All right, guys, I'm Phil Ng, Jefferies Paper and Packaging analyst. We're excited to have the Pactiv Evergreen team with us today. Representing the company, we've got Jon Baksht, the CFO, and Curt Worthington, who heads up the IR effort and Corp Dev as well. So Jon, why don't you kick things off? Great. Thank you, Phil. Thank you for hosting us at your event, and thank you all for your interest in the company. I'm gonna start with a brief overview for those of you that are less familiar with the story. Pactiv Evergreen, we're a leading manufacturer and distributor of food and beverage packaging in North America. Some of the key differentiators that differentiate us from others that are in the space, we do have one of the broadest offerings of products and substrates in the industry. We have long-standing relationships with blue-chip customers across the industry. Our exposure is across both food away from home and food at home consumers. So we touch the consumer regardless of where they get their calories, so it's a broad spectrum. And we have a well-invested distribution network that helps us provide just-in-case availability for our customers. If you look at our EBITDA margins around 15% last year. We go to market in two different segments. Our food services business unit services the food away from home segment, and really the channels there are the quick service market and the distribution market. Our Food and Beverage Merchandising business unit services the food at home segment of the marketplace. That services food retailers, food processors, and our CPG clients. Then, if you go from here, I'm going to just lay out for a few minutes here before I sit down with Phil for the fireside chat portion. I'm gonna give you a bit of a sense of where we are in our transformation program that we've talked about. It's a multi-year program. Give you some context for some of the volume trends that we're seeing in the marketplace and our positioning within that, and then I'll give you a sense of some of the actions that we're taking to grow and some of our growth initiatives and some of the initiatives that we have to optimize our cost structure, which is going to lead us to improve EBITDA and margins in 2024 and 2025 and beyond. So the next slide here is. It gives you a sense of the transformation and where we are in that journey. So we're coming out of several years of an effort here, and what I'd characterize the first phase of this transformation is really significantly around structural changes to the organization. So we focused on streamlining into core markets, and for us, core market is North America, with the majority of that being here in the United States. We've exited our international operations over the last couple of years. We announced a restructuring of the portfolio to move to a capital-light business model. The conclusion of that is, with the sale of Pine Bluff, our remaining paper mill, that we're expecting to close here in a matter of months. We've implemented a new operating model to drive continuous improvement and improve efficiency. So part of that is the PEPS operating system, which I'll touch on a bit further as well to help us drive that operational efficiency. But it's also been an increased focus on data and analytics to drive our decision-making processes around our go-to-market and our strategic positioning. We've optimized the portfolio to improve customer profitability, and we've been strengthening the balance sheet. So you've seen us recently. We've upgraded and extended our credit facility and also done the same with our term loans. So where are we going next in the transformation journey? And what I'd characterize this is really optimizing our channel coverage and our cost to serve, is where we're taking the next phase of the transformation. So first off, aligning with our core customers through the cycle, increasing our flexibility to invest in future growth initiatives, and again, moving to that capital-light business model and being able to redeploy some of that capital from our exits of the paper mill business. Continued focus on innovation, which will be one of the linchpins to our growth. We're repositioning the product portfolio, and I'll get into this a bit more in further slides, to increase our presence within some select customer channels. And then, improving operational efficiency and lowering our cost to serve. So we're still in the early, early days of the PEPS program, and as we continue to mature that program across the organization, we'll continue to expect nice gains there. Here I wanted to frame some of the recent volume trends that reflect our strategic positioning. Just to orient you on the slide, the green lines here represent industry trends within our business units. Those are third-party supported or supplied, I should say. The blue lines there represent Pactiv Evergreen's volume trends within these markets. One thing from an industry standpoint that is evident when you look at the slide is that the consumer has been feeling the pinch of inflation. You see volume year over year really across both business units declining and showing some of that strain in the consumer, less discretionary spending across both of our channels. What you do see as well is that there's been a shift in some of the spending from the food away from home, which is our food service segment, migrating to the food at home market. So you see just last quarter was the first time you've seen the industry in several quarters go to positive year-over-year volume growth. So that's just now underway. And then as it relates to our positioning, you've heard us talk about value over volume and how we've optimized our business mix, and typically, we've been referencing products and customers as we've high-graded our portfolio over the last several years as part of the transformation. You can see in the food service segment how that's played out. We've largely executed the value over volume strategy about a year ago. You see that now we're coming out of that. Our volumes have been in excess of where the market has been, and so we're really catching some of the later effects of that. We're leveraging our core customer relationships and aligning with core customers to do that. That's part of the piece that we've enjoyed some benefits of in food service. Food and beverage merchandising is a bit more of a nuanced story, as we'll talk about a little bit further as well. There's a lot of channels there, and it's been part of our restructuring effort around merging our food and our beverage merchandising business units together about a year and a half ago. The recent volume trends there reflect strategic business exits, which we're intending to facilitate our future go-to-market strategy. And as you think about where that fits in is, you know, I've talked about some of the value over volume. This is also now positioning our business across channels differently and how we think about the channel mix within our business. So those strategic business exits will impact near-term volumes over the next several quarters. But we're expecting that uplift to come as we reposition the business in that business unit. And just to frame our customer base and where some of those repositionings are happening. So here's a look at what our customer mix looks like. So the left side of the page here is our core customers, which comprise the majority, and I'd say the vast majority of our customer base. These are long-standing partnerships we've had with blue-chip customers. They often operate under multi-year supply agreements with pass-through mechanisms that insulate us from market volatility. They are national customers with diverse product needs, and so our scale matches up well with their scale, and they effectively recognize our value. They value our service model. They value the ability for us to provide the supply chain that we do, the product quality that we do, and again, the just-in-case availability, and you can see at the bottom side of that page, we're aligned with the majority of the top suppliers to the food and beverage market across all categories. The smaller portion of our business is what I'd call at-will customers, and this is really the minority of our customer base. Here, we supplement some of our excess capacity with spot market business. This provides minimal price protections versus from a contractual basis. Buying decisions can tend to change across the cycle, and in some cases, they'll prioritize just-in-time inventory. We have a broad product portfolio and focus on customer service allow us to win in this category through the cycle, but it's an area that we are de-emphasizing as we move into some of the next phases of our transformation and aligning some of the capacity that we have in more strategic manners. And sh... What I mean by that is, if you look at where we're positioning the business for longer-term sustainable growth, we're taking the foundation of our core strengths that I've mentioned, the broad product portfolio, the blue-chip customers, the distribution network, our focus on innovation, and overlaying that with some key items here. So the sale of Pine Bluff, which again, is closing in the next couple of months, we are going to be able to redeploy some of the capital associated with maintaining a single paper mill. So over the last year, that's been about $35 million of CapEx, and that's against a negative $30 million of EBITDA contribution that we're expecting this year. So you add those two together, that's negative $65 million of free cash flow. That has not been a good business for us. And so as we redeploy that capital to growth initiatives, we will recognize the benefits of that, as we transition out of that piece of the restructuring. The second point here is continue our emphasis around innovation and new product development. And so, if you look at the announcement that we had last week, around some of our new sustainable product offering around protein trays. So we rolled out a reduced density polypropylene protein tray that is a very strong sustainable solution for our customers at a lower price point than the current sustainable solutions. We're early days in that product offering, but we're really excited about the future prospects of that. Then the third point here is just repositioning our product portfolio, particularly around the food and beverage merchandising business unit, to increase the presence in attractive customer channels. We're evolving our go-to-market approach there in retail channels with CPG customers, and de-emphasizing some of our activity through distributors in that business unit. Then in terms of our cost structure on the bottom line, we're continuing to lower our cost to serve through structural improvements. Footprint optimization is a program we announced earlier this year to reduce our overall footprint by approximately 10% across the next couple of years. We anticipate full run rate savings of that to be $35 million, in excess of $35 million, hitting run rate by 2026. 2025 should be around $20 million. We're taking cost actions to flex with demand, and we find ourselves in an inflation-constrained, consumer-constrained environment still, and in that environment, we have taken actions to flex our cost structure to meet that demand, and will yield about $15 million of cost savings this year, and then operational excellence will continue to underpin our operational benefits that we've had to help really offset inflation that we've seen around the manufacturing channel, leveraging PEPS as that platform, so this takes us to the financials, and you can see the significant multi-year improvements through this transformation program. Over the last several years, we've managed to increase EBITDA, increase free cash flow, grow our margins, and delever the balance sheet. As we are transitioning here to the next phase of our transformation, we continue, we expect to, starting with free cash flow, continue to grow free cash flow with our capital-light business model, grow EBITDA with some of the benefits that that we're gonna recognize. We expect to grow our margins into the high teens in the coming years and continue to deleverage the balance sheet into the threes and beyond. And And my final prepared slide here, and I'll leave a few minutes for some questions with Phil. Gives you a sense, I know there's a lot of programs that that we've initiated and we've been talking about. It's been, there's been a lot involved in this transformation program. And so to help bridge some of the numbers, we put together this slide to help highlight some of the factors that would be non-normalized over 2024 and 2025. So, 2024, we're gonna have a negative $30 million contribution from the Pine Bluff paper mill, which will be closing here in the coming months. We've had the benefit of these cost actions that we've taken to respond to the volume environment, so net contribution, negative $15 million. If you were to take 2025 just by itself, there's $30 million benefit from not having the $30 million drag of Pine Bluff next year. The cost actions largely will transfer into next year, but we'll probably give back some of that just due to volume growth, and we'll have to adjust accordingly with increased volume that we're expecting next year through some of our growth initiatives and market growth. And then footprint optimization, so the capital we've been spending this year will start to take into effect next year, and we'll see the EBITDA benefit of that. So just taking the 2025 piece in isolation gets you about $45 million of benefit going into next year, just on a normalized basis. And that doesn't include any factors in for any real market growth or anything around that. So with that, that's my prepared remarks. I will take it back to... I will join Phil here for our virtual fireside chat. Jon, and to help pull that last slide, kind of give us a framework for 2025. $45 million EBITDA uplift's pretty awesome. Any offsets that we need to be mindful of that could be a bad guy, whether it's investments or perhaps how you're thinking about demand? In terms of demand, I don't. I think it's really the other way. We're expecting to have some tailwinds from demand picking up, GDP picking up, and frankly from some of these initiatives. We've talked about, I think on our last earnings call, you'd asked about some of the wins that we talked about hitting 2024. We have some, and this is really focused in the food service segment specifically. We've had some nice wins that we're expecting to help us in the back half of 2024 that will carry on to 2025 and provide a bit of support going into next year. Then generally, these growth initiatives that I referenced, they're early days on some of them, especially some of the initiatives around the retail and the consumer piece of the business, but we're gonna start seeing some benefits for some of these strategic repositionings. Super. From a consumer standpoint, I mean, no doubt they're stretched, given where we're seeing inflation. Has that kind of bounced along the bottom, Jon? It's kind of leveled out on the food side, and, and are you seeing any uplift with some of your QSR customers stepping up promotions? Just want to get a better feel for, are you seeing any upside on the QSR side, food service side, and have things kind of stabilized on the consumer side of things on food? Yeah, sure. So you saw on the chart that I showed around the migration from the consumer still going from food away from home to food at home, which is a bit of a lower price point from a convenience standpoint. And we're seeing that shift is still there. You're seeing some growth now starting to hit in our food and beverage merchandising business unit. But I think the response, as you point out, is with some of the promotion activity we're seeing in QSR, which we saw kick off early in late June, carry through July and August. It has been having some impact, and I think that it's still early, but the benefits there. You are seeing some traction. But I do want to balance that with it's still a bit of a weaker environment there. It's still a higher price point to go out to eat, and with the constrained consumer, we are waiting for that to really kick in and see if purchases will increase as those consumers do go out to eat. Okay. Sounds like more of a good gut and bad gut, so that's, that's great. Mm-hmm. And with the proceeds you're getting from Pine Bluff and just less CapEx, you talked about reinvesting for growth. Can you just give us a little more color? Where some areas would you like to invest and grow for growth? Yeah, sure. So I mentioned a couple on the slides. You know, we have some of our innovation, some of our sustainable product offerings that we think will have a real good traction in the marketplace. We're seeing it now, and we're expecting that to grow as we ramp up some capacity there. And broadly speaking, you know, we're actually going through our capital review process this week for going into next year's budget, and we have a long list of high-returning projects that we're looking at, and whether it's and really across both of our business units, and as I mentioned, one of our strategies is aligning with our core customers and helping them grow. And in that context, we have some good returning projects to facilitate that growth. And being able to shift that $35 million of capital from Pine Bluff into those higher growth or higher-returning projects is really gonna be a benefit for us going forward and help drive that EBITDA margin expansion going into next year, too, which I think will be a nice benefit to us. You've kind of pruned your portfolio the, you know, the last few years, and you talked about realigning your customer. Where are you with that journey at this point when we think about 2025? Is most of the heavy lifting done, or that's still an ongoing process? Yeah. In the food service segment of the marketplace, I think we talk about that pruning of the customer, and I'd say pruning is really just high-grading some of those customers. Because in some cases, it was going to those customers and really looking to get rewarded for the value that we're providing. So it wasn't necessarily just losing customers in that context. And so that value over volume conversations have really played out in food service now. I think now we've baselined that, and we've got a good base from which to grow from some of these growth initiatives that I've touched on. Food and beverage merchandising, I would say we're shifting the... I think the highlight for today is we are shifting a bit more from a customer value over volume. There's still some of that to do, but we're really repositioning a bit across our channels and where we're gonna invest going forward. And some of the capital getting freed up from Pine Bluff, we'll be a capital-light business, but that still frees up more capital to redeploy to really the customer segment, CPG, retail. Those are areas that we feel we've got some opportunities to grow in. Super. From a cash flow standpoint, just walk us through how you think about free cash flow conversion and generation, and how you're gonna prioritize deploying that capital, and how you think about leverage overall. Sure. Yeah, so, you know, we will, as we exit the paper mill business, our free cash flow conversion will grow, and we will have a higher percentage of our free cash flow available for things like debt repurchase. Our capital allocation priority remains deleveraging the balance sheet, even at four times by end of the year, we still feel that's on the higher end of where we'd like to be. We're looking to get into the threes very early next year and really continue to delever the balance sheet beyond that. And it's always striking a balance. We have some high-returning projects, as I mentioned, and as we're repositioning, some of these strategic initiatives and some of these strategic channel alignment that we're going after, there will be capital to deploy to that, but the priority continues to be deleveraging the balance sheet. Is, like, low three times, like, your ideal goal, or, that's not the right way to think about it? We're, you know, we haven't put out public targets in terms of where we wanna be. I think that's fair to say that we're gonna continue to delever the balance sheet. And with our, on the other side of the restructuring that we're doing, I think the deleveraging will come more quickly, and so getting into the low threes in the foreseeable future is certainly on the table. Super. On the PEPS side of things, it's a lot more comprehensive, just taking costs and right-sizing footprint. Give us a little perspective where you are in terms of rolling that out and actually starting to see a real impact, from a bottom-line standpoint? Yeah. Yeah, it's still early days, as you mentioned. So we have some metrics in our investor deck in terms of how many plants are PEPS certified. So, and just to frame it for those that are less familiar with our PEPS program, it's a new operating system that we've implemented the last few years, and we have different levels of achievement for our plants. Bronze level is the first level of achievement, and that signifies that you've implemented the PEPS system in your plant. And then as you get to Silver and Gold, it means now you've implemented the system, but then you're also achieving certain KPIs and targets that we can start rewarding plants for the performance within the system. So year to date, we're at roughly 30 plants. We have around 50 plants. So it's. We've got a good portion of those that are on the program, but 24 of those are bronze, so it just means that they're on the system. So our goal is to get all the plants on the system by year-end, but to that metric, it's still early days. There's only 6 plants that now are achieving our targeted metrics in that system. So as that continues to evolve over the next several years, we expect that we will get bottom line benefits for more efficiencies. And I'll also just add, the other piece of this is right-sizing our footprint, which will also help our efficiencies. We're closing down 10% of our assets in that space, and shedding some of those fixed costs is gonna be another benefit to drive further efficiency within the system. Okay. If I think about your journey, as a public company, obviously you're going through a transformation, and, and the first part of it was getting the cost right and the footprint right. Are we at a point where we should think about the Pactiv story from here on out, more growth oriented? Like, how should we think about normalized growth of your business? Yeah. No, I think generally this, we like to think of the business as a GDP plus, plus business, and across both of our channels, both food service and food and beverage merchandising. And, you know, while there's been some challenges with the consumer right now in the inflationary environment, I don't know if there's anybody here who, you know, hasn't used DoorDash or hasn't used some sort of delivery service more today than they did five years ago. And we continue to from a secular basis, we expect that trend to continue, albeit we're probably in a bit of a constrained environment now, as my slides show. But that trend will revert back as. And our positioning remains the same there. And then as it relates to the food and beverage merchandising, our positioning continues to be around the fresh side of the grocery store. So we are positioned well on the perimeter of the grocery store, whether that's your proteins, your eggs, your produce, your bakery, your beverages. We continue to believe that that's a strategic trend. That's a secular trend that we are strategically aligned towards for the longer term. That's all the time we have. Jon, really appreciate your insight. Thank you so much. Phil, thanks again.