Glenn Richter
Chief Financial and Business Transformation Officer at International Flavors & Fragrances
Thank you, Erik, and thank you all for joining us today. As Erik noted, IFF had another very solid quarter achieving revenue just north of $2.9 billion, an increase of 9% on a comparable currency-neutral basis. We delivered broad-based growth across Nourish, Health & Biosciences, Scent and Pharma Solutions with notable volume improvements across all four business units.
Our ongoing productivity initiatives also contribute to a 16% increase in comparable adjusted operating EBITDA in the quarter. Building on our margin strength from the prior two quarters, we also realized another successful quarter of margin expansion with our comparable adjusted operating EBITDA margin of 19.4%, improving by 180 basis points versus Q3 of '23. Adjusted EPS, excluding amortization, was $1.04 in the quarter, increasing 17% versus the prior year period as strong profit performance and lower interest expense were mitigated by foreign-exchange impacts in other expenses.
Turning to Slide 9, our improved performance was broad-based this quarter. Nourish comparable currency-neutral sales increased 7% and we delivered an adjusted operating EBITDA increase of 18%. This was led by Flavor's third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth and modest sales improvement in Functional Ingredients. In Functional Ingredients, high single-digit volume growth was mostly offset by our pricing actions, which were very consistent with our planned price investments this year. Overall, we are very pleased with our Functional Ingredients recovery plan that has delivered three consecutive quarters of volume growth with strong expansion in margins and EBITDA.
Health & Biosciences achieved double-digit improvements in all of its businesses due to strong volume growth and productivity gains. H&B's comparable currency-neutral sales increased 12% and we delivered comparable adjusted operating EBITDA of $173 million, a 15% increase from the year-ago period.
In Scent, double-digit increases in both consumer fragrance and fine fragrance as well as high single-digit growth in fragrance ingredients led to a strong quarter for both revenue and profit growth. Net sales in the quarter totaled $613 million, up 10% on a comparable currency-neutral basis, and we delivered adjusted operating EBITDA of $127 million, up 7% on a comparable basis.
Lastly, Pharma Solutions returned to growth, delivering sales of $256 million, an 8% increase on a comparable currency-neutral basis, while adjusted operating EBITDA surged over 32% to $62 million on a comparable basis. This notable performance was driven by strong double-digit growth in industrial and mid single-digit growth in core pharma. Once again, margin expansion was primarily driven by volume and productivity gains.
Turning to Slide 10, cash flow from operations totaled $702 million year-to-date, a $366 million increase from last quarter, while capex year-to-date totaled $303 million or roughly 3.5% of sales. Our free cash flow position totaled $399 million year-to-date, a sequential increase from $136 million last quarter. Year-to-date, we also distributed $411 million in dividends to our shareholders. Our cash and cash equivalents totaled $569 million at the end of the third quarter, including $2 million in assets held for sale. Additionally, gross debt for the quarter totaled approximately $9.1 billion with a net debt to credit adjusted EBITDA of 3.9 times, a decrease from 4.5 times at the end of '23. Our trailing 12-month credit adjusted EBITDA totaled approximately $2.2 billion, largely in line with last quarter.
As we look ahead to the fourth quarter and into the first-half of '25, we remain committed to achieving our net debt to credit adjusted EBITDA target of below 3 times, following the completion of our Pharma Solutions divestiture, this sale, which again we expect to complete in the first-half of '25 reflects our near-term focus on optimizing our portfolio and improving our leverage position to further strengthen our capital structure.
On Slide 11, I'd like to turn to our consolidated outlook for the full-year '24. Given our improved financial and operational performance in the first three quarters of the year, tempered by some caution due to continued soft end-consumer demand, we are modifying our full-year '24 financial guidance. We now expect net sales to be in the range of $11.3 billion to $11.4 billion, up from our previously communicated range of $11.1 billion to $11.3 billion. We also now believe that volumes will be in the range of 5% to 6% growth versus our previous expectation of 3% to 5% increase. Pricing is also now expected to be roughly flat for the full-year versus 1% growth previously as real pricing remains consistent with what we expected at the beginning of the year, but FX-related pricing in emerging markets is expected to be slightly less than originally expected.
Our outlook for the fourth quarter remains unchanged despite our performance in Q3, given macro trends as we closely monitor food, home and personal care end markets, order phasing due to potential customer inventory adjustments at year-end and a slightly tougher year-over-year comparison. On the bottom-line, we now expect to deliver full-year '24 adjusted operating EBITDA near the high-end of our previously communicated range of $2.1 billion to $2.17 billion. The high-end of this range includes the upside we delivered in the third quarter and assumes continued productivity improvements, a greater level of annual incentive compensation given the relative strength of our performance versus budget and incremental reinvestments in the business with a focus on profitable long-term growth.
Lastly, based on current market foreign exchange rates, we now expect that foreign exchange will have an approximately 3% full-year adverse impact to sales growth assuming a euro-U.S. dollar exchange rate of 1.12 at the time of our forecast was developed versus the previous expected range of 3% to 4%.
I'll now turn it back to Erik for closing remarks.
