Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc.

Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc. is an American frozen potato products company that supplies french fries, hash browns, and other frozen potato items to quick-service restaurants, foodservice distributors, and retailers in more than 100 countries, generating $6.45 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Spun off from Conagra Brands in 2016, the company is the number-one supplier of frozen potato products in North America and one of roughly four global players that collectively dominate an industry where potato supply, manufacturing scale, and multi-decade customer relationships create genuine barriers to entry.

This is a story about a business that over-expanded into a demand slowdown, saw its pricing umbrella collapse, and is now attempting to earn its way back through a cost-driven turnaround. From fiscal 2022 through early 2024, Lamb Weston rode exceptional pricing power — gross margins above 27%, earnings that more than tripled in two years — and invested aggressively in global capacity to capture what looked like durable growth in fry consumption. Then global restaurant traffic softened, competitors brought new production lines online, and the company found itself with too much capacity chasing too little demand. Gross margin fell from 27.3% in FY2024 to 21.7% in FY2025. Net income halved. The stock, which touched $115 in early 2023, trades near $43. The file turns on a single question: whether the cost savings, potato cycle reset, and volume wins now underway are sufficient to restore mid-cycle earnings power, or whether the industry's capacity overhang has permanently reset the margin structure of the business.