DARRYL DYCK/The Globe and Mail
Revenue (fiscal 2025) $1.3 billion
Adjusted net earnings (fiscal 2025) $72.5 million
Three-year share price gain 4.3%
P/E ratio (trailing) 11
Some CEOs who ascend to the top job after decades with a company then just settle in to coast. Others kick the operation into higher gear. Rogers Sugar Inc.’s Mike Walton, who’s now 64, is definitely one of the latter.
He still remembers walking into the Rogers lobby in June 1980, his first day as a summer student, at its refinery in Saint John (which the company closed in 2000). There was a picture on the wall of an employee who’d been with the company for 50 years. “I sat there and I did the math, and I said, ‘I could do that,’” Walton recalls.
As Walton enters year 47, in many ways, he’s just getting started. He assumed his current role in October 2021, after a succession of jobs from the shop floor up and across every department. “You know early if sugar is in your blood,” he says.
One turning point was being named head of Rogers’s new maple initiative, the Maple Treat Corp. (now Lantic Maple), acquired in 2017 and since expanded.
Maple is now responsible for about 20% of Rogers’s revenue, and Walton says it’s driving meaningful growth of the company. Lantic Maple is the largest bottler and distributor globally. “We’re 25% to 35% of the world market,” he says.
The sugar market in Canada is basically mature and mostly a duopoly between two very old refiners—Rogers (founded in 1888) and Redpath Sugar Ltd. (founded in 1854 and based in Toronto)—and a smaller upstart, Sucro Can Canada Inc. Rogers has refineries in Vancouver, Taber, Alta. (which processes output mainly from local sugar beet producers), and Montreal.
As CEO, Walton has refreshed the executive team and changed the fundamental mindset. The industry “always just chased volume,” Walton says. “I want to be consistent profitable growth.”
Sugar is established in food production and among individual consumers. “In the maple business, it’s 85% private label,” Walton says.
The financial expansion at Rogers has been impressive—up from $91 million in adjusted EBITDA (Walton’s preferred measure of profitability) in fiscal 2021 to $150.4 million in fiscal 2025 (which ended Sept. 27 last year).
And the company remains a value investor’s dream. The dividend, at nine cents a quarter going back to 2013, gives Rogers a yield of 5.6% at recent share prices. Walton is looking at “some improvements in our debt ratio and dividend payouts over time.”
Sweet.