It's truly amazing to see the growth of the conference over time, as we expect around 400 investors and 1,000 total attendees at the conference between yesterday and today. Throughout the day, the conference will feature panels, presentations, and fireside chats from senior executives across a range of public and private companies spanning the agricultural and food value chain, including the crop protection, fertilizer, chemicals, agribusiness, protein, food, and beverage sectors. And we're excited to explore in our keynote lunch panel how private equity firms are managing existing portfolio companies and deploying new capital amidst current market uncertainties with representatives from Apollo, Ospraie Ag Science, and BMO Sponsor Finance. Before I go any further, I want to take a moment to thank the many people who truly make the conference the success you see today. The management teams have been unbelievably gracious with their time and insights, upon which the conference has been built. Our tremendous sales force, devoted editorial staff, and tireless conference coordinators are remarkable in their commitment to making the event a success for investors and companies in attendance. Finally, thank you to the investors that have joined us from all parts of the world to really make this event special. As is the case each year, our goal is to provide a venue to explore key issues and investment opportunities across the food value chain. We hope you come away from the conference with incremental insights and a better understanding of company strategies and outlooks, opportunities and challenges, and new ideas. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask, and thank you. Enjoy the conference. We have probably a minute before we need to get going. That's okay. That's okay. We're excited to have Ingredion with us to kick off the second day of the conference. Ingredion continues to execute on its evolution to a more value-added specialty ingredient company, leveraging strategic investments and operational improvements to drive strong and more consistent performance. The strategy has enabled Ingredion to navigate a range of operating environments in recent years and contributed to a 50% appreciation in shares over the last 15 months, among the strongest performances within our agribusiness coverage over that time frame. We're joined today by Ingredion's CFO, Jim Gray. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. Glad to be here. I guess where I wanted to start is on some of the investments that the company has made over the last several years. It's been about $1 billion in terms of acquisitions and growth projects over that last maybe six years or so. I know we're going back a little bit. Can you talk about the strategy behind those investments and how you're seeking to shape the portfolio? Sure. You know, I think when Jim Zallie, you know, ascended to CEO in 2018, you know, we really had a business that was, one, pretty country-based. It generally followed where corn or tapioca grew around the world. We had amazing teams that could execute locally. But then, when you looked at the overall portfolio, everybody. Each team kind of prioritized around their own business, and what were the opportunities within that country, across different industry sectors. And so it didn't have any ability to, you know, to kind of gain momentum. And so when we came in, and we started looking at where we could put portfolio investments, you know, into, in, into particular segments, product segments, serving different customers, you know, we did so with a lens of growth. We did so with a lens of risk. You know, eventually, it's—I think what we're doing is we're building in more consistency and profit flow to the portfolio. We're also kind of upgrading in terms of margins. We're upgrading in terms of the products and their value to customers. And so that's really—you know, that's probably a good way to theme it. Obviously, we've had some specific investments. We've gone into sugar reduction. We've ventured into plant-based protein. But what we've really done is really driven texture and really elevated, I think, our overall texture portfolio. And texture for us is a very broad definition. So much like you might own a flavor or fragrance company, where they're focused on making the scent or the essential oils that kind of provide that flavor, texture is a larger ingredient component in food and beverage. And it has a different supply chain to it. And it plays a different role in the foods and the beverages that we eat. And so, we think it's a bit of an untapped and a little—t here's lots of different organized opportunities within that market globally. But underlying it, there's a lot of competencies to actually deliver texture effectively and efficiently for customers, and so that's been our theme for the last five or six years. When you think about allocating capital towards these types of projects, what type of returns do you get on those investments? Are there areas where you've allocated capital that are either ahead or behind, maybe have some additional catch-up or growth opportunities to contribute to the profit growth expectations this year or next? Yeah. Well, so in our business, when, when we're putting organic capital to work, you know, it might take us one to two years to put, you know, equipment into dirt, and it, then it might take us anywhere from one to three years, one to five years to ramp the capacity on that plant. So pretty long investment cycle. So right now, I would say that, you know, out of all the, you know, if I look at it at your billion, I'd probably say, like, maybe half of that is fully productive. And so, I would probably say that out of the, another half of it still has a lot of room to run in terms of profit growth. When you think, when you think about now on a go-forward basis, continuing to layer on growth opportunities, what are the, you know, focus areas, I guess, is maybe the best way to say it, as you think about continuing to shape the portfolio and the right level of spend for us to think about, and returns? Yeah. So, you know, right now, when we, you know, if I can take it, we have a winning aspiration, right, to be, you know, a leader in Texture & Healthful Solutions. And so we're investing in further texture. In our healthful solutions business would be our stevia, our sugar reduction solutions, as well as our plant-based protein. So we still think that those are driven by some mega trends, very, very large markets. We'll continue to invest against those. You know, right now, we take capital, and we're about $80 million-$100 million of growth capital a year. But we also look at tuck-in M&A and where there's M&A opportunities that we think can accelerate that. The tuck-in M&A is not part of our four-year outlook. You know, our four-year outlook is driven by organic growth, and then is also stimulated by that growth capital. You know, as the company gets bigger, you know, you really have three big levers to think about, you know, what's gonna drive the shape of the revenue, the shape of the profit, as well as your competitive mode. So one, you just have your overall portfolio, right? So where are some businesses and markets that are really doing well and growing, and where are some businesses more mature? And so you always have to think a portfolio lens. You have a cost lens, which is, for us, I think, still pretty exciting because, you know, as I began, when you start your business and you're growing by country by country team, we've been at building an operations team that's global. We're now in our, I'm gonna call it my fourth year. We have, you know, global shared service support, and that really allows us to be. You You get to upgrade the whole thinking of your team in terms of opportunities that go against an $8 billion, you know, revenue company. So I think the cost productivity for us, we have a cost program now, but I think the long-term cost levers that we can pull are still pretty exciting. And then straight up the middle, what we talk about all the time, so what are the growth opportunities around Texture & Healthful Solutions? We'll still invest there. It's a very, very broad category, and we're gonna be investing in the R&D and the competencies to continue to, I think, bring solutions to customers that are higher value add, right? So really three— I look at it as three big levers that are gonna shape the next three to five years. The company recently started reporting under new segments. Yes. Yes. How does that- It's very exciting. Very, very exciting. Absolutely. It was exciting rebuilding— I have to say that, or else my finance team won't support me, so. How does that, I guess, restructuring or realignment change the way that maybe internally you guys approach the business and support your ability to achieve kind of the growth objectives you have over the next several years? Yeah, I mean, I think, for those of you not familiar, so we took what we used to call our Specialty Ingredients business or mostly our food starches or starches that are modified in some ways to create value for customers. And we had really strong footholds. In Europe, we had a great business. In the U.S., we had a kind of a leading business in Asia Pacific, and we're selling similar types of solutions. Now, we were really successful with some regional customers, but when we looked at the large multinationals, you know, they would come to us with a customer brief, and it would be like: "Hey, I want this, I want this starch solution that you developed for me or this texture solution, but I want it in 19 countries." And you're like1 So you go through the internal machinations to get that done, and now what you have is you have a team that can just make all the trade-offs across the customer portfolio. It's all within their power. It's all within their consolidated P&L results, and so it's pretty exciting to see that team really collaborating across borders. And so that, I think that's been quite enabling. And I think it'll be an accelerant on, on, how we think about Texture & Healthful Solutions. The other piece then is that with our business in the U.S. and Canada, as well as really kind of a natural fit between our Mexico team and our South America team, that even though we had organized by segments, you always have organizational silos, and it's funny how they don't talk to each other sometimes because, "Why would I help you out? It doesn't help my P&L." They've come together, and it's amazing to see some of the opportunities that spring up, and particularly, you know, remind yourselves that we run at really high utilizations for our U.S./Canada business and for our LatAm business. And so being able to figure out where you can get that extra 1%-2% as you're balancing through the years, I mean, that's real money. And so I do think that that's been a kind of a cool focus, near-end focus that I've seen already evident. Yeah. The specialty mix was 34% of sales in 2023. Can you remind us how you think about the margin delta between specialty and non-specialty, and how you think about where that mix will go over time? A nd the driver of that, improvement, I know you break it out kind of— Yeah. —by verticals. So, how do you think about the biggest drivers of that mix shift? Yeah, I mean, right, so right now, I mean, we don't really provide enough information to be able to look at gross margins by the different segments. You know, as we get through 2023's kind of restatement of the new segments, and we share that in Q2, share that in Q3, you'll see more of that reveal. And just for everybody, you know, under GAAP requirements, by 2025, we will have to report gross segments, gross margins for segments. But to characterize what we've said, so our a modified starch, a specialty ingredient is typically gonna be anywhere between a high 20% to low 40% gross margin business. It's also gonna sell at a higher value per ton, okay? And so now, why is that? Well, you have people resources, then you have R&D, you have innovation, you have technical salespeople that are actually working with the customer in the customer's make process, right? So this is important, right? In that customers may be baking something, they're looking at the shear and the mix. They're thinking about, hey, are they pouring this into a mold? Is it going on a conveyor belt? Is it being baked? And to the extent that you can actually have something that comes off the conveyor belt cleanly, right, it doesn't provide any stick, so you don't get any yield loss in the final product for the customer. It goes through the oven faster or goes through the oven, and it needs less heat. You're saving dollars for your customer. You're saving a lot of dollars that relative to the cost of the ingredient is pretty small. So to the extent that we can design ingredients that help our customers actually produce at a lower cost or with greater capacity, we're impacting their total cost of ownership, right? And so our theme has always been like, let's look at where those functional ingredients can truly, truly be functional and game changing, not just in taste, not just in terms of the label of the ingredient on the pack, on the pack, on the back of the pack, but also in just in the total use for the customer. So our specialty focus is really around that, and so I do think that that's a, a much, much higher margin potential business as we go forward, and that's where we're making investments. The other verticals, right, where you're producing, you know, just a whole bunch of liquid, and the cost of the raw material, the corn, might be a higher portion of the cost of the COGS, you know, pretty high variable COGS. What you're then doing is you're working with customers really on the variability and the change of the commodity. So if corn futures are going up or down, corn, tapioca is moving, sugar is moving. You know, generally, we all of us in the industry work with our customers, our procurement folks, to be able to say, "Well, how are we thinking about managing that price change and that risk?" So that becomes a lot of the discussion around pricing, but at the end of the day, I get paid for my value add on making the ton of glucose, the ton of high fructose. And so what we've really tried to do is move more towards, well, pay us for the value add, and let's have a conversation on how that raw material, underlying raw material is moving. And let's try and make sure that we're sharing at least in that risk. That makes sense. And, I guess as we think about growth levers, you mentioned that M&A is not included in the way you think about the outlook. In our organic, yeah. Yep. Yeah. And so, at the same time, you've sold the South Korea business, you have plenty of cash on the balance sheet. You've been open about wanting to, or that you are pursuing M&A. I guess, where, where are the areas of focus, and what is the environment like now for M&A? Yeah. I mean, have multiples come in? Is it an attractive environment? How close or not close are we to maybe executing on something there? Yeah. Well, so one, I think, you know, within our business, if you, you know, some of our materials would say if you looked at texture, as an overall market, you know, we think that that market's, you know, close to $20 billion. Somewhat related to the role that starches play in texture, you have, you know, hydrocolloids, you have natural fibers, you even have some emulsifiers. And I think all of these are somewhat key in delivering the texture and the taste that each of us experience, you know, whether or not you're dipping into an ice cream, you're having a salad or, you know, you're biting into a breaded chicken sandwich. And so that, that's a pretty big market, and it's not terribly organized. You know, there's no kind of single dominant player out there that says, "Wow, look at them, they're an amazing leader in texture." And it's because, you know, the underlying make process and the technology is a little different as you go through each one of those. But I think that's a pretty fruitful area for us to be looking at, and our lens has been there for quite a while. And so that's probably, you know... The environment, look, when risk-free rates went up, multiples came in, which is, you know that, right? And so I do think the environment's been a bit probably more to the favor of a strategic. I hope there's no private equity guys in the room. Cheering for you. Good luck. Maybe the Fed will help you. Yeah, okay. I guess kind of tagging on to that, though, you know, is there a point at which you say: "Look, we've got all this cash. It doesn't make sense to have it sit on our balance sheet"? Where does share repurchase and, and, and the pace of share repurchase, how does that fit in— kind of net against kind of your M&A aspirations, I guess. Yeah. Well, so I think where I've been, you know, sort of public is both. You know, it's not—I'm not gonna look at it as the tyranny of the or. We have been very prudent, I think, in managing our balance sheet. We have a higher target for debt-to-EBITDA than what we're currently at. I think optimally, you know, 2.2 or so debt-to-EBITDA is a nice place for us. I think if you optimize the WACC, would be a little bit higher than that. In our business, you know, as much as we experienced, like in 2021, you know, if corn runs up and you have to invest in accounts receivable, you have to invest in the value of inventory, then you're gonna put cash into the business. In our cycle, that putting that cash in that business could be $600 million, $700million-$800 million bucks, and then we get it all back right? When corn comes down to, you know, the levels we're sort of seeing today. So we think about long-term the balance sheet and where that should be. And then we look at. So all of the everything that's in the M&A pipeline and the timing of that, you can never really predict because each deal sort of has its own agreement and its own life. But beyond that, then, you know, we look at share repurchase. And, you know, right now, we're out there with, we're gonna try and get share repurchase done this year that's gonna exceed what we did last year. So equal or exceed last year, which is about $100 million. So I think we're along the way. Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit, you laid out several years ago, kind of your growth algorithm through 2025. Yeah. You have been over the course of that period pacing ahead. This year, the guidance, especially after a number of very good years, has started maybe a little bit lower than that. But as we get closer to 2025, as we get closer to that finish line, is that still the right way to think about the growth potential of the business? Is there anything that has changed in your thinking, the way with whether it's restructuring, cost savings, et cetera, that make you think differently about the growth potential beyond 2025? Well, I go back to the point is that, you know, if you ask about the, you know, the four-year outlook, it has a revenue and an operating profit component, and it has an EPS and a fiscal policy, and a TSR component, right? So we're very clear on our TSR that we really aim to be 12%-14% on our TSR, and I know that some of you all don't manage that, but for the folks who actually own shares like me, TSR is pretty good, you know, so we like TSR. So that's a combination then of driving, you know, the growth opportunities in Texture & Healthful Solutions, being very focused on our Food & Industrial Ingredients. You'll see us investing capital, you'll see us investing in cost savings there. It's taking our ops team and our global supply chain team, and as well as all of our support services, and making sure we're getting every ounce of efficiency and effectiveness that a global company can, right? Which is honestly, I think we're early stages in that journey. So that's gonna drive revenue and operating profit as part of our outlook, but then also being supportive of how we look at the portfolio, I think, and being very mindful of fiscal policy will help drive the adjusted EPS growth and overall the TSR. So I'm—y ou know, 'cause you can't— we're very mindful of our dividend, right? So we're gonna adjust, we're gonna drive that op growth, we're gonna pay that dividend, grow that dividend, and then we'll use share repurchase as well. There's nothing, I guess, when you look at your categories in which you play, the end markets, nothing from a structural perspective or your competitive position perspective that makes you think, or the cash generation perspective, I guess, with the growth of the business, that growth would be necessarily one way or the other relative to kind of how you've thought about it the last several years? Yeah. Well, we know a lot more, and we're in some new markets, and so you get introduced to opportunities to that extent, and so to some extent, I'm pretty optimistic about what we've overcome. I mean, we've built a lot of foundation capabilities into the company over the last five years. And so, you know, obviously, look, we've talked about pricing, pricing centers of excellence. We've done a lot in terms of hedging. You know, global procurement has been a real, you know, benefit for us. And just even thinking about how we're organized around our marketing and our customer teams in terms of our focus. So I think there's a lot yet to come. Okay. Yeah. Okay. The Texture & Healthful Solutions segment that you already talked about a fair amount here was 30% of sales in 2023 and has a number of growth levers. Can you kind of help disaggregate that a little bit across the different verticals in terms of, I don't know if you want to think about mix or profit contributions within that segment, just to give a little bit more kind of clarity, I guess, or granularity on how to think about it? And I guess, how do you expect that, the composition of that segment to change over the next, you know, kind of three to five years? Yeah. So, I mean, largely within Texture & Healthful Solutions is our Texture Elevation, product lines, and so these are gonna be our clean label starches and our modified starches, but we also have some native, you know, starches, and these can be corn, tapioca, potato, rice. So just a whole suite of different product lines that all work in different categories to different effectiveness. You know, so, so the type of starch that you're using to create shine and polish and smoothness in a yogurt is different than the type of starch that you're using to coat a French fry, right? And provide a crispy, you know, crunchy outside to a French fry. And so we, we span that whole competency, so what we call high moisture content solutions, low moisture content solutions, baked, crispiness, batters, crunch, right, extrusion. And so that whole business, that's, you know, that, that's predominantly that, and what I see, you know, within that business is still just a tremendous amount of growth in Asia Pacific. You know, so we have an investment in China, we're, I think, a leader in, in, in ASEAN in terms of tapioca, tapioca starches. Those are being pulled, and Canada, and there's demand in the U.S., there's demand in Europe. So I, I really think that just population-wise and the, how those economies are evolving, with middle classes being, you know, really, developed and growing, a need for convenience in the day drives demand for packaged foods, right? Now, so that's that. I mean, we have a nice Europe business, we have a wonderful U.S./ Canada business. I think we have very, you know, nice share positions in those businesses. I think the overlay on top of all this, which is kind of exciting and kind of fun, you know, and you could say it's a challenge in front of the business, maybe, but it's an opportunity as well, is wellness. You know, call it what you want, right? So whether or not people are growing concern towards maybe GLP-1 and its effectiveness, is it retained, etcetera? What impact does it have? There's been lots of discussion there. There's been discussion on, you know, how you label the ingredients, right? And we're pretty sensitive to that, right? Does it, does it have a lot of processed touch or not? But understand, we have authenticity from the farmer all the way through our make cycle. That's really hard to do, and we've been at that for more than a decade. You know, we can talk about regenerative practices. So when we get a customer, let's say a large Swiss multinational, who has a very, you know, reputation around nutrition and wellness, and they're very concerned, their marketers, their innovation people are concerned about how their products and how their brands show up on our table every morning, right? That we're an ingredient supplier that we think can make sure that we have a long-term relationship with them on authenticity. So that's worth something. That will be worth something, whether you call it sustainability, whether you call it human sustainability, whether you call it wellness, that's the environment that I operate in. And I think that we're really striving as a company to deliver that over time. Maybe, maybe switching gears within the portfolio, but can you dig in a little on the plant-based side, and talk about kind of what you're seeing there from a category perspective, how your positioning is within that category? Do you need to evolve that at all? Are you confident in the growth outlook, just— Plant-based proteins? Yes, exactly. Yeah, 'cause everything we do is plant-based. Yes, sorry. If we weren't clear. Yeah. Everything we make is plant-based. Yes. So, so on the plant-based protein side, just curious what you're, what you're seeing there? Yeah, so you know, it's interesting. Look, there, there's a number of titles, you know, on headlines, I think, from some of the alt meat, you know, brands that are out there in terms of, you know, when protein prices ran up significantly, you know, three years ago now. The substitution effect on, I think, the alt meat was looked pretty interesting trade-off, right? You've seen then, you know, some both demand pull back, much tighter in terms of pricing because the consumer couldn't bear the inflation of the grocery basket. And so it's been some tough times, I think, in all protein, or at least alt meat. What we're still seeing, though, and, and I wanna make sure that everybody doesn't miss this, is that, you know, teenagers today and maybe 20-somethings have, you know, fortunately or not, they've been tremendously impacted by all the social media and awareness around sustainability of our planet. Yeah, look, I got a 21-year-old and a 17-year-old, and they blame me for, you know, ruining it for them. Well, yeah, it's. I know we laugh, but it's like sometimes it's, like, real, and there's tears and. And, and they're making choices about what they wanna eat, and they're making choices about their lifestyle. And look, I'm a CFO in an ingredient company, you know, I have friends who are marketers in brand companies, and they're really into it. Like, they, they are. They see this as a really, really big trend. And the reason why, and what they won't say to you, is that the habits that you form when you eat in your teens and your twenties, you carry through with you your whole life. So you start to define your generation, right? There's generations of coffee drinkers, right? There's generations of Mountain Dew drinkers, right? There's generations of energy drinks, right? And if you look, they're kind of like they'll be separated by eight, 10 years. And so I think that there's a number of big, big brand companies who see that underlying swell, and they're very concerned about what, how do they go and they grab all the various ingredients that they want to convey sustainability, authenticity, transparency? These are, these are, these are themes that you have to be able to, you know, to be able to show up every day against. And so I think that's gonna drive a lot of choices as we go forward. What we're seeing in plant-based is the vegan pull is still pulling things in dairy, surprising places. We get briefs for, like, "I wanna make a protein cupcake." We're like, "What?" You know, like, but they're actually serious. You know, and we're seeing things like some of the indulgent pieces where you can actually mix in a plant-based protein, and you can change the carb sugar mix within the product, and I think that innovation and that creativity is gonna catch on, right? The other piece, then, we don't think about, and it's a little bit more obvious just in our day-to-day, but a number of you might do pre-workout shakes, right? You have a lot of problems, and when you put the powder in, is it soluble? Does it disperse easily? Like, do you like drinking clumps, right? See, there's a couple of us that drink clumps. Okay. It's a little frustrating, like, 'cause no matter what... Like, so I, I can't do a blender every morning 'cause then I gotta clean the blender. My wife yells at me, "You gotta clean the blender." Right? So I'm just ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, right? And you get clumps, and, like, so pea protein is awesome because it's actually quite soluble, and it has great dispersibility. So I see aspects like that, where there's, you know, that, that's a description of functionality that actually impacts us in terms of how we think as American consumers, right? We, we love consistency. We wanna go to McDonald's, and we wanna open that up, and it has to look the same every single time, and if it's off, we feel like, "Ooh, there's something wrong with it," right? That's not true in every culture around the world. People, like, like variety, right? No, it's really true. Light, light variety. Right. But what we have to strive for, I think, in plant-based proteins, is really overcoming some of those particular, you know, particular challenges in the end use for the consumer. So we, we like ready-to-drink. We like ready-to-mix. As an opportunity, I still, I still think that that's pretty popular, despite what your Scantron, IRI, Nielsen, Circana, Circana, excuse me, Circana data says. If we kind of take a step back from a volume perspective across the business, we've been dealing in some of your end markets with destocking over the last, you know, 12 months or so. We've been hearing more about trade down. We've been hearing about consumer softness maybe a little bit more recently. You guys have offered a fairly optimistic volume outlook in terms of recovery. So can you talk about what you're seeing more recently on the volume recovery? Are you on track there? Are there any of your end markets that are leading or lagging across the portfolio? Yeah, no, I do think that we've seen some pretty strong volume numbers, at least year-over-year. You know, it was in our Q1 results. I think that's gonna—l ook, we only have easier laps, Q2, Q3, Q4, so I think that all of that's still gonna be pretty on track. You know, I will say that, you know, one of the comments that I've heard, right, is that the whether or not1 and you always have to look at what's the income strata across households, and you always have to think about the number of households, right? So if you have lower or middle to low income households in the U.S., and they're kind of scrimping to splurge, right? So maybe let's save now. You know, I got my wage increase. You know, prices of food or going out are still a little bit elevated, so I'm gonna scrimp now, so I can go on my vacation. So you see some of that, what's called trading down, right? Well, all that means is then people are eating at home more. They're preparing more meals from home. That's generally really good for our volume demand, right? That means they're using things out of the refrigerator. That means they're using things off the shelf, and generally, we sell texture into those types of products. So we kind of like in-home, in-home prep is really good for us. It's a little harder for us to get out, and when, you know, only about maybe 20% of our U.S. business is exposed to food service. So food service trends, and if they come down, we kind of tend to like QSR demand a little bit more. If there's a really, really robust economy, then we don't always necessarily get a lot of pull for ingredient growth, at least. Yeah. So I guess, how do you think about then, as you're seeing the volume recovery, how do you think about the supply-demand balance, particularly in the U.S., in terms of maybe your capacity utilization rates and how that lays out for, you know, I know we're a ways from contracting. There's not much you can say around that, but just kind of— Seriously, you're gonna ask me about contracting? No, I'm not, actually. But how that sets up the industry. I mean, it's been a while since we saw any real capacity come on. You do have a little bit on the dextrose side, maybe coming on here in the near term. I don't know if you think that that that kind of frames things, but is there any... I would suppose that creates a pretty good, what you're describing on the volume side, a pretty good setup in terms of utilization rates and supply demand. Well, maybe just to separate, though, and provide a little bit of background: so within the U.S., there are wet mills. There are also some dry mills that may be able to make dextrose. Those are really, really large assets. The offtake from those is generally, you know, a glucose that's gonna be made. It can, it can be converted into ethanol straight away, or, you know, it can be converted into a dextrose that goes into an industrial feedstock. You know, so you can use it for fermentation. You can use it as a brewing adjunct. You can use it in a lot of different industrial uses. And so most of the wet mills, so let's call that upstream asset, we, as an industry, look at that utilization, right? Ingredion has generally plants that are mid-sized to smaller, and we look at downstream production, where we modify. So we create that modified starch, we dry it, we package it, et cetera. So we're trying to get to a particle or a molecule that has a particular, a lot more value add. So the downstream capacity, you know, we really kind of compete a bit with maybe like Tate & Lyle, maybe some Cargill, maybe some ADM, but generally, that's food and beverage focused, and we get paid for that. We get paid for that downstream production. The upstream, the wet mill, is something that everyone in our industry looks a little bit at. I would say the utilization is okay, and maybe it's a little bit towards the historical low end. So as you get GDP coming back, you're gonna get pull for the different types of wet mill offtake products. And so some in our business have moved a little bit more towards dedicating wet mill and offtake towards industrial uses. And so that part of the business seems to be a little bit more GDP relevant, and it may be a little bit sensitive to oil prices. 'Cause, you know, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to substitute in a bio-renewable feedstock into something that had a petroleum base, right? And so as a specialty chemical manufacturer, you're seeing an opportunity to get paid a premium for that green aspect, and so therefore, I think that creates demand offtake in the business. Yeah, we're seeing opportunities like that. It hasn't been our strategic focus, but two of our bigger players, you know, I mean, you know, have a pretty stated strategy around that. You, shifting gears to the cost saves that you talked about, you just recently on the earnings call announced a new cost savings program. You have pretty good track record on delivering against your, your cost savings objectives. Where do you see? Can you talk maybe a little bit about the program? How is it similar or different than the one that you did several years ago, which you not only executed on ahead of schedule but exceeded the expected savings? So maybe how, how is this similar or different? Do you see similar opportunity to maybe over-deliver there? Yeah. I maybe I'll answer not necessarily from a tactical question, but from a people perspective, which is, we have a really performance-oriented culture. You know, when we set targets, our general managers and our teams really focus on adjusted op income. And so to the extent that, you know, you can run the financials really clean with very limited restructuring for a period of time, I have a number of shareholders who've commented and said: "Thank you very much. We love it. I don't have to spend time when I flip between adjusted and reported. It's pretty clean." But there are times when you need to become a little bit boundary-less to your leaders and your team, and you need to let them go think about how they're gonna redesign the organization to follow the strategy focus, right? And so yeah, that may involve changing roles, it may involve severance, it may involve rethinking plants in the network, it may involve, you know, thinking about your warehouses. So I look at Cost to Compete as just emblematic of letting our management teams, for the next two years, really go at trying to focus on where do we want to be really on our cost curve or ahead of our cost curve, right? And so, I have a target. It's $50 million, okay? It's $50 million. That's my target. It's $50 million. It's a good place to start. Yeah. Okay, good. In terms of the guidance for this year, I know we only have a couple more minutes, can you talk about kind of the swing factors in the guide, the EPS guidance range, high and low end? Yeah. Excuse me. It is a bit back-half weighted. We talked a little bit about the volume side, but can you just talk about the cadence of the year and the, and the driver of that? Yeah. So, you know, when we, I think, go out with, you know, a full year guidance, so one, we go out with a pretty big range. That range is also driven by the fact that, you know, like, we have weather events. We just talked about some weather impact in Q1. You can always have some vagaries in corn, you know, whether or not there's rain, and planting's late. It's dry during summer, you get drought, you're gonna get movement. We do hedge much more effectively, nowadays, but you're still subject to a little bit of movement there. You can have differences in crop. You know, what soy does versus what corn does can have a small impact. But right now, on the, I think on the, whether it's the upside or the, the downside, I mean, we are counting on volume coming back. So, you know, if I do see branded, retail companies continuing to kind of really hold pricing, not really, not really go after promotions, and you see, you know, pricing low single digits, mid-single digits on a per-unit basis, well, it's gonna impact volumes. You know, unit volumes are gonna be still down. They won't be down nearly as much as 2023, but they'll be down. And so you, you know, that's—m y eye has to be on what their algorithms are, and then how does that guide their pricing to consumers on shelf, right? And so I think that's part of the range, right? So we may see that, be pretty competitive. I love kind of some of the moves Walmart's making. You know, stimulates, it stimulates demand, it stimulates the grocery basket, and that's good for us 'cause we sell volume. So yeah. Maybe just one last one. We started with kind of the evolution of the portfolio and the different levers that you guys have. You have done a little bit of pruning. We mentioned the sale already. Is there anything else that you see within the portfolio in the coming years that maybe would be a candidate for optimization, or are you pretty happy now with where things stand as you move forward? Yeah, I think we have to be pretty happy with our other segments, you know, right? And obviously, in our all other is our sugar reduction and our plant-based proteins. So we look to continue to see a lot of very high revenue growth there, but right now, I think in how we thought about the segments, we're gonna run with these segments for a while. Great. Well, we're out of time. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.