Lancaster Colony Corporation (NasdaqGS:LANC) is looking for M&A. During the company?s fiscal year 2024 second quarter conference call, David Ciesinski, President and Chief Executive Officer said that ?As we look ahead, Lancaster Colony will continue to leverage the combined strength of our team, our operating strategy and our balance sheet in support of the 3 simple pillars of our growth plan. The number one, accelerate core business growth; the number two, simplify our supply chain to reduce our cost and grow our margins; and number three, to expand our core with focused M&A and strategic licensing?. ?So, I would love to tell you we have another Chick-fil-A on the hook, but I think we all know there's just one Chick-fil-A out there.

But I think this in conjunction with how we're thinking about organic innovation, and M&A into the future, hopefully, will give us a balanced sources of growth for our retail business that allows us to compete in the top quartile of our peer group, and that's really our long-term aspiration?. Thomas Pigott, Chief Financial Officer said that ? And then when you look at M&A, our strategy is to really look at opportunities where we can lever our core competencies, really in dressings and sauces is kind of our focus area.

We see sauce category continues to be a nice growing. And so we're going to continue to look at opportunities in that space to really continue to grow this area of dressings and sauces where we tend to have strong culinary capabilities, nice retail sales team that's able to execute well. And with the Horse Cave investment, we have high-speed lines and capabilities to produce at a very low cost.

So that's the focus of our M&A strategy. And certainly, now that we have the SAP project behind us, as well as the Horse Cave expansion. We're certainly more open to looking at opportunities to scale the business further?.