Glanbia plc GLAPF

The business

Glanbia sells protein in two directions. It owns brands that sell finished protein to consumers, and it makes ingredients that other food companies build into their own products. Performance Nutrition is the engine: $1.8B of FY2025 revenue, 46% of the group, and $233.8M of EBITDA, 47% of the group total. Inside that segment, Optimum Nutrition alone was 78% of revenue in the first quarter of 2026, which puts a single brand at roughly 36% of group sales. Health & Nutrition, the premix and flavour-solutions arm, is the smallest at $628.5M but the best, earning an 18.4% EBITDA margin, and it is buying its way into Latin America and India through Sweetmix and Scicore. Dairy Nutrition is $1.5B of American-style cheddar, whey proteins and colostrum bioactives at a 9.9% margin, and it is the piece most investors skip.

Skipping it is the mistake. Whey supply is set by how much cheese gets made, so it cannot flex to meet demand, and demand has gone vertical as high-protein claims spread across mainstream grocery. Australian grass-fed WPC80 has risen more than 110% since July 2025, and suppliers are guiding another 20% to 30% by the end of 2026. That inflation is what took Performance Nutrition's EBITDA margin down 390 basis points to 13.0% in FY2025 and what has wrecked the equity of competitors who buy whey and do not make it. BellRing Brands, which owns Premier Protein and Dymatize, trades at $13.24 against a 52-week high of $56.69. Simply Good Foods, which owns Quest and Atkins, is at $10.46 against $33.19 and has written enough goodwill off to put its trailing EBITDA below zero. Glanbia is short whey inside Performance Nutrition and long whey inside Dairy Nutrition, and Dairy Nutrition's FY2026 EBITDA guidance was raised in April to $160M to $170M from $149.5M delivered. The hedge is partial rather than complete, because roughly two thirds of Dairy Nutrition's revenue is cheese, and cheese prices are falling while whey prices climb. But partial beats none, and none is what the peers have.