers.

Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Wonderful. Thank you. That is the end of the Q&A portion. Dan, do you have any closing remarks?

Dan Jaffee, President and CEO, Oil-Dri Corporation of America: Yeah. I just wanna thank the investors for very thoughtful and on-point questions. It shows, you know, you’re longtime holders, and you’ve been very invested in the strategy and growth of the company over many, many years. Your knowledge of, you know, where we create value and where we have opportunities is clear by the questions you’re asking. So thank you for that. Thank you to the Oil-Dri team, and we will be looking forward to our third quarter teleconference in, you know, around 90 days.

Conference Call Operator: This does conclude today’s program. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.