US-based TreeHouse Foods has announced that William Kelley has been appointed as interim chief financial officer.
Kelley, the company’s senior vice president, corporate and operations finance, replaces Matthew Foulston who, after a three-month transition period, will be “pursuing other career opportunities”.
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TreeHouse, which has also cut its EPS outlook, has engaged an executive search firm to review candidates for a permanent CFO. The company will be considering both internal and external candidates.
It is the second senior executive appointment at TreeHouse, the largest private-label packaged food manufacturer in the US, in two months. In September, it appointed former Hershey executive Amit Philip as chief strategy officer.
TreeHouse is undergoing a restructuring programme – TreeHouse 2020 -, announced in 2017, which is intended to make the business more competitive by improving profitability and accelerating growth.
Speaking about the CFO development, Steve Oakland, TreeHouse’s CEO, said: “I want to thank Matthew for his contributions during his time at TreeHouse. He deserves a great deal of credit for helping drive the organisation forward over the last three years as we streamlined our portfolio and re-engineered the organisation – difficult but essential tasks.
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By GlobalData“As TreeHouse continues its transition to a more agile, focused, and growth-oriented enterprise, we will be best served by having a management team with expertise that aligns more closely with our future growth opportunities.
“I am also delighted that Bill will be stepping into an important transition role. Bill is an accomplished finance executive who has spent more than 30 years in the food and beverage industry. He has successfully led our finance transformation programme and has been responsible for the company’s financial plans, as well as managing profit and loss on a daily basis.”
Kelley joined TreeHouse in 2016 as corporate controller. He was previously head of global audit for Kraft Heinz.
Announcing its Q3 results today (7 November), TreeHouse lowered the top end of its earnings per share guidance for 2019 by as much as 5%. It now expects adjusted EPS to come in at $2.30 to $2.50, compared to the $2.33-2.63 announced when the second-quarter results were released in August. That is effectively the second downgrade to the EPS outlook after TreeHouse said in February, when it reported 2018 annual figures, that EPS for 2019 would likely be $2.35 to $2.75.
TreeHouse expects to post net sales for 2019 of $4.26-4.36bn, down from $4.29-4.49bn previously.
In the nine months to 30 September the company’s net sales dipped to $3.14bn from $3.39bn in the equivalent period in 2018 while operating losses widened from $30.4m to $48m.
Its net loss widened from $50.5m to $376.5m while its earnings per share from operating operations also worsened, from $0.74 to $2.23.
