Good day, everyone, and welcome to today’s MGP Ingredients Fiscal 2009 First Quarter Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Steve Pickman, Vice President of Corporate Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to this morning’s conference call. Very shortly, Tim Newkirk, our President and CEO, will provide comments related to our first quarter earnings announcement as well as the news regarding our recent restructuring plans. Also joining us this morning are Robert Zonneveld, Vice President of Finance and CFO, and Don Coffey, Executive Vice President of our Ingredient Solutions business segment. Before Tim begins and prior to taking questions this morning, we need to note the following. Any forward-looking statements that we might make today are qualified in the following respect There are a number of factors that could cause our actual results and any guidance to vary materially from expectations. Additional information about these factors may be found in the reports that we filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These include our Annual Report in Form 10-K and quarterly reports and 10-Q. I would also like to mention that this conference call is being webcast and is open to analysts. Now I would like to turn the call over to Tim.

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this conference call. As you know, we have been running at full tilt to transform this Company. I want to start with a brief overview of the quarter we reported yesterday. Then I will give you more context around our recent restructuring actions. Robert will then cover the financial highlights of the quarter, including the subsequent actions we have taken. At the end of our remarks we will be glad to open up the call to your questions. Our first quarter looked very similar to our recent fourth quarter, the main culprit again was higher pricing for our key inputs. The per-bushel cost of wheat for the first quarter increased by 41% over the same period a year ago. The per-bushel cost of corn before adjustments related to hedging practice averaged 49% higher than one year ago. Finally, the average cost for natural gas increased 42%. So, in total, while our sales of $99 m represented a 13% increase above last year’s first quarter, our profitability was eroded by a significant increase in our cost of goods sold related to raw material and energy expenses. Since you have our quarterly earnings release, I am not going to spend time reciting all the numbers. We reported a net loss of $17.2 million in the fourth quarter equating to a loss of $1.04 per diluted share. Robert will talk more about our quarterly financial results in a few minutes. Let me now move on to explain our recent actions in the context of our overall strategy. We are implementing a business transformation program that is expected to bring measurable rewards over the long term as we continue to exit underperforming businesses and refocus on our core strengths and growth…

Thank you, Tim. As with Tim’s remarks I will confine my discussions to a few highlights since everybody has the earnings release with the financial tables. As noted in the release, we have completed a second amendment to the credit agreement. The highlights include the following. The standstill agreement has been extended to February 27th or earlier if we have a forbearance to follow. Interest rate will be plan plus 3%, but the agreement has a interest rate forward of 7%. The financial covenants are monthly year-to-date EBITDA targets and other non-financial requirements exist. We also expect to receive approximately $9.2 million in tax refunds during our second quarter. The tax refunds will be used to pay down the credit line. While our credit lines (inaudible) at $55 million the uses of the cash received from the tax refunds will be restricted to be used only for our grain hedging activities, including margin cost. A more detailed amounts of our liquidity and capital resources and the amendment to the credit facility are included in the 10-Q we filed yesterday. Just as we move into becoming a more customer-centric Company, we are also becoming a Company whose decision-making is data and information-driven. The investment the Company has made in both operational and financial reporting has given MGP the transparency to understand the key drivers and has enabled us to make the difficult but (inaudible) decisions to change how we operate the Company. I will right now like to discuss details on our restructuring plans. As we had previously announced, as a result of the shutdown of the protein and starch operation in Pekin and the flour mill operation in Atchison, we will now non-cash charge writedown estimated at $6.9 million during our second quarter. The flour mill writedown does not include…

Thank you, Robert. Adding to what Robert said, another key element for the success of our performance improvement program is human performance leadership. Over the past year, in particular, we have attracted many high performers with deep experience in the critical areas of sales development, commercialization, plant management, and finance. Given the volatility in the commodity markets we also elevated risk management to a new level by creating a shorter supply chain and adopting more effective margin management programs. MGPI has a long legacy of successful manufacturing. Much of that footprint will continue to serve us well. However, our future will be determined by our ability to transform from a manufacturing mindset to one that is truly customer-driven. For instance, in specialty ingredients, instead of measuring pounds produced, we will be keeping a close eye on the number of problems solved. While I am on the topic of ingredients, let me say just a few words about our strategy. In the past we were able to score a number of home runs with the latest resulting from the low-carb fad. This is not typically how the industry works. In fact, just like the leading hitters, who also tend to lead in strike-outs, we need to generate a lot more new ideas for our food customers in hopes of scoring a sizable new product order. Don Coffey, who is principally responsible for our Ingredients segment, is charged with getting our people deeper into our customer base to the point where we become part of the fabric of any one company. It’s all about numbers. The more new products we have in our pipeline, the greater our chances of success. Don tells me that we have over 50 customer projects in the works, and he thinks we can eventually double that number over time. We want MGPI to be the first call when a customer has a challenge. Even though we are still early in building our new applications and service network the initial results are encouraging as measured by the value-added products we create and get paid for. That concludes my prepared remarks. Now we are ready to open the line for questions.

(Operator instructions) We will take our first question from Steve Denault with Northland Securities. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Good morning, everyone.

Good morning. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: You made some reference to intending to return of profitability, I didn’t catch the timing or timeframe.

See – this is Tim – we are expecting to be – to return to profitability by the next fiscal year. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Okay. How unprofitable in the most recent quarter would you say the wheat gluten and commodity starches were?

In the – in that Ingredients segment, the majority of those losses were driven by those commodity ingredients. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Okay. And most of which aren’t sold on contract, I would imagine, right? I mean if they are commodity (inaudible) it’s easy to walk away from it.

That’s yes – that’s generally true, see that ourselves, there will be some contracts, but most of those because of the time of the year that we are in most of those are calendar year contracts and are basically winding down here in the second quarter. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Okay. If I look at the Distillery Products segment, the $12.9 million operating loss, anything abnormal in that number?

No, that’s really a function , Steve, I think of what we’ve seen in the overall industry with the – we basically came through the highest prices corn in that quarter. We had very high natural gas prices peaking (inaudible) we had $140 oil in that quarter and obviously the rapid erosion of margins in the fuel ethanol market, all of which really affected that fourth quarter, but nothing unusual – I mean those are – fortunately those are unusual events in and of themselves, but there was nothing within the operations that was unusual. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Nothing. And in terms of hedging at high levels on corn or anything like that?

Not relative to the price of corn at the time. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Okay. What are your hedges look like heading into the December quarter?

We are running out of all of our hedged position within this current quarter on the corn side and are open after the end of this quarter. Sometime during this quarter we should use up all of the hedged grain that we have. Natural gas, as we talked about, in our fourth quarter earnings call is hedged for the remainder of this fiscal year. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Okay. And I missed the comment on SG&A expense reduction. There was something about $2.1 million?

Yes, we expect SG&A to be about $2.1 million than we originally planned for this year, lower. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Okay. $2.1 million lower on an absolute basis?

Right. Steve Denault – Northland Securities: Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

Thanks, Steve.

(Operator instructions) And there are no more questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Tim Newkirk for any additional or closing comments.

Thank you. This is Tim Newkirk again. Let me conclude my remarks by saying that these difficult decisions regarding changes in the Company’s operations have been driven by our need to focus on those areas where we can sustain a competitive advantage while reducing our earnings volatility caused by uncontrollable external factors such as we have witnessed in the commodity markets. Although recent economic conditions have caused us to accelerate some of these decisions, they all stem from an exhaustive business analysis spanning our entire enterprise. Additionally, every facet of our organization will aim to improve profitability while ensuring proper alignment with our strategic focus going forward. We thank you for joining us this morning. We look forward to talking with you again when we report our second quarter earnings. This concludes our call.