General Mills, Inc. (GIS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Please welcome Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance, Jeff Siemon.

All right. Hello, everyone. It's great to have you all here. Thank you all for joining us on the webcast. I just have a couple of quick housekeeping things before we get the content in motion here. So on behalf of the entire General Mills team, I want to thank you for joining us today for our 2025 Investor Day event. We really are thrilled to have you here at our headquarters. For those of you in person, thrilled to have you joining us online. Before we begin, let me remind you that our presentations and Q&A discussion today may include forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions. So please refer to the materials that -- on our Investor Relations website this morning for factors that could impact forward-looking statements and for reconciliations of non-GAAP information, which we may discuss on today's presentation. Throughout today's presentation, you'll hear from a wide range of General Mills senior leaders, beginning with Jeff Harmening, our Chairman and CEO. For those of you joining online, you can find bios for each speaker accompanying the webcast and presentation materials. And for those here in the audience, you have the same information in your programs. We have a really full day planned. So let's go ahead and get right into it. Please join me in welcoming Chairman and CEO, Jeff Harmening.

Thank you, Jeff, and good morning, everybody. Good morning, everybody. Yes. Welcome to all of you joining us today, both live and virtually. We are thrilled to have you with us for Investor Day, especially excited to host those of you here at our General Mills world headquarters. This is the first time in many years, we've held this event at our corporate office. And for those of you who made the trip we really appreciate your coming. Our theme today is remarkability, and in particular, how we're driving remarkability across our business to accelerate growth. We've designed this day to give you a better picture of how General Mills is bringing remarkability to life. You'll get a look inside each of our businesses, time to connect with our leaders, and of course, enjoy sampling some of our remarkable products along the way. You can see our agenda behind me. We've got a great lineup of business presentations, multiple Q&A sessions and a panel discussion with leaders from supply chain, digital and technology and innovation and quality. To show you how we are modernizing our capabilities that fuel growth and sharpen our competitive advantage. Then for those of you here in person, we'll move into the interactive stations this afternoon. Immersive exhibit showcasing our businesses in North America Retail, North America Pet, foodservice and international as well as our work on sustainability and on supply chain. And you'll get a tour of our global R&D facility where we'll show you how we're leveraging our capabilities to shape the future of food. It is a pack-day and one, we hope you'll find both valuable and engaging. Before we get into the presentations, I just want to set the stage. As I said, our theme today is driving remarkability to accelerate growth. And throughout today's remarks, you'll hear how we are stepping up our remarkability across all aspects of our strategy and our execution. You'll hear how we are making bold choices to deliver more remarkable experiences from investing to bring consumers more value in North America Retail to launching nationally into the fresh Pet segment of the Pet food category, to building a world-class digital and technology capability. And you'll hear how we are working to deeply understand our ever-changing consumers and adapting to ensure that our total product offerings meet their needs in remarkable ways. And this is exactly where our accelerate strategy comes in. With our purpose to make food the world loves as our North Star, the accelerated strategy guides how we prioritize resources to capitalize on our competitive advantage, deliver for our consumers and drive top-tier shareholder returns. It's about making choices on where to play, focusing on the product platforms and the geographies where we have clear competitive advantages, and a right to win. And that includes our a core markets where we have the scale to compete. And our five global platforms and local gem brands where we see the best opportunities to drive profitable growth. It's about clearly defining how to win by boldly building our brands, relentlessly innovating, unleashing our scale and standing for good. It's worth taking a step back and assessing the volatility that our industry and General Mills in particular, has weathered over the past half dozen years, including COVID lockdowns, supply chain disruptions, sharply elevated inflation and geopolitical uncertainty. Fast forward to today, I think we can safely say that we've proven our ability to effectively navigate the evolving world and positioning General Mills for future success. We've doubled our investment in digital and technology, building new capabilities that are helping us to stay on top of evolving consumer behaviors and external trends, all the while seeing returns in the form of efficiencies, innovation speed and greater agility. And the good news is we are just getting started. You'll hear more later today from our talented leaders who are guiding our teams and advancing these digital capabilities, with more detail on how we're deploying them to adapt and win in a fast-changing environment. We've also delivered industry-leading levels of holistic margin management cost savings for more than 15 years, and we've outperformed our long-term trend more recently with a very good visibility to our HMM pipeline, we have high confidence that we can keep delivering strong savings to fuel our growth investment for years to come. And we've proved that we can effectively reshape our portfolio through M&A and through divestitures, making bold choices that change 30% of our net sales base. These changes strengthen our position in the categories and platforms where we have the right to win and created shareholder value along the way. We've acquired and grown a Pet food portfolio that is approaching $3 billion in net sales with strong margins, including Blue Buffalo, Edgard & Cooper and Whitebridge Pet brands. We've divested businesses like yogurt, where we didn't see a path to profitable growth. And we built a successful always-on M&A capability that gives us real confidence in our ability to pursue more portfolio-shaping actions in the future when the opportunities arise. With this strong foundation, we are well equipped to keep adapting to market realities, because we know that the landscape continues to shift. On one side, we're managing uncertainty around tariffs and global conflicts, shifting food regulations. And of course, we continue to see consumers seeking value as they contend with a historic level of inflation in recent years. And on the other hand, technology adoption from AI to new diet solutions like GLP-1s is rapidly reshaping consumer behaviors and expectations. At the core, our job is actually quite simple, follow the consumer. And when we look at long-term trends, several stand out. In the U.S., multicultural consumers, particularly Hispanic households are reshaping the consumer landscape and influencing food culture in powerful ways, led by millennial and now Gen Z households. At the same time, consumers are aging and with that comes new needs around health and wellness and convenience. Weight management and holistic health are increasingly top of mind, particularly with the influence of GLP-1 drugs. And Pet humanization continues to accelerate with Pet parents prioritizing premium nutrition and treating pets more and more like family. We are working hard to position our businesses to capture opportunities that these trends present. Our brands have built trust and relevance and scale, and we've proven our ability to adapt and evolve. As the marketplace changes, we are confident in our ability to keep following the consumer and to drive organic growth while also managing near-term challenges along the way. Our remarkable experience framework is at the center of how we adapt our brands to follow a consumer. So what is the remarkable experience framework? Simply, it's how we make every touch point with our brands more remarkable across product and packaging, brand communication, omnichannel execution and consumer value. And why does that matter? Because remarkability is a competitive advantage. In a crowded marketplace, it's what makes consumers choose our brands, stay loyal to them and recommend them to others. Our plans in fiscal '26 are all about investing to improve our remarkability, and while price is one place where we're investing, it is really important to understand that our investments across this framework go well beyond price. And so let me give you a couple of examples. First, our product news is bolder and bigger than it's been in many years. This includes core renovation news, premium innovation and seasonal offerings across both human and Pet food. We expect net sales from new products in fiscal '26 to increase significantly from about 3.5% last year to around 5% of total net sales this year. We've also sharpened our brand communications, making sure we're top of mind that the exact moment consumers are making buying decisions. We're breaking through today's noise in a few important ways. First, we're executing bigger, better ideas like this year's Pillsbury Bakes Up Bigger news, Blue Buffalo's product superiority messaging and our work to remind consumers outside the U.S., just how remarkable are Haagen-Dazs offerings are. Dana, Liz and Ricardo will unpack these initiatives further this morning. Second, we're building stronger capabilities. Like, for example, we launched an iconic brands growth lab bringing our science back proprietary. It's easy for me to say, proprietary brand building approach to all of our $8 billion brands. And we're creating exciting new digital marketing capabilities, helping our teams generate and scale creative content in fresh and innovative ways. All of this is supported with increased media and omnichannel investment, giving our brands more reach, more visibility and more consumer engagement. Now we're building momentum, and our plans are geared to further accelerate our growth. You'll hear about many initiatives today across our business, like Cheerios, Ghost Protein bars and Pillsbury refrigerated dough in North America retail. Yes, you'll hear more about Blue Buffalo's, new Love Made Fresh dog food in North America Pet, Haagen-Dazs stick bars and Nature Valley snack bars in international and frozen baked goods and our North America foodservice business. These are places where we're leaning in with even greater focus to drive acceleration. Executing this playbook also requires making bold choices. That means rethinking and rewiring how we operate, being mindful of risk, but unafraid to take decisions and actions when we see opportunities. Driving remarkability is about investing with conviction. On fiscal '26, we're taking a big step forward, doubling down on investments across our priority businesses. We're able to do this because of the enablers we put in place, like our industry-leading holistic margin management productivity program and our recently announced global transformation initiative. Collectively, our efficiency efforts are expected to deliver $600 million in savings, free up capacity and creating new ways of working that will enable our teams to increase their focus on demand generation. That efficiency allows us to reinvest more in meaningful growth. It's about discipline, it's about adaptability and it's about boldness, all working together to enable growth. So let me close with this. In fiscal 2026, our focus is on demonstrating our ability to restore organic sales growth as the first step toward our long-term ambitions. We are seeing progress and we have confidence in our fiscal 2026 plans, which will create the right foundation for continued acceleration. We believe that the best path forward is to drive long-term value for shareholders is through consistent profitable organic sales growth. We'll achieve it by continuing to invest in consumer value and product news and innovation and in brand building, guided every step of the way by a remarkable experience framework. We are making significant investments with strong ROI discipline and building on momentum we've already seen strengthen in the second half of last year and into today. Above all, we remain squarely focused on the consumer, because we know that if we lead with remarkability we can accelerate growth, despite challenge, despite change and despite volatility. With that, let's dig into the remarkable experience framework, and how we're bringing it to life. And who better to walk us through what that means then our leader of our North American Retail and North America Pet business. Please welcome Group President, Dana McNabb, to the stage. Dana?

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Dana McNabb and I have the privilege of leading our North America Retail and our North America Pet business. North America Retail and North America Pet play very different, but important roles for our company. North America Retail or NAR, as we call it, is fueled by beloved iconic brands like Cheerios and Pillsbury which have been in part of the fabric of General Mills for nearly 160 years. It's our largest and most profitable business segment, and our goal is clear. We need to return the NAR segment to consistent, profitable sales growth. For North America Pet, we see tremendous growth potential, for brands like Blue Buffalo and Tiki Cat behind the multi-decade pet food trend towards humanization and premiumization. Our job in pet is to leverage our portfolio of trusted beloved brands to tap into that humanization trend and accelerate our company's growth. When you look at our total combined portfolio in North America, we are the only food company with leading share positions across all meal occasions for humans and for pets. We take this access to 95% of American households seriously. And we know that to continue to be consumers, brands of choice, we need to deliver remarkable experiences for our consumers which leads to remarkable growth for our brands. With my time today, I'll share with you how we're investing in remarkability to ignite growth in NAR, which represents a $11 billion in net sales across snacks, meals and baking and cereal categories. Later in today's presentation, you'll hear from Liz Mascolo, who will share how we're leveraging remarkability to accelerate growth for North America Pet. It's impossible to talk about how we're going to drive growth if we don't start with who we need to drive growth with. As you heard from Jeff, our consumers are at the center of all our decisions. To build remarkable brands, we need to deeply understand our consumers and the choices they're making and how that translates into growth opportunities for our business. We know that consumers' pockets continue to be stretched, and they're looking for value in every aspect of their lives. And while price is important, it's just one of the many factors consumers consider when they're assessing the value of their choices. Now more than ever, our consumes are looking for easy access to quality food they trust to beat themselves or their family at affordable prices. And meeting our consumers where they are with the products and experiences they're looking for is simply nonnegotiable. Grounded in our accelerate strategy, our NAR ambition is to build the most remarkable brands in food. Because consistently delivering brand remarkability day in and day out is how we'll return NAR to consistent, profitable growth. Today, I'm going to walk you through two ways we'll do this. First, by investing in the remarkability of our brands and then by leveraging the power of our portfolio to capture new avenues of growth. Our ability to restore profitable growth to NAR will depend on our success in improving the remarkability of our brands. As Jeff shared we're using the remarkable experience framework as our guide to measure our superiority to the competition across all five measures. Based on our own experience as well as benchmarking with other leading CPG peers, we know that when we deliver superior scores to our competition across the majority of these metrics, there's a strong correlation with sustainable market share and household penetration gains. Let's take a look back at last year. As we entered fiscal 2025, we had a plan that was focused on improving remarkability in NAR, largely in the areas of product, communications and omni execution. But we soon realized that we had underestimated how much economic pressure our consumers were continuing to feel. And it became clear that price sensitivity had become too much of a barrier in certain categories, keeping the rest of our investments from breaking through. So we quickly moved to address the price challenge on a couple of big businesses like Pillsbury Refrigerated Dough and Totino's hot snacks, and encouragingly, when our price investments were combined with great product news and relevant messaging, we saw those businesses respond, inflecting to volume growth in the second half of the year. This increased our confidence that our focus on remarkability is the right one. And as we did an honest assessment of where each of our brands stood on all five metrics versus the competition, we knew that there was more work we needed to do. This is what led to our decision to significantly increase our investments to improve our remarkability in fiscal '26 across our portfolio, starting with price value. Because the truth is we can have the best product with the most compelling brand campaign, but if we're priced too high, the consumer simply won't put us in the consideration set. With consumers under significant economic pressure, we're investing to narrow price gaps on some of our biggest product lines or get under key price clips with the goal of addressing price value on about 2/3 of our NAR portfolio. And we've been smart about how we're deploying these investments, leveraging our strategic revenue management toolkit and using mechanisms that allow us to quickly pivot if KPIs are not being met. For example, our SRM analytics helped us identify the price clip we needed to get below on our Totino's Pizza Rolls large pack. When we invested to get our shelf price right, our business responded, and the large pack has grown pounds over 20% since we made the investment. We've made significant progress on our planned price value adjustments in Q1 and will complete the work in Q2, which will put us in a strong position to allow the rest of our remarkability levers to work harder for consumers going forward. And that includes great product. As I said earlier, we know our consumers are seeking great tasting, high-quality products. They feel good about feeding their families. This year, each of our top 10 categories and core brands has product quality news. That is up from three categories having news last year. This includes product renovation news like Cheesier, Annie, Mac&Cheese, Old El Paso soup with 30% more chicken and taste improvement on our core checks mix varieties. We also have strong innovation plans in F26 and expect NAR's net sales from new products to be up 25% versus last year. This innovation is centered on three growing consumer trends, bold flavors, better-for-you benefits like protein and products that deliver familiar and fun experiences for stressed consumers. We know consumers are looking for bolder flavors with 62% of U.S. consumers being more likely to buy food if it's spicy. To lean into this trend, we're launching products like Progresso Pitmaster, barbecue inspired soups, new spicy varieties of Chex Mix and a new line of Totino's ultimate pizza and pizza roles that delivers an elevated taste while still bringing consumers the value that they've come to expect from Totino's. On protein, we believe we're uniquely positioned to deliver great tasting, affordable protein for families and we're making significant investments to broaden our protein lineup this year. This includes expanding our Cheerios protein line, the top new cereal launch last year, with a great new tasty cookies and cream flavor. We're also rolling out new varieties of Annie's Supramax with 14 grams of protein and 5 grams of fiber along with oatmeal crisp protein cereal in Canada and Nature Valley creamy protein snack bars. Finally, we're continuing to deliver our familiar and fun by leveraging our iconic brands with new products from Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Cheerios and more. Importantly, we're already seeing success with this innovation lineup with Q1 customer acceptance, distribution and new product volume tracking ahead of our expectations. Let's move on to packaging. We're doubling the amount of price pack architecture, we're launching in fiscal '26. To ensure we have the right sizes to meet the needs of our consumers at the right prices across the right channels. From a pack size perspective, we're seeing bifurcated growth driven on one side of the spectrum by larger value sizes. And on the other, by smaller affordability sizes. Our strategy is to meet our consumers on both sides of the spectrum. For example, on Chex Mix, we launched new larger tubs, and smaller car cut formats to deliver both value and affordability as well as bringing new benefits in freshness and convenience. Beyond pack size, we're also accelerating our seasonal offering, like Halloween packs and fruit snacks and partnerships and equities like Wednesday and [indiscernible] with 50% more seasonal offerings planned year-over-year. These efforts help drive Nielsen-measured retail count growth for both our salty snacks and fruit snacks businesses in Q1. And we think there's more growth potential ahead as we continue to adapt our packaging to meet evolving consumer needs. With these investments in the remarkability of our products, packaging and price, we're building a stronger portfolio to bring to the physical and digital shelf. This gives us an opportunity to step our omnichannel execution by partnering with our retailers to help grow our categories. In fiscal '26, we are increasing the number of scaled portfolio events and seasonal events that we bring to the market. This includes launching cross-category events that hit critical windows for our customers and consumers, like back-to-school, football game day and New Year's. We're already seeing positive retailer engagement with these initiatives. In fact, incremental pounds, display support and merchandising lift are all outpacing our categories so far in fiscal '26 behind our strong event plan. And as we continue to drive omnichannel execution, we know that e-commerce integration is increasingly critical part of the mix. We already have a lead here. With our online market shares typically higher than in bricks and mortar outlets. We plan to capitalize on that by partnering with our customers to drive future e-commerce growth. And we have dedicated teams who work with our biggest omnichannel retailers to build effective growth plans. For example, at one key retailer, our back-to-school event integrated our Box Tops for Education program into the platform using a full funnel marketing approach. This drove improved sales and led to a 400% increase in connected Box Tops users who spend nearly 3x more on General Mills products. The final element is investing in remarkable brand communications with better partners, better ideas and better investments. We recently brought in three new creative agencies who are partnering with us to deliver modern social-led brand campaigns across all our top categories. And while early, initial reads on the campaigns that hit the market in Q1 have been promising, including Cinnamon Toast Crunch's new Must Cinnadust campaign that has already driven a 25% increase in brand consideration, helping drive increase pound and dollar share for that brand. In addition to improving the quality of our ideas, we're focused on improving our marketing capabilities and ROIs by leveraging AI tools. We recently stood up a new content studio called Studio G, with a partner we believe will be highly transformational for us in months. Together with our own internal growth lab capabilities, we will leverage AI across the entire communications chain from ideas, to content creation to publication. AI is helping us test ideas, increase the efficiency of production with digital twins, evaluate content before it launches and create at speed with versioning tools. We expect these and other AI-based tools will help us continue to optimize our media investments going forward. Beyond our AI capabilities, we're increasing our use of social media influences this year, with plans to expand going forward. And we're supporting all of these efforts with a double-digit increase in media investment in our fiscal '26 plan. Okay. So that's a lot. Let me now walk you through a great brand level example of how we're bringing these remarkability investments to life with Pillsbury. So for context, within the Refrigerated Dough category, our Pillsbury canned dough line, which includes products like cinnamon rolls, biscuits, crescent and breads, generates $1.5 billion in retail sales for General Mills. And Pillsbury holds a strong leadership position with roughly 80% share of the canned dough segment. We drove tremendous growth on this business during the pandemic as we out-executed the competition to keep our product on the shelf. In fact, we had to pull back on our marketing investments to manage demand as we reach the limits of our manufacturing capacity. But by fiscal '25, we were seeing demand slow down. Without a strong marketing push, we weren't as top of mind for consumers and our prices, which had increased to match the record level of inflation we experienced in the previous years, had simply become too much of a barrier for consumers. When we got to key baking season last year, it became clear that our total product offering was not where it needed to be. Through the first half of fiscal '25, our household penetration was down by a full point. Nielsen measured pound volume on our canned dough was down 4%, and our pound share was down almost 1.5 points. Simply put, we needed to deliver more remarkable experiences to consumers to get back to growth. So we took a comprehensive approach investing across all elements of the framework to address the challenges we were seeing and bring consumers back to the category and to Pillsbury. We started first by investing to ensure our offerings were below key price clips and had manageable gaps to the competition. But it had to be about more than just price. We knew our product experience needed to be truly remarkable. And thanks to the technical expertise of our R&D team, we were able to renovate our biscuits, crescents and cinnamon rolls to bake up noticeably bigger. This is real value for consumers that they can see, giving them more of what they loved about our products. We brought this news to life in a compelling way in our packaging turning our shelf-ready trays into a true marketing billboard to share the news at the in-store shelf. And we invested to revamp our e-commerce presence and highlight Bakes Up Bigger on the digital shelf as well. And to share this product news with consumers, we enlisted the help of influencers, media and social channels, along with the iconic Pillsbury Doughboy. Through our partnership with our new creative agency, we developed a creative campaign to spread the word. Let's go ahead and roll that ad. [Presentation]

Loved that doughboy. The icing on the top of the cake is that we are now using the doughboy across our social channels to engage with consumers and culture in real time, rapidly accelerating our social engagement. In fact, through Q1, we already saw more social engagement than we had in all of fiscal '25. It's early, but the results so far are encouraging. We're seeing the brand engaging with new consumers with growth in household penetration. We also restored volume growth for the Refrigerated Dough business and our pound share was up 2 points in Q1. And we are just getting started. As we enter key baking season, we'll be getting behind this news in a big way with an increase in media support and strong visibility in-store and online. Be on the lookout for everything, from an integration with Jimmy Fallon's new on-brand reality show on NBC, to crescent dog Halloween costumes to keep the bigger buzz going. As you can see from that example, when we invest in our brand remarkability, it works. And as we strengthen our remarkability, we can better leverage the power of our portfolio to drive growth. R&R portfolio allows us to achieve broad reach and satisfy more consumer needs, bring our scale to activations in-store and online, maximize cross-branding opportunities and provide offerings across the value spectrum. We're the #1 or #2 player in all our top categories. And with that comes a responsibility to drive category growth. By using the breadth of our portfolio to our advantage, we can drive more growth for our categories and increase the competitiveness of our brands. One way we're doing this is through our portfolio events that I mentioned before. We're also leveraging our brand awareness and category expertise to extend our hardest working brands into new verticals and across categories. For example, on Old El Paso soup line has been additive to our soup portfolio, and it's driving incremental consumers to the rest of the Old El Paso product line. In fact, of the Old El Paso soup shoppers who are new to the brand, nearly 40% of them also purchased another Old El Paso product for the first time, whether that was kits, shelves or seasonings. And we're pleased to announce the introduction of a new line of Ghost protein bars, which will start hitting shelves later this month. We have utilized our technical capabilities to create a performance bar that delivers 20 grams of protein with only 2 grams of sugar and it's delicious. It's a truly remarkable tasting performance nutrition combination in the snack bar space. In addition to portfolio events and cross-category innovation, we're also leveraging our portfolio to accelerate growth with key consumer targets, including Hispanic families, 55-plus households and GLP-1 users. We know Hispanics are the fastest-growing U.S. segment, with 1 in 3 Americans projected to identify a Hispanic by 2060. And we've recently started to make good progress with these consumers. In fiscal '25, we grew our Hispanic household penetration. And in fiscal '26, we have even stronger plans in place to continue this momentum. We're doubling down on priority brands such as Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Annie's that we know have a right to win because of their cultural relevance and growth potential. Leveraging these brands, we're driving strong brand creative rooted in Hispanic insights, and we're increasing our Hispanic dedicated consumer investment by 40%. We're also bringing product news we know will resonate, including unique seasonal items and flavor profiles, and we're leveraging both national and hyperlocal events to reach these consumers. 55-plus consumers make up almost half of the U.S. households have unparalleled spending power and drive almost half of total food and beverage spend. We have numerous categories and brands within our portfolio that over-index with 55-plus households, and we're leaning into this advantage in three ways. First, our fiscal '26 innovation slate has a strong emphasis on Tasty Protein, which we know is a key need with this consumer group. Second, we're expanding smaller packs and portions, and we're leaning into our frozen formats like Pillsbury brands that are better suited to small households. And third, we're investing in more relevant media and joint activations across key brands such as Cheerios and Progresso that will better resonate with our consumer group. Finally, we are working to get ahead of the continued scaling of consumer adoption of GLP-1s. The latest research indicates GLP-1 usage among U.S. adults is around 12%, and it's expected to grow. And our own studies indicate that users are generally split into two groups. One group that largely eats the same foods they always did, just in smaller quantities and portion sizes; and one group that makes more significant changes to their diet. They look for specific product attributes such as protein, for muscle mass and fiber for digestion. In fiscal '26, we're taking action to help address the most critical GLP-1 user needs, leaning into categories that over-index with these consumers like soup, snack bars and cereal. A positive is that many GLP-1 user needs overlap with the needs of our 55-plus consumers. This means the protein innovation and the portion-controlled offerings I just mentioned are going to benefit us with GLP-1 users as well. On top of that, we are also planning more specific activations including new targeted messaging via digital media. We're already seeing positive early traction on key brands with buy rates for GLP-1 consumers up 5% on Progresso soup and up 20% on our Ratio and Fiber One bars. It's early days. But we'll continue to learn and adapt to ensure we're leveraging the power of our portfolio to maximize our success in these growth basis. So I've walked you through how we're investing in our brand remarkability to increase superiority to the competition and how we're leveraging the power of our portfolio to drive growth. But most importantly, is it working? In short, yes. We are seeing broad-based improvement across our portfolio and clear signs that our investments are working. We held or grew pound share in 8 of our top 10 NAR categories in Q1. We strengthened pound volume trends across 7 of these top 10 categories, and we grew household penetration for the first time in three years. And while our NAR operating margin will be down this year due to our investment profile, the strength of our HMM and strategic revenue management capabilities has enabled us to maintain a margin profile that is roughly in line with our pre-pandemic margin and remains among the top of our peer set. Let me be clear. We have more work to do. And we won't get everything exactly right. But I am confident that we're on the right things. We're listening to our consumers, and we're making the bold choices and necessary investments to fuel our growth. By staying focused on the remarkability of our brands and leveraging the power of our remarkable portfolio, we will build the most remarkable brands in food and return NAR to consistent profitable growth. With that, I will hand it off to Pankaj Sharma, our Segment President of North America Food Service, and I look forward to answering your questions at the Q&A session. Thank you.

Thanks, Dana. Hello, everyone. It's wonderful to be here and see so many of you in person. Building on what Jeff and Dana shared, our North America foodservice team is committed to providing solutions through the remarkable experience framework. We are focused on helping our operators and customers solve their biggest problems. Today, I will focus on how we are delivering remarkable products across two of our key growth areas that we expect to further accelerate our performance. Before we get into it, I'll start with some grounding on our business. North America Foodservice or NAF, generated $2.3 billion in net sales last year with attractive operating profit margins. This is a business that's exposed to growth with away from home food in the U.S., outpacing at-home food over the past decade apart from the pandemic period. Our NAF business spans a variety of categories such as cereal, snacks, frozen baked goods, baking mixes and bakery flour. Our portfolio includes retail brands like Pillsbury and Cheerios and Nature Valley as well as foodservice brands, including [ Bonichi ] and All Trumps, which are loved and trusted within the food service industry. Our products serve operators across all dayparts and include a full spectrum of prep formats focused on solutions. For example, our biscuits can be used across all dayparts, including breakfast sandwiches, biscuits and gravy and even dessert applications like Shortcake. We sell our products to distributors and operators across all channels. This includes commercial channels like restaurants, vending and supermarket bakeries and noncommercial channels where food is not the primary offering like K-12 schools, universities, health care and lodging. Our channel breadth is differential and allows us to capture multiple points of growth regardless of the industry dynamics. For example, our business has strong noncommercial exposure, which has experienced sustained traffic growth over the last several years. The scale of our noncommercial business differs from many of our large competitors that are more heavily exposed to the commercial channel. In the commercial channel, the traffic performance has been mixed. Quick service and fast casual restaurants are seeing increased traffic. However, the rest of the commercial channel is facing traffic challenges largely due to the slow recovery of away-from-home eating since the pandemic and continued consumer economic pressure. Beyond the strong solutions-oriented portfolio and channel breadth, we have advantaged R&D capabilities. This includes our in-house culinary team who provide operator-first solutions focused on product innovation, back-of-house labor efficiencies and how to most effectively leverage the versatility of our portfolio through training and consultation. We also have our own sales organization which most food service companies don't have. Our team has a direct relationship with our operators enabling us to provide tailored solutions to solve their problems. Taken together, our portfolio of great products, channel breadth, differentiated R&D capabilities and sales capabilities sets us apart from the competition. It's truly a win-win for our operators when they choose General Mills. And in turn, our performance story is one of winning. The NAF segment has been on a journey of sales acceleration following the pandemic, growing organic sales for each of the past four years and delivering market share leadership for three consecutive years. This continued in fiscal '26 with 68% of our priority businesses having grown or held dollar share fiscal year-to-date. This includes growing to an unprecedented 55 share position in cereal and a 51 share in biscuits by driving all aspects of remarkability. Now let me share how we'll continue this momentum by highlighting two focused areas: leading breakfast through nutrition and expanding frozen baked goods. Beginning with leading in breakfast through nutrition. We are the undisputed leader in school breakfast. And we take this leadership really seriously. We believe students who eat better, learn better, we are proud of the positive impact we are making by providing schools with a strong portfolio of nutritious products that students love. We currently have 84 share of K-12 cereal, and we are the leader in frozen breakfast with a 28 share in individually wrapped items. We also know there is a significant room to expand our impact today, breakfast participation is far lower than lunch participation. Our operators indicate that participation rates of breakfast are growing more than other dayparts. We capture this growth opportunity by investing in remarkable innovation, renovation and value. This is a big year in K-12 schools as new reduced sugar regulations on certain products such as cereal were implemented. Our portfolio has historically included many low sugar options. And in this year, all our K-12 cereals meet the new regulations. By ensuring our portfolio was ready in advance of the regulation change, we were in a competitively advantaged position, which allowed us to extend our share leadership, gaining more than 2 full points of cereal share and K-12 schools over the last 12 months. Now as we look ahead, we'll remain focused on meeting the evolving needs of our operators. This includes offering the strongest portfolio of gluten-free cereals and removing certified colors from our entire K-12 portfolio by the summer of 2026. Additionally, we're reformulating products like Pillsbury Mini Cinnis and Mini Bagels to meet reduced sugar requirements coming in the 2027 school year. Finally, we have a strong innovation lineup featuring new Pillsbury branded Muffins and pancake puffs that meet regulations can be prepared easily and most importantly the taste [indiscernible]. Now moving to our frozen baked goods business. This category represents more than $18 billion in retail sales in away-from-home channels. And it's expected to continue to grow at a compound annual rate of 4% over the next three years. This category growth is driven by operators seeking affordable solutions and greater convenience as they continue to face limited skilled labor, rising costs and growing consumer expectations. We'll capture that growth by bringing remarkable product innovation and renovation across three big goods categories. First, we are investing in our flagship biscuit portfolio, which has grown volume and share over the last two years. Our unbaked biscuits are truly remarkable in the marketplace and operators know they can count on Pillsbury biscuits for a consistent high-quality product experience. They also solve operator problems through their versatility as I highlighted earlier. We have a suite of recipes and applications that are truly differential for our operators. Now we do have an opportunity in big biscuits where we are bringing more remarkable products that solve operator problems, like our recent renovation that extended whole time which drives enhanced product quality and reduces waste for operators. Next, we are investing in frozen desserts. This is one of the fastest-growing subcategories of frozen baked goods, and we are delivering double-digit growth year-on-year on our full and half sheet brownies and blondies. These products are consistent, delicious and versatile. They can be sliced to whatever size the operator desires and served stand-alone or talk to be a signature or a seasonal item. We are building on a strong portfolio in the growing brownie space with our latest sheeted dessert innovation, the chocolate chip blondie. This product is providing operators with a new offering to expand their bakery and dessert portfolios and at a great value. For those in the room, you will have a chance to sample them later today. Finally, croissants is a growing category where we are gaining share, led by the strength of our customer partnerships across the portfolio. We offer the continuum of croissants that can meet the need of any back-of-house operation from frozen baked croissants, which are frequently used for breakfast carriers, to freezer to oven which are often used as a signature or a bakery case item. We are providing operator-first solutions. We'll be building on this momentum by bringing in additional flavor innovation. Now to summarize. Our North America foodservice business is a unique differentiator for General Mills, and we are committed to building on our strong performance track record. From cereal and snacks to flour mixes and frozen baked goods, we deliver remarkable solutions that are innovative, nutritious and value additive. With an industry-leading portfolio, Channel Breadth and competitively advantaged capabilities, I'm confident that North America Foodservice is well positioned to continue driving profitable growth for this year and beyond. Okay. That wraps up our first portion of today's prepared remarks. I'm now going to invite Jeff, Jeff and Dana, back to the stage for our first Q&A session. Thank you.

Okay. Hands already up. That's great. Why don't you take off our Q&A session. For those of you in the room when I call on you, I just ask you to stand so the mic runners can find you and then state your name and your firm and then we'll make sure that you get your question answered. So let's go ahead and get started. Maybe we'll start with Nik Modi here in the front.

I swear I'm standing. You knew it was coming. So just, I guess, two quick questions. Just when you think about the price adjustments, how did you make the decision in terms of price clips, like where exactly you're going to go? And if you can just give us some contexts on how much of this is a function of narrowing gaps with private label versus the proportion that is relative to your branded competitors? So that's the first question. And then the second question is really on protein. How do you think about putting protein in existing brands versus new brands when you think about an offering? Because sometimes, I feel like the packaged food universe is just kind of sprinkling protein everywhere. And sometimes it may be off brand because it may alter the taste of a product that people like as an indulgent versus something that has a health and wellness angle. So those two questions would be great.

Thanks for the question, Nik. In terms of pricing and how we figured out what to do, we have a really good strategic revenue management toolkit, and we evaluated every business line by line in every geography and every retailer to try to understand, do we need to look at the gap to private label? Do we need to look at Cliffs or do we need to do both? I think initially, when we started out, we thought it was going to be more gap to private label, and what we saw is, we use that Pillsbury as an example, that majority of the challenge was really getting under key cliffs. And that was -- we used our data over time to develop that. And we have a really surgical answer for every brand, every scoop. So that's how we went about it for the price. And as you saw, we believe it's working. We've been really presently surprised with the results that we're seeing. We're either at or we're exceeding performance targets that we set. Our pound growth on our top 10 SKUs is up 1.5 points. And so, so far, so good. When it comes to protein, I can understand why you think it looks like we're sprinkling protein everywhere. And I'm sure you would expect me to say this, but I really believe our R&D team has a proprietary advantage in how to make protein taste good. And how we determine where to put it is all based on the consumer first. So I'll use Cheerios Protein as an example. We actually had a new brand developed that we thought might work better with protein innovation. And over time, we saw that the consumer said, "No, we really like Cheerios. We would just like it to have a little more protein and be an accessible price and taste great." And every time we got this offering in front of consumers is scored better than everything else. So again, we just come back to the consumer, we test concept and product. We make sure that we do that in home over a period of time and whatever wins with the consumer will launch.

Great. Let's go to Michael Lavery here in the front.

Michael Lavery, Piper Sandler. Just two questions related to the marketing and brand approach. One is you talked about listening to the consumer. And it does feel like that's maybe happening a little differently than it used to. So what maybe changed there? Or how do you maybe feel closer to what the consumer needs are? And then how do you determine what the right level of spending is looking at a price gap or a price cliffs, it's got a bit more straightforward element to it. What gets you to the right level of brand spend and how do you know when you're there?

So I'll start first with we know when we're there. It really is about looking at the brand, who we're trying to reach, where we can reach them best and then we determine how much spend we need to put into the marketplace in order to reach them effectively to deliver the household penetration that we need. It is not a lot more complicated than that. That's how we go about it. In terms of listening to consumers and learning from them, it has changed a lot. When you think about social media, the impact of Tiktok, the impact of the fact that you get real-time feedback almost instantaneously from consumers and that you can use AI to understand quickly what they're saying, what they like, what they don't like, how to pivot. We have launched what we call this growth lab. It's a brand accelerator lab that uses AI to scan all of those social media network to get real-time consumer feedback and we've been able to pivot really fast using those in order to say, "Hey, I think we've got something here that consumer is going to like. Let's try it." Or "Hey, this is really not going to work today, and we put it on the shelf and go for something else."

Great. We go to Chris Carey here in the front.

Chris Carey, Wells Fargo. The first question, Dana, you mentioned in the presentation you've got new quality news in 10 categories or core categories in the U.S. Last year, you had 3. I was more surprised by the fact that last year, there was just 3. What was the impediment last year to bringing new product news? I think there's a debate in the market about the retailers are saying maybe there's value issue in food, maybe there's an innovation issue. So why wasn't there the innovation over the last year? And then maybe if we take a step back on these price adjustments. Yes, it's about the consumer. But can you just talk about -- how do I say this? The partnership that you have with retailers about how to grow these categories together over time relative to this becoming a bit of a more of a competitive relationship if you will take that.

Can you remind me the first part of the question again?

Why wasn't there enough quality?

Why wasn't there enough quality? All right.

3 Categories versus 10 this year. What was the impediment?

So in terms of us determining where to add product quality news, last year, as we developed our F26 plans was really the first year that we brought the use of this remarkable experience framework toolkit to all 10 of our categories. We hadn't been using it across every category prior to that. And what's really good about this tool is it forces you to measure your product quality against private label, against small brands, against branded manufacturers, and really understand where you sit in terms of the consumer mindset. And so it was a really great tool to point to us where we weren't good enough. And we saw an opportunity where we needed to improve the product quality or we could bring news that consumer would really value more than someone else in all 10 of those categories. So that's why you saw that step up from 3 to 10. And now we use this remarkable experience framework, and we're disciplined in how we measure against the competition in everything that we do. And I think you'll see us getting better and better at this. So that's the first. In terms of -- in terms of the customer, what I would say about retailers is they are partnering with us. They want us to help grow the categories. And they have the same goal as we do, which is to serve the consumer, and they value brands. So they've been a great partner in this in terms of helping us to understand what is the right gap, what is the right cliff to be under, because again they want to grow the categories. They want to serve the consumer and they want the consumer to have the best value proposition across the total mix.

Great. We go to Dave Palmer here in the front.

Thanks. To some degree, I'm asking sort of a lateral question about you guys versus the competition when it comes to the margin, again you said the North America retail would get to roughly this -- or could be sustained at roughly the pre-COVID level of margin. A lot of the competitors out there the North America businesses are 200 to 250 basis points worse this year than where they were pre-COVID, maybe you have some perspective about why that is reasonable that you would be at pre-COVID levels of margin and maybe why you'd be doing better than what we see elsewhere. And then also I just wonder about pricing and the answer to each mega category that you're in. So for example, dough, 80% share, private label is your major competitor, it seems like that would be a pricing oriented solve, whereas we see some of the smaller premium brands winning in cereal right now, it's not as obvious that price is the solution there. So maybe you can give us a sense of the spectrum of pricing is the answer of your major categories.

So you ask a question, I'm going to speak to give Dana break, plus let you know I'm capable of speech. And so, the reason is why our margins have held up, and we're really, really proud of this is that our productivity leads the industry. I mean we don't just talk about it, we do it, we have been doing it for a long, long time, even during COVID when many people were having trouble keeping their factories up and running. We were generating 3% productivity. We've averaged 4 over 15 years, and now we're at 5. So it really is quite helpful when you're able to generate industry-leading levels of productivity and you have strategic revenue management tools, which are amongst the best in the industry as well. So those are a couple of things that have allowed our margins to stand the test of time or last little while where a lot of our competitors, they either don't have the SRM tools or they don't have the HMM tools or they actually they don't have both. So I think that would be the answer to our productivity. In terms of pricing, it always varies by category. I mean, we competed more than 20 categories. And the answer is always different by category. But I can assure you, at the end of the day, it's always about brand building and innovation. At the end of the road, once we get past pricing and lapping kind of what we're currently doing, it is all about innovation and leading that voice, whether it's in Pillsbury or something else. But you are correct in that some of our categories that were the big leaders like in Pillsbury, Private Label is the bigger competition and cereal, not nearly so much. And those things all dictate different solutions. But at the end of the day, they all dictate following the consumer and making sure we innovate whether that's on our core or whether that's with new product innovation.

Good. If we go to Alexia here in the front.

Alexia Howard from Bernstein. So the first question I have is whether you can help us interpret what we're seeing in U.S. measured channels, which seems weaker. You've obviously accomplished a lot in the North American Retail segment getting to the price points you want to be, but the volume trends in there do still look fairly lackluster. Are there things that are going on in non-measured channels that we don't see, whether that's Costco or e-commerce or Trader Joe's rolling out different channels. And therefore, should we expect to see your reported results consistently doing better than what we're seeing in those -- that measured channel data that we see coming out that becoming less relevant? And then I have a follow-up for Jeff.

I'll start with. I think as we think about measured channel data versus our own data, we would expect that, that will track pretty similarly. So I think that yes, when you can talk about channels like club and others that are growing well, but I'd would say we still have 90 plus percent coverage from measured channels, so I think by and large that will track the same, but may we are going to talk about some of the other headwinds and tailwinds we're seeing from a volume standpoint in our categories.

Right. I mean from a volume standpoint for us we are pleased with the point growth progression that we are seeing and we're up 1.5 points on our top 10 categories versus what we saw in Q4. But you are right, the categories in general aren't improving as fast. We think that's largely due to the fact that the consumer is still adjusting to this once-in-a-lifetime inflationary period and trying to find their footing. So what you're seeing is that we're not getting the same amount of price mix into the categories as that we've been able to in the past. And I just think we need to adjust to some of that. There is a little bit of pound volume that is moving. People are cooking more at home, they're stressed. You're seeing staples increase a little bit. And obviously, GLP-1s are impacting volume a little bit. But largely, we think it's due to this economic stress. The fact there's no price mix or just a little bit of price mix and that the consumers are still adjusting, that's what we think is leading to the categories. We are controlling what we can control which is our competitiveness in those categories and taking seriously that we have the job to do to get those categories back to growth.

Great. And as a quick follow-up for Jeff. M&A has become a much bigger theme across the industry in the last year or so. We've had a couple of companies announced separations. You've obviously been working at portfolio change since fiscal '18. Can you talk about your priorities on that front on the acquisition and maybe the divestment side, what you imagine going forward over the next few years?

Yes. Well, there has been quite a discussion in the industry. When it comes to M&A, our first priority is organic growth. That's what I would say about M&A. And you look at the year squared on your stock valuation return to shareholders, and I can guarantee you the biggest thing you can do is grow organically. And so that's our #1 priority. And that's why we have pound growth this year in North America retail is #1, and our growth in pad is #2 for our priorities. Having said that, we're really proud of what we've done in M&A and it's one thing to do M&A is another thing to do it successfully. And we've been able to do it successfully without damaging our core business, which is the trick. And so we -- obviously, it's been 30% over the last few years. This combination of looking at growth assets and divesting businesses which aren't a big priority. We feel like that has worked well for us. We feel like it's worked well for all shareholders, and so our approach to that hasn't really changed at all even though we understand the narrative going around the whole industry, but our job to do to take care of our shareholders, not worry about what other people are doing in the industry, and that's what we look to do. So we're going to keep the hammer down on our organic growth, and we'll look at growth assets when they become available, if we think that we can create shareholder value, and we'll continue to look at divestitures if they no longer fit our portfolio.

Great. We go to Andrew Lazar here in the second row.

I'm Andrew Lazar, Barclays. Jeff, you talked about how some of your categories more recently have weakened a bit, consumer has to adjust to some of the higher the price points. I guess, historically, it's been like 12 to 18 months that the consumers needed to sort of better adjust, right, to some higher price points at various points. Why do you think it's taken longer this time? Is it simply the magnitude of pricing that was taken. I guess the question I'm asking is the hard one to answer is how long is this going to take?

The -- I'll give you a theory on why it's taken longer, and I'm not going to be nostradamus on how long it's going to take. But I think it's taken longer because we haven't seen inflation like we saw for about 3 years in a row and 40 years. So when we talk about precedence for what we saw, there actually isn't much precedence in the United States at least for how long it's taken. I think -- I believe that it's the magnitude of inflation we saw, plus we saw it year after year after year for 3 years in a row. And so the combination of the length of the inflation that we have seen and inflation is still running at or ahead of wage growth. And so consumers, if you're making $200,000 a year or less, you are really feeling that pinch even still today. And so that's what I believe is the magnitude of the inflation that we saw is the reason why it has taken longer for for the value consciousness of consumers to kind of abate. How long will that take? I don't know the answer to that. What I feel great about is the work that Dana and her team have done on getting our prices aligned as well as the rest of the elements of the marketing mix and the remarkability framework. And I'm convinced I saw this in cereal in 2008. Many of you were not around in 2008, but I was, and I saw it in cereal. And what I saw at that time, we did right size, right price, was that when we got our prices in line, suddenly, every lucky charms was more magically delicious and the Cheerios marketing worked a lot better on cholesterol messaging. And so we're starting to see that same thing in some of our business here. And there's no reason, in my view, why we won't see the same thing in our categories to the extent that we do the job we have to do. Dana showed the Pillsbury Doughboy. We talk about more [indiscernible]. We do that kind of work with prices in the right frame. It's not clear to me why we wouldn't see the same kind of growth that we did then. And we saw growth in cereal for 5 years in a row and took market share 5 years in a row. I think it started with pricing, but it finished with great marketing and innovation.

Great. We are going one more here. Tom Palmer In front here?

Tom Palmer, JPMorgan. You've noted some of the, I guess brand extensions in terms of offering different attributes such as higher protein. I wonder about kind of the core of the portfolio and to what extent just given consumer preferences involving, they might be the need to perhaps change ingredients, obviously, there's headlines about dies, but maybe even more broadly than just that.

I think the answer to that question always comes back to the consumer and what do they value in the product in terms of quality news. And so I think Cheerios is a great example where when we talk to the consumer, there was a group of them that would say we would like a little bit more protein at a good price, that's something that we'd be interested in. But at the same time, we're talking about the great taste of our honey nut Cheerios and both are growing. So again, I think it comes back to what consumers say and what they do with food isn't always the same thing. You have to stay really close to them. You have to listen to what they want and adjust quickly. I think that we're one of the best at doing that. And if we stay focused on this remarkability, we'll like the growth that comes with it.

Yes, I completely agree with Dana, and I know we need to wrap up here, but this is important. I mean our Cheerios Protein offer has really taken off. So that innovation has taken off. Our granola offerings, in particular, protein granola has really taken off. And over the last 6 months, the performance of Tricks and Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch has also taken off. And so as we think about consumers are one way or the other, but as Dana said, there are lots of things that are important to them. They always care about value, taste, health and convenience. That's what they care about. And sometimes they care about one more than the other, and they usually care all about the same time. And so as we think about the jobs to do, it really is following what the consumer is wanting, not what they say or not what somebody's headlines say we should be doing, but what our consumers is really looking for. And I can tell you, it's possible to grow Cheerios Protein and Lucky Charms at the same time, and that's what we're doing. And that's why this remarkable experience framework is so powerful.

Good. Okay. So we'll close this first Q&A session here. We'll have a second later on after a second set of presentations. One announcement before we go to break. Dana talked about the great partnerships that we have with -- is working on things like back-to-school and Game Day here in fiscal '26. I'm excited to announce for those of you in person, you're going to get an opportunity to meet and get photos with one of our partners this year. The Minnesota Vikings, all Pro wide receiver, Justin Jefferson, will be here for lunch with us. So I'll share more when we get past the break and past the session here, but just make sure you've got your game face on for Justin. So with that, I think we'll go ahead. We're going to take a 15-minute break here in the room. We're going to pause the webcast. So for those of you online, we'll pause the live stream, and we'll come back in 15 minutes. And with that, I think we'll wrap up this first session. [Break]

Please welcome segment President, North America Pet, Liz Mascolo.

Good morning, everyone. Hope you had a good break. I have the pleasure of talking to you today about our North America Pet segment and the work that we are doing to love, feed and treat more pets like family. But first, let's start with a little bit of context. For the last several years, humanization has been the key growth driver for the pet food category. And what I mean by humanization is that pet parents increasingly consider their pets as kids. And they are making food choices for them based on how they would feed the rest of their family. Millennials and Gen Z make up the largest segment of pet parents, and they are leading the humanization of this category. They are also having fewer kids. So pets play a larger role in their lives. We expect this humanization trend to continue to drive outsized growth for the category. Today, Pet food is a $56 billion category in the U.S. It is a $142 billion category worldwide. That's the equivalent of global ice cream, cereal and snack bar categories combined. As a company, this is the biggest category that we compete in, and it is our largest opportunity for growth. In 2018, we entered the pet category with the acquisition of Blue Buffalo. Since then, we have grown the North America pet segment to roughly $2.5 billion in net sales, spanning dog feeding, cat feeding and treating with very attractive margins. We have done that by driving significant organic growth and by bolting on additional pet assets, which are helping us to stay at the forefront of humanized innovation, yet our pet business represents only a 7% share in total North American pet food. Clearly, we still have tremendous opportunity for growth. So what are we doing to capture it? The short answer is a lot. Fiscal '26 is a critical year for us as we continue to pursue more share of the pet food category. To deliver we are differentially investing in remarkable experiences across our core and in new growth vectors that we call accelerators. Both need to grow, and that is exactly what we intend to do. Blue Buffalo dog feeding, cat feeding and treating these businesses represent our core. Today, Blue Buffalo is the most loved and trusted natural pet food brand in the U.S. All of our Blue businesses are grounded in brand purpose, which is to help more pet parents love their pets like family and feed them like family. Blue was the first brand to teach pet parents to flip over the bag and read the ingredient labels and ensure that everything on that label was something that they would feel good about feeding to one of their family members. All of our products abide by the same nutritional philosophy that we call our True Blue Promise, which assures pet parents that real meat is the first ingredient and that our products do not contain poultry byproduct meals, corn [indiscernible] soy or any artificial flavors or preservatives. Our focus on ingredient superiority and premiumization has positioned Blue Buffalo as the leader in premium pet feeding. And it's what we're continuing to amplify this year through the remarkable experience framework. Beginning with our dog feeding business. It is the largest part of our total portfolio, spanning dry and wet feeding. Life Protection Formula, or LPF, as we call it, accounts for more than 70% of our dog feeding business. We have grown pound share in this business for 7 consecutive quarters, led by our LPF dry kibble. We've grown LPF dog dry behind our ingredient superiority strategy. Our brand communications highlight the quality of our all-natural ingredients, and they help convince pet parents to trade up from lower quality food they may be feeding. We are not afraid to take our competitors head on. And in fact, our head-to-head advertising comparisons are the most effective way to build our LPF brand. This year, we are expanding our head-to-head advertising and we'll give pet parents new compelling reasons to trade up their puppy and senior food to LPF, puppy and senior formulas. We will do this by talking about superior quality ingredients and the benefits that those ingredients deliver versus the competition. From a product standpoint, we are also continuing to invest in our latest dog dry feeding innovation, LPF salmon. Salmon is the fastest-growing protein in the category, and we are seeing strong performance in its first few months in market. [ Weed ] and wilderness. It's our more premium line and admittedly has been our most challenged Blue Buffalo business. To address this challenge, we are working all elements of the remarkable experiences framework. This includes adjusting our packaging, accelerating innovation behind higher protein offerings, and continuing to invest in brand communications to ensure that pet parents understand the value of our products compared to the competition. We have recently repositioned Wilderness to focus on superior protein-packed nutrition that provides energy for a more active lifestyle. Wilderness has 30% more protein than our leading competitor, which we know is a benefit that protein is seeking dog parents value. Switching gears, let's talk about the cats. The cat segment of the category is outpacing growth that we're seeing in dog. Cat parents are finally beginning to view their cats as family members and are increasingly willing to spend more on premium, high-quality food that caters to their cats specific needs and preferences. Retail sales for our cat feeding business grew low single digits in fiscal '25, and our momentum has accelerated this year. With retail sales up mid-single digits in the first quarter, including our newly acquired Tiki Cat business. Like in dog food, taking competitors head on has proven to be successful in cat feeding. But for cats, we must focus on the taste advantage that we deliver from these high-quality ingredients. We know that 7 out of 10 cats prefer to eat blue taste [ float over items ]. And the more cat parents who know that, they choose Blue too. Our taste comparison brand communications have been in market for about a year and are driving growth. And we will continue to increase investment behind this campaign. Additionally, we've got exciting taste news behind a big product innovation, Tasso's gravy, which launches this month. This game-changing innovation features gravy coated kibble. You can serve it dry or wet. When you serve it wet just by adding a little bit of water in a quick stir, the water is turned into delicious gravy that cats love. We will continue to accelerate our innovation in cat feeding to expand this important growing segment of our business. Now on to treats. Pet parents seek a lot of variety when it comes to treats, particularly across products and packaging. They also make purchase decisions by relying on their human snacking intuition. Blue Buffalo has the most humanized treating formats. And we will continue to advance remarkable brand communications and our product innovation to highlight our highly humanized portfolio. New this year, we're launching a game day campaign promoting our most humanized products like state drillers. More than 70% of payers watch sports with their pets. And we are excited to remind pet parents this year that while they're preparing snacks for game day, it's game day for their pets, too. Finally, we have an exciting seasonal lineup with nearly 2x the offerings versus last year. We're bringing pet parents refreshed seasonal packaging and a fun new peanut Snoopy treat, which will launch in time for the holiday season. This now brings me to the investments that we're making behind our accelerators. These are the new growth vectors that we're focused on to drive outsized growth and to complement our North America core Blue Buffalo business. Let's start with Blue Buffalo's entry into the fresh space. The Fresh segment is more than $3 billion in retail sales today. And we expect it could reach as much as $10 billion in the next 10 years. Fresh is significantly outpacing overall pet category growth driven by you guessed it, millennials and Gen Z. They are prioritizing pet spending over things like dining out and home improvement. No one understands this more than Blue Buffalo. And we know from our initial Fresh test that pet parents believe we have a right to win in this space. We heard loud and clear in our test that we had a product that pets and pet parents loved. We also learned that you have to drive awareness at scale to win. And winning is what we intend to do with our nationwide launch of Love Made Fresh. We are putting differential investment behind this launch, with a remarkable product, packaging and brand communications. Today, the biggest players in Fresh are focused on kibble shaming. They're either doing it right with Fresh, are you doing it wrong with kibble. The reality is we know that 80% of pet parents are using both Fresh and kibble. And we know through our research that most of them would prefer to buy their kibble and fresh food from the same brand. Blue Buffalo is the largest brand to offer both, and we believe Love Made Fresh is going to strongly resonate with pet parents. Our formula is another reason our product is remarkable. Love Made Fresh adheres to our True Blue Promise. And relative to the leading players in the Fresh segment, Blue Buffalo is the only brand that's fully all natural. And it's packed with a unique blend of the highest quality vitamins and nutrients that help dogs absorb all the goodness from fresh, real meat and vegetables. In September, we launched two packaging formats, a role which is the biggest format in the category and a tub, which is a completely new format and unlike anything currently on the market. What makes the tub differential is it provides pet parents an easy-to-close no mess experience. And the product looks and smells just like a stew. We'll launch another format later this year that gives pet parents an added way to serve the best to their pets. So I hope you stop by our station upstairs later if you're in the room and check it out. Another key difference in our Fresh launch is our omnichannel experience. We're installing new custom-branded coolers at many retailers, and we have secured distribution across a broad array of customers within food, drug and mass. Between our coolers and our retailers' coolers, we expect to be in about 5,000 coolers by the end of this calendar year. And we anticipate this distribution will grow in calendar 2026 and as we expand two additional retailers. Our brand communications include a dedicated and comprehensive national plan that will reach pet parents through TV, digital and social media, and we will leverage the power and the spend of our Blue Buffalo master brand to maximize the impact. And now I'm excited to give you a sneak peek of one of our new Love Made Fresh ads which will be in market starting next week. So let's roll that. [Presentation]

So in addition to launching in Fresh, we are also bringing pet parents remarkable product differentiation in fiscal '26 by launching Edgard & Cooper in the United States. This brand, which we acquired in Europe a little over a year ago, features products that are made with only fresh or frozen meat and healthy fruits and vegetables. With this launch, we're extending our U.S. portfolio into the super premium segment, which is the fastest-growing price segment in the market today. . In July, we launched Edgard & Cooper's dog portfolio exclusively at PetSmart. The brand is really resonating with pet parents with strong engagements we're seeing on many of our social assets. We have a robust in-store influencer and digital plan, along with a new direct-to-consumer site that will not only help drive sales, but also help us better understand pet parents in their shopping habits. This brings me to our last accelerator, which is Whitebridge Pet Brands. We acquired Whitebridge Pet Brands' North America cat feeding and treats business a little less than a year ago, and we are actively working to integrate the business while not slowing down its strong growth trajectory. The Whitebridge portfolio complements our Bluecore in both product formats and in channel distribution. Through an emphasis on humanized innovation, Whitebridge will help us accelerate growth across all of North America Pet. Whitebridge's Tiki Cat brand is a gem of a business and has consistently grown retail sales at a strong double-digit rate over the last 10 years. Tiki Cat's remarkable products are specially made to give cats who are natural meat eaters, the right nutrients to keep them happy and healthy. Tiki is a cat first high-protein, minimally processed brand with visually remarkable products. It has an extensive variety with over 400 SKUs, multiple textures and more than 10 sub-lines. Cats love the shredded chicken in the whole chunks of real fish, and they go crazy for the after-dark subline, which has a quail egg on top. We expect Tiki Cat to lead our North America pet growth in both cat feeding and cat treating. What I've hope you've seen is that North America pet has exciting opportunities ahead and our portfolio is built to support the continued humanization trend. We are confident that we're positioned to drive growth on our core and amplify that growth with our accelerators. We think that this is a business that should grow mid-single digits over time, in line with the growth that we expect to see with the premium segment of the category. I have no doubt in North America pets ability to deliver long-term sustainable growth for General Mills and ultimately, to help more pet parents love, feed and treat their pets like family. Thank you very much. And now please join me in welcoming Ricardo Fernandez to the stage.

Good morning, everyone. You've heard a lot about our businesses in North America, and now I have the pleasure to talk to you about our international segment. The segment represents one of General Mills most remarkable opportunities for long-term growth. We serve consumers in more than 50 countries, generating $2.8 billion in net sales across 4 operating units. Our portfolio includes global and local brands that can be found in more than 140 million households. Yet, there's more than 7 billion consumer across our markets, and we play in large, growing categories. So this gives us tremendous headroom for growth. To capture, we're applying the remarkable experiences framework on our brands around the world. This includes global platforms like ice cream, snacking, Mexican food and pet food, and local gems like Wanchai Ferry dumplings in China or Yoki and kitano meals and snacks and seasonings in Brazil. Today, I'm going to focus my comments on our global platforms which we expect are going to drive more than 75% of our growth over the next 3 years. These platforms provide leading brands, global growth potential and strong margins that will help improve the segment's profitability today and into the future. Let's start with Ice Cream and our largest brand outside of the United States, Haagen-Dazs. Ice Cream is a $90 billion global category that's growing 7%. And Haagen-Dazs is a world-class brand that represents the definition of super premium Ice Cream. We own the brand globally and independently operate in our international markets, where it generated roughly $750 million in net sales in fiscal '25 through a combination of retail channels and our Haagen-Dazs shops network. We've been competing well recently, including growing retail sales mid-single digits in fiscal '25 and holding or growing market share in 75% of our priority markets. This was offset somewhat by a more challenging backdrop and performance in China where the consumer pressure is pressured and especially impacted our shops business. We continued to deliver solid performance in the first quarter of fiscal '26 with retail sales growing double digits, improvement in our shops traffic and maintaining our positive momentum in our foodservice channels. And we're really proud about how far the brand has come, and we have more space to grow. We're improving the remarkability of an already remarkable product through renovation, innovation and investment. Let's start with our core, which includes awesome flavors like vanilla, Belgian chocolate and Strawberry. These flavors account for about 50% of our Haagen-Dazs retail sales and yet we've only reached about 76% of our fair share of distribution. In fiscal '26, we're driving omnichannel excellence with increased distribution and shelf availability. We're also bringing remarkable product renovation news, most notably to cookies and cream. We've added 50% more cookies and compelling advertising that highlights our superiority. Consumers are loving it. In our first quarter, we saw a growth of more than 50% on these SKUs since we launched the renovation. Next, let's talk about stick bars, which is an accelerator for our Ice Cream business. More than 60% of global ice cream consumption is in a portable handheld format. Handheld ice cream is growing a full point faster than the global category at roughly 8%, and Haagen-Dazs has historically under-indexed here, and we've been especially underrepresented and stick bars. So in fiscal '26, we're taking a multi-geography approach to capture more growth in a consumer-first way. In Europe, we renovated our portfolio, giving consumers more of the remarkable product experience they expect by providing a thicker chocolate shell and more of the indulgent crunch. We also conducted our first dedicated brand communication on stick bars, helping drive more than 30% retail growth in Europe over our summer months. In China, we improved our retail execution and unlock manufacturing solutions to get us closer to the consumer at a more accessible price point, and with all the remarkable product quality that consumers expect from Haagen-Dazs. We've more than doubled stick bar distribution while increasing our investment in superior brand communications helping drive strong retail sales growth in the first quarter in China. And in places like Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, where we are leaders. We continue to lead the category with remarkable product innovation and omnichannel execution. And if you're wondering how good these renovated stick bars are, I invite you to save some space after lunch and stop by the international station, because we have some samples for you. Now let me shift to our second global platform, Mexican food. It's our second largest business in international and accounts for more than 15% of total sales for us as a segment. Mexican food is a growing $2 billion category and plays in the broader world food space, which is on trend in our largest markets. Consumers want more access to foods from around the world, including Indian, Chinese, Thai, and Mexican. What makes Mexican food special is it's a unique combination of a meal that can be customized to taste, textures and proteins while also being casual and fun, and no brand does Mexican better than Old El Paso. We've helped build this category in many markets around the world, supported by our investment in innovation, advertising and in-store execution to help consumers make Taco Tuesday or Fajita Friday, a regular part of their routine. In fact, Old El Paso have earned a leadership position in many of our priority markets, with market shares at or above 50% in place like Australia, France and the U.K. We're excited about Old El Paso's growth potential, and our biggest opportunities are to maintain growth and strength with households with kids and capitalizing the emerging opportunities with young households with no kids. Leveraging the remarkable experiences framework, we're emphasizing our product superiority, bringing consumers mealtime solutions for flavors they're seeking and investing more in brand communication. In our third quarter, we're bringing exciting news to the category with remarkable product renovation, a crunchier Taco show. Consumers highly value Taco texture and flavor and our new crunchy tacos are amazing and are providing consumers with what they want. This next to our preservative-free tortilla puts us in a very strong position to continue to grow this category in the spaces outside of kits. When it comes to growing with young no kid households, we need to deliver alternative solutions, including smaller portions and exciting flavors. In fiscal '26, we're building on last year's launch of our street [ vibes ] food kits, which drove 3 points of household penetration growth for Old El Paso with new flavors, including al pastor, Barbacoa, and Birria Tacos. Yet the biggest barrier to Mexican food consumption globally is remaining top of mind for consumers. We're increasing our media investment by double digits on a high-return campaign. We're also activating in-store through partnerships with complementary ingredients and beverages. This takes us to our third global platform, snack bars. Across our international markets, better-for-you snacks are a $3 billion category, growing high single digits. The snack bar category has a more expansive set of markets that the -- where they're available. And like the U.S., it's a very competitive category. Brands that are gaining share are delivering on specific consumer benefits like protein, elevated taste and permissible indulgence. Nature Valley is our leading brand in snack bars. And as you heard at the most recent earnings call, have been driving both dollars and pounds. Utilizing the remarkable experiences framework, we also have strong plans to drive more growth. We're leveraging the expertise and capabilities of our North America retail business with new product formats and varieties to expand distribution and helping us reach new channels. And we're bringing new flavors like our recent chocolate and coffee protein bar launch. We're also increasing brand investment by double digits here, and we'll shift more of our media, sampling and display support to help our fast-growing protein portfolio. The last platform I'll talk about is the one Liz left with, which is Pet Food. As you heard from Liz, Pet food is our largest growth opportunity at General Mills, and it's a $142 billion global category. We'll keep building on the momentum we have across our portfolio by growing our newest international brand Edgard & Cooper and by continuing to establish Blue Buffalo across key markets around the world. Edgard & Cooper is a fast-growing super premium pet food brand loved by more than 1 million pets across Western Europe. The brand is known for using fresh meat, whole fruits and vegetables to provide maximum nutrition to dogs and cats. This business is capturing remarkable growth backed by strong digital-first brand communications, focused on real ingredients and taste with a fun, playful approach. A portion of Edgard & Cooper's sales are also through a direct-to-consumer model which allows the brand to personalize marketing communications and promotions to individual pet owners. We'll look to leverage and scale those insights as we expand the business into the U.S. With Blue Buffalo, we're focused on building trial and awareness in markets including China, Taiwan and South Korea. We're leveraging the same playbook that's made Blue Buffalo successful in the U.S. We're investing in brand communications that highlights our ingredient superiority and gives pet parents a compelling reason to trade up to blue. Later this month, in fact, this week, we've launched the brand into Mexico and are excited about its potential there. As I mentioned at the beginning, Ice Cream, Mexican food, snack bars and pet food are expected to deliver more than 75% of International segment's growth over the next 3 years. And we're looking forward to continuing to build momentum across each platform and our broader business in fiscal '26. By applying the remarkable experiences framework across our brands, we're making every consumer touch point more remarkable. We're also making bold choices to ensure we're prioritizing outsized opportunities for growth. With a beloved portfolio of global brands and focused plans, we have confidence in our ability to capture the growth opportunities in international. And we continue to build scale across our global platforms will deliver more profitable growth, helping drive stronger value creation for the company this year and into the future. Thank you.

Please welcome Chief Supply Chain Officer, Paul Gallagher; Chief Innovation Technology and Quality Officer; Lanette Shaffer Werner; Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Jaime Montemayor; and moderator, Jeff Siemon.

All right. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. We are going to set up here a fireside chat. So you're going to hear a little bit more about how we, as General Mills are advancing our digital transformation. And I'm proud to have Paul Lanette and Jaime here to talk a little bit about that. So let's just dive into it. Jaime, let's start with you. So could you start by sharing a bit of context on our digital journey and where we've come -- where we've been and where we've come from since we launched the Accelerate Strategy 5 years ago?

Thank you, Jeff. I'll be glad to do that. So 2025 marks 5 years since the launch of the Accelerate Strategy. And since that year, General Mills has doubled the investment in data, digital and technology, all of it in service of the Accelerate Strategy. And for us to execute on this strategy, we have focused on 3 key pillars. So just let me elaborate on each 1 of them. The first pillar is technology. The second pillar is process and the third one is talent. So on technology, we've done 3 things. The first thing that we have done in technology is that we strategically prioritize the move to the cloud. And since 2021, every technology solution that we have delivered is running on the cloud. This cloud foundation that we have built has given us the opportunity to change the physics in how we deliver technology solutions across General Mills. On top of this cloud foundation, we have now built a, what we call, a connected data foundation. In fact, Paul Gallagher was my partner in crime when we launched the first Connected Data Foundation in service of his supply chain digitization strategy, and he'll talk more about that. But with this Connected Data Foundation, we're now able to accelerate our investments in advantaged capabilities that are built using data, analytics and AI. And you will hear more about that from my peers in a minute. So that's the second pillar or second element of that technology pillar. The third element is the move to upgrade our core SAP systems. We've completed the upgrade of SAP into S4, and thankfully, you didn't have to hear that from me or anybody in the company because the program went as planned with no disruption to our business or any of our customers. So that's the pillar number one, technology. The second pillar is process. And we can spend a lot of time talking about process change, but I'd like to focus on a couple of big changes that we have made. The first one is the adoption of Agile ways of working in the company. Again, I have enjoyed the partnership with my peers in adopting this way of working, which has greatly accelerated the way in the speed to market to some of these capabilities that we're building. The second thing I'd like to highlight in process is also the strong focus on data governance and ethical systems, and you will see how that investment that we made since the beginning of 2020 is paying off today because our data is perhaps is as clean as it needs to be for us to accelerate AI investments. And then the third pillar of our digital transformation has been our talent. And we're very proud of our talent. We have a global team in nature. We maximize the use of our own resources and our own talent to drive our capabilities. But we also use our extensive ecosystem of suppliers that we have globally. I'd like to say just a couple of things about our talent. First, our leadership is obviously has significant expertise in the CPG space, but it also has multi-industry expertise, and our engineering teams are remarkable. We have amazing engineering teams focused on cloud, data, AI and SAP. So in a nutshell, that is the transformation that we have driven over the last 5 years. Jeff?

Great. Thanks, Jaime. So maybe from there, as we built a digital foundation, maybe Paul and Lanette, you can share how are we applying that foundation in your respective functions.

Yes. Thank you, Jeff, and good morning to all. I want to come back to a point that Jaime mentioned, which is around our connected data foundation and the importance of that. It's not just been a critical first step. It's been the true enabler of our unlock as we looked at our digital transformation. And we all know the importance of data, but there's 2 things that I'd call out is that, one, data has to be accurate. And we put enormous governance in around that. And it's not just the master data that goes into our SAP system. It's also our operational and our transactional data. And to bring that to life for you across our supply chain, we sit at about 96% to 97% data accuracy. So therefore, not just do we have it in one location in the cloud, but we've got one version of the truth. It's great to have the data, but the second part to that is you got to use the data. And there's many means for it to use that, and you can use it through dashboards, but what we've really leaned into is let the data make the decision. And that's the capability that we've been building over the last few years. And it's also why that you see us outsize our HMM delivery because we've delivered over $300 million of savings over the last 3 years because of our digital transformation. And maybe I'll bring that to life with a few examples, and it's across the entirety of our supply chain, whether it be through smart contract management with our suppliers to the amazing work that Jaime's team and Lanette's team have done in our manufacturing facilities, where we're getting waste out of our process streams. We've got proprietary algorithms that run on top of the data dynamic set through sensing that's allowing us to realize dynamic opportunity across our manufacturing. And we've really only started in that space. And where we've actually driven it across a number of our facilities, it's generated over $40 million so far. So we think there's a healthy pool of opportunity in that space going forward. In addition to that and what really excites me is where we get an opportunity for to see it across the entirety of our supply chain and right through from our suppliers to ultimately then working with our customers. And one of our biggest retailers, we've actually got ourselves talking system to system in our customer order taking and optimizing in around our truck utilization, which was a healthy pool of opportunity for us, and we affectionately call that Project ELF, which is end-to-end logistics flow, where we're using not just machine learning and AI and GenAI, but facilitating Agentic AI on top of the opportunity to drive not just millions of dollars out of that supply chain, but also it's taken over to date 15,000 tons of carbon because we have less trucks on the road. It's enabling us to actually deliver a better service offering. And what used to take us 18 hours to go through those orders and optimize those orders to get truckloads is now taking us less than 30 minutes. So it's bringing time back in, in order for it to be able to drive added value. And now we're going to roll that across our other 7 key top customers to drive value across their networks as well. So hopefully, that gives you some examples of the areas where we see opportunity.

Lanette?

Awesome. Love that. Well, good morning, investors. It's great to see all of you. In ITQ, which is the function that I lead, we aspire to deliver remarkable experiences by transforming possibilities into reality through science. And that includes our work in data and digital, including AI. We also aspire to be a digital-first organization and its simplest embodiment, what we mean is how do we digitize, how we experiment first and then validate physically when needed. I thought I'd hit on a couple of areas today of where we're using digital tools and capabilities in both innovation and technology. In innovation, we are literally innovating how we innovate, not only in developing new products, but on our core. I know you heard both Jeff and Dana mentioned, this new capability called Growth Labs. And what this does is help our teams through a facilitated process, generate growth ideas, leveraging the remarkable experience framework. But what I love about this is that we are leveraging our digital innovation, best practices and tools to fuel that flywheel. This includes using visualization tools to create and iterate literally hundreds of visual prototypes so that we can understand consumer desirability before we even make one physical prototype. This has substantially increased our learning velocity. We are also using digital personas to gain feedback on all those great ideas that we're generating. And this year, we partnered with our sales organization to create buyer customer personas to really supplement our learning and get these teams learning in real time on what we might expect from our customers. We can also do this with our consumers. And this is now a great part of our body of evidence toolbox to augment real-world learning with both our customers and consumers. We are also leveraging AI moderated research platforms to literally conduct hundreds of consumer interviews overnight. And we're doing this with always-on chatbot interviewing, really helping us to drive new insights at the pace of learning and integrate those into our learning plan so that we can be testing the next iterations as we learn. For those of you that are coming, I hope you do to our technical center this afternoon, you're going to see these tools in action on how we use them in new product development with a feature case on our Pitmaster soup that Dana highlighted earlier. But we are not done there. So we are deploying digital capabilities also for technology development. A few examples. In our oat breeding program, we are using advanced machine learning to really accelerate our breeding program. This allows us to predict traits before one seed even goes into the ground. And I know all of you know how important our oats are to one of our biggest brands, Cheerios. We are also leveraging it in regenerative agriculture. We are using satellite imagery to understand adoption and effectiveness of our programs, helping us to really understand, are we driving the outcomes that we are investing in and measuring and modeling things like greenhouse gas emissions to make sure those outcomes are impactful. Many of you that are covering the tech sector also are probably aware of deep research. And this area is fundamentally transforming how we think about technical knowledge acquisition. We can now harvest the volumes of technical data that are available to us, not in months, but in weeks and days and hours to use those to help foster and forward our thinking on how we apply said technology to our applications. And finally, in the area of packaging, we are leveraging our data capabilities to do real-time tracking on our sustainability commitments. We can also use modeling here to understand future regulatory changes and potential fees for things like EPR. So I hope this just give you a smattering of some of the ways that we are leveraging the great data foundations and digital tools to drive both innovation and technology to develop and launch remarkable experiences.

Awesome. Okay. So for this next question, I'd like to hear from all 3 of you and maybe share where has General Mills digital capabilities created competitive advantage for us relative to our peers. So maybe, Paul, we can start with you then Lanette and Jaime.

Sure. Maybe to not call on some of the examples that I've referenced earlier, but one that was raised in a recent earnings call was in around the demand space and what are we doing in demand spaces that we feel that we're advantaged with. And I'll speak more to our forecast accuracy, our demand forecast accuracy and the opportunities that we're realizing there. It's probably fair to say that we've been in the leading pack anyway as regards our forecast accuracy. But a number of years ago, we said that, well, how do we make that easier on -- across the organization because it's a heavy lift, requires a lot of human capital in order for it to fine-tune those signals. And we embarked on a journey with Jaime and his team to build algorithms that allows us to be able to get to those insights early and be able to be no touch. And where we've rolled this across the business units, we have seen a remarkable improvement in the signal, but also freeing up enormous time. Actually, it's reduced the time that people are spending in the system by over 50%, and we see a way to 75%. And it's probably no surprise as now that we're spending more time fine-tuning the signal, actually, our demand forecasting has actually improved. And the other benefit of that is that it's driving value in our supply chain and bringing a better rhythm of performance to what we do in our supply chain. And we're seeing that in lower cost. We're also seeing it in less waste and ultimately, a better customer service to our consumers and our customers as well.

Excellent. Lanette?

I really think our differentiation is in our how. And what I mean by that is how we partner across our functions and segments to really drive value and getting our digital systems and data more connected. So maybe a couple of quick examples. One, partnering with my buddy, Paul here and our supply chain organization, using predictive models and real-time data to optimize things like serial line speeds. And in our first runs at this, we've actually been able to drive more throughput as well as reduce waste, which is just remarkable. We are combining a physics-based twin model with our control systems and some in-line sensors really to create a foundation that we know we can redeploy across other platforms such as pet, where we're actually using it on and to understand our dryer operations. Probably the other area that I'll highlight is a great partnership with Jaime's team on modernizing our product life cycle management system or what we call PLM. And this is really helping to help streamline, product formulation changes and to improve data accuracy and traceability. It's really helping to get more of our data connected end-to-end. And it's resulted in about a 25% reduction in touches when we go in and have to make a change and also time savings in our conversion of specs and specifications that come from my world and how we translate those into bill of materials at our plants. So I think just a couple of great examples of how when we partner and get our systems and data talking, we can drive great value.

Jaime, how about you?

Well, from my perspective, I just talked to you about how the investments that we have made in technology, process and talent have allowed us to change the physics in terms of how we deliver solutions. And the way I think about it is time to market and predictability in terms of our ability to go from an idea to a real solution that not only solves the problem or the opportunity, but delivers the value. And -- so I'd like to reinforce the point that Lanette made. I would say a key competitive advantage of ours is our ability to collaborate. We hold tech summits with our most trusted tech partners every year. And I'll tell you, 100% of those tech summits in 100% of those, we have joint business and tech teams coming together. And we go there not just to learn about what's the latest and greatest in the technology landscape, but we also bring in our own opportunities or business problems. And we collaborate right from that moment to identify those areas of opportunity where we can make a difference through the application of technology to drive the business forward. And so with that, we come back and we use this amazing tech foundation that we have built to go quickly from idea to a solution. And that's why you see my peers here committing to significant levels of HMM and significant levels of efficiency because we are able to make those things happen in a shorter time frame that I want to believe versus the rest of the industry.

Excellent. So maybe before we wrap here, maybe one last question for each of you. Can you share something you're excited about or something your organization is working on as we continue to become more future-ready. So maybe, Lanette, let's start with you.

We're so I get to go first. I want to share with you that we recently broke ground on a significant capital investment at our largest technical center, what we call James Ford Bell. I hope you recognize that name or what we refer to as JFB. I love this project. It is called Building for Growth, and it is a testament to our continued investment in growth in the company. This will increase our available pilot plant space by nearly 25%, and we are aligning the space to be much more flexible and agile with unit operations that can move around and really orienting it towards capabilities, not to business units. So really excited. Look forward to seeing you all there this afternoon, and you'll see construction is already well underway.

Great. Jaime, how about you?

Well, as you have heard today, many, many examples where our business is taking technology and driving the business forward. And so I'm most excited about just continuing that path. Many of the examples that you heard about today were delivered using what we call core AI, machine learning or even generative AI capabilities, and that's all great. But now as we speak at this moment, we're expanding that tech foundation, those capabilities by adding Agentic AI architectures. And with that, we hope to accelerate delivery of value to the business because we will be introducing bots that can help our business, not just make faster decisions, but many times, not actually have to make the decision because the technology will make it for you. For us, that's the dream to move from a world where we enable the business through descriptive analytics to a world where we enable the business to prescriptive analytics. That's the next frontier for us. I'm very, very excited. I think we have the foundation. We have the partnership in place, and we have the business opportunities identified with our partners to make that a reality.

Awesome. Paul, how about you?

Yes. I'm very excited because I think we've only scratched the surface of the opportunity as part of our digital transformation. And for me, Jaime mentioned it earlier about the triad that we have, which is that we've got amazing technology that we do feel that we're advantaged with, but also we're bringing some process agility to how we get that done. And you can see from the interaction with us right down through the organization, the engagement that we have with all of our work and the talent in order for it to make that happen. And that for me is the sweet spot of being able to add more value, aka, HMM, which we know will help fuel the growth of the organization.

Perfect. More HMM is a good way to finish this conversation. So Jaime, Lanette, Paul, thank you very much for talking and sharing about our digital journey and excitement about what's ahead. So with that, we'll wrap up this fireside chat, and please join me in welcoming to the stage, Kofi Bruce, our CFO, for the last part of our presentation.

Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with you. Thank you all for coming in. I hope what you've heard so far clearly demonstrates our focus on returning to organic growth by delivering more remarkable experiences and the investments we're making to support that goal. As we near the end of our webcasted session, I want to share more details on our financial commitments. How we think about driving shareholder value, how our financial performance has played out in recent years and how we plan to deliver consistent profitable growth and returns over the long term. Our long-term strategy for maximizing shareholder return centers on 4 key levers; sustainable sales growth, margin expansion to turn sales into profit and earnings, disciplined capital management to convert earnings into cash and returning that cash to shareholders via dividends and share repurchases. Most importantly, our strategy starts with volume-driven organic net sales growth, which fuels the rest of the flywheel. We know that organic sales growth is, over time, most highly correlated to valuation and shareholder value creation. Profit growth generated by organic sales growth and supported by reinvestment creates capital flexibility, fuels future growth and allows us to return cash to shareholders. When led by top line growth, HMM is stronger, growth investments are more sustainable, cash flow growth is easier and value creation accelerates. Over the long term, we aim to deliver 2% to 3% organic net sales growth. When combined with modest margin expansion, this will generate mid-single-digit adjusted operating profit growth. We strive to convert at least 95% of adjusted net earnings into free cash flow, returning approximately 80% to 90% to shareholders through dividends and repurchases. We expect this approach to deliver mid to high single-digit adjusted diluted EPS growth and ultimately, top-tier shareholder returns. Now before I dive into where we're going, let me quickly take a step back and talk about where we've been. As we look at the period from fiscal '19 through pandemic lockdowns and the post-pandemic inflation cycle, General Mills significantly outpaced its long-term growth targets. We executed exceptionally well with performance differentiated from our peers and shareholders were rewarded as a result. More recently, however, consumers have felt the lingering effects of what in retrospect has been nearly 10 years' worth of inflation that they experienced between fiscal '22 and fiscal '23 with food prices up almost more than 25%. This was a level of inflation we hadn't seen in almost 50 years, and it resulted in a significant increase in value-seeking behaviors by consumers that has remained with us over the past 2.5 years, creating top line headwinds for many companies, including our own. Amid this extended period of stabilization, we believe it is more important than ever that consumers see the value and quality of our brands and products. As you've heard earlier today, we are intentionally investing across all aspects of remarkability to increase our competitiveness and return organic sales to our long-term growth rate. So that brings us to where we are today. The midpoint of our fiscal 2026 guidance, which we reaffirmed earlier this morning, assumes we stabilize organic sales this year, which will be a 2-point improvement over last year's result. On the bottom line, we expect constant currency adjusted operating profit and adjusted diluted EPS to be down 10% to 15% in fiscal '26. As a reminder, this includes a 5-point headwind from the net impact of divestitures and acquisitions and a 3-point headwind from the normalization of corporate incentive expense. The remainder of this year's profit decline after accounting for cost savings and inflation reflects the significant growth investments we're making to amplify our remarkability. Finally, we continue to expect free cash flow conversion of at least 95% of adjusted after-tax earnings, which is in line with our long-term goal. So as we shift from where we are to where we're going, I mentioned that our fiscal '26 organic sales guidance assumes about a 2-point improvement over our fiscal '25 result. Looking beyond fiscal '26, to return General Mills to organic sales growth in line with our long-term 2% to 3% goal, we need to drive another 2 to 3 points of improvement in the future. And we see 3 primary ways we can achieve that top line acceleration, improving our competitiveness, reshaping our portfolio and seeing our categories return to their long-term growth rates. First and most importantly, we're working to improve our competitiveness and capture more of the growth we currently see in our categories. You've heard and seen many examples of how we're doing this throughout this morning's presentation. From Pillsbury and Cheerios protein in NAR to breakfast and frozen baked goods in NAF to core Blue Buffalo and Love Made Fresh in North America Pet to Häagen-Dazs, Old El Paso and Nature Valley in our international business. Overall, we think the current mix of geographies and categories is growing around 1% based on our latest category estimates. While that's 1.5 points below our long-term expectation, it still means that improving our competitiveness and holding share more consistently across our enterprise could deliver another point of growth relative to the midpoint of our fiscal '26 guidance. In fact, the competitive improvement we have baked into our fiscal '26 plans would have us exiting this year with positive organic sales growth in Q4. Second, our portfolio-shaping efforts continue to strengthen our growth profile. As Jeff mentioned, we've turned over 30% of our net sales base since fiscal '18, adding a full point to our long-term growth exposure. Over that time, we've built a strong track record of integrating new businesses successfully into our operations and divesting businesses where we did not have a clear right to win. We consider M&A an always-on capability, and we will continue to look for inorganic opportunities to improve our organic growth profile over the long term. Third, we expect our aggregate category growth to return to its long-term historical growth rate of 2% to 3% over time. Now the biggest gap we see today is price/mix, which is not surprising given the historic level of inflation consumers have experienced over the past couple of years. As consumer economic situations around the globe stabilizes, we do expect to see price/mix return to our categories while volumes grow roughly in line with population. And as the category leader in many of our priority businesses around the world, we know we have an important role to play in improving our category growth by delivering on all elements of remarkability. Now with 2% to 3% organic sales growth, our long-term model requires we effectively manage the middle of the P&L to deliver mid-single-digit operating profit growth and modest margin expansion over time. And we have shown our ability to do this over time with our HMM and cost discipline. From fiscal '19 to fiscal '25, we successfully maintained our margin profile despite unprecedented input cost inflation, leaning on our HMM productivity program and our strategic revenue management capabilities. We expect our fiscal '26 margins to be down year-over-year, driven largely by the reinvestments we're making to restart growth as well as the impact from yogurt stranded costs and net tariffs that we won't be able to fully offset within the fiscal year. Longer term, the keys to driving margin expansion in line with our model will be consistent volume growth and strong contributions from HMM and strategic revenue management that offset inflation and create fixed leverage even while we're reinvesting for growth. One way our adjusted gross margins remain competitive is through industry-leading HMM productivity. General Mills has leveraged HMM to average 4% annual gross savings in cost of goods sold for more than a decade plus. We consider this a discipline and a capability, which is led by our business teams across many functions. It's rooted in continuous improvement tools that help us identify and eliminate waste. And as you've heard from Paul, in recent years, we've accelerated our HMM savings above that historical level by leveraging investments we've made to digitize our supply chain. With a strong HMM pipeline bolstered by digital supply chain initiatives, we have good visibility to generating 5% HMM savings again in fiscal 2026. The third lever of our shareholder return model is converting earnings to cash. We've delivered tremendous performance on core working capital for more than a decade, generating nearly $1 billion in additional cash between fiscal '19 and fiscal '25 by reducing our core working capital balances, primarily driven by payment terms optimization. This capital discipline has enabled General Mills to deliver free cash flow conversion that has averaged more than 100% over the past 7 years. Looking ahead, we see further opportunities to drive efficiency in core working capital, both in accounts payable as well as inventory, which will help us continue to deliver on our long-term 95% cash conversion target in the future. With strong cash generation as a backdrop, we are very disciplined about prioritizing the use of that cash in shareholder-friendly ways. Our first priority is investing back in the business for growth with capital expenditures expected to be about approximately 4% of net sales over the long-term. Our next cash priority is our dividend. And as a reminder, General Mills has paid a dividend without interruption for 127 years, and we expect to grow our dividend roughly in line with earnings over time. After dividends, we'll look to deploy our cash for strategic acquisitions that enhance our growth priorities and our growth profile over time. And our final capital allocation priority is share repurchases. We expect to drive a 1% to 2% average annual reduction in net share count over a multiyear time frame. At the same time, we remain committed to maintaining our strong investment-grade credit rating, and we continue to target leverage of roughly 3x net debt to adjusted EBITDA over time. As we've done in the past, including as recently as this year, we will toggle back on our share repurchase activity following acquisitions to enable debt paydown. The final lever in our model is cash returns to shareholders. Between fiscal '19 and fiscal 2025, we paid nearly $9 billion in dividends and deployed nearly $5 billion in net share repurchases for a total of almost $14 billion in cash returned to General Mills shareholders. And we're confident our model of high-quality, sustainable growth and disciplined capital allocation will drive strong returns for our shareholders over the long-term. Before we move to our second Q&A session, let me summarize delivering consistent and profitable organic sales growth is at the foundation of our long-term shareholder return model. While our investments in remarkability are pressuring our margins in the near term, they are critical to restoring volume-driven organic sales growth and putting us in a stronger position to generate growth in line with our model over the long-term. We have a strong history of delivering on our margin expansion, cash conversion and cash return goals, thanks to industry-leading HMM and SRM capabilities, our core working capital management and capital allocation discipline. Finally, we are confident that our strategic focus on remarkability and our unique combination of leading brands, differentiated capabilities and world-class people puts General Mills in a strong position to deliver on our ambitions and drive top-tier returns for our shareholders over the long-term. With that, I want to thank everybody for your time, and let's get set up for the final Q&A session.

Okay. So we'll go ahead and get the second Q&A session started. I think you all know the drill out in the room. So let's start Pete Galbo in the second row here.

My first question is for Liz. Just on the TAM analysis, I think in the slide you gave, we're at $3 billion today on fresh going to $10 billion over the next 10 years. Just can you help us understand the buckets of the incremental $7 billion, what underlies how you kind of get there in your TAM assumptions even just for the category? Because I think there's maybe some skepticism even given what some of your competitors are seeing already before you even really enter the category in full that, that might be aggressive. So I would love to just understand the from to in the assumptions.

Yes. So to reach that TAM that assumes ongoing double-digit growth in the Fresh segment, and that would assume channel expansion, greater online presence. We could be right, we could be a little high. We could be a little low. I'm not -- 10 is what we have sized the market at. What I would say, though, is that we really believe that with us coming in with Love Made Fresh, we have the chance to grow this segment. You see segments that have a couple of major competitors in doing better, and we're going to be bringing investment in driving this segment as well. And so it also assumes other people coming into the market, helping to grow the segment. And we believe we're going to help do that with Love Made Fresh coming in.

Great. And maybe just a second held out of the mind. I had to get 2 in. Just your message today, and this could be either for Jeff or for Kofi, your message today is very clear, right? We need to get the price points to a level that meets our consumers. And I think there's a view that you're moving in one direction, while some of your peers are actually going to take pricing up this year, which, again, I think the view is starting to change that maybe you have the right view of the category. But with that in mind, Kofi, as we start to normalize kind of this, I don't know, negative price/mix environment, you talk about the category needing to be able to get back to 1.5 points of, I think, price/mix growth over the long-term to kind of hit the algorithm, which would seemingly be the most outside of your control of all the factors you've listed. So what just gives you the confidence that as we normalize this, maybe your peers follow you, maybe they don't, that we can get back to that environment of a point or 2 of price/mix over the long-term?

Sure. Appreciate the question. Certainly, as we started to make the pivot last fiscal year, about midyear, we saw a really good response, as Dana shared in her presentation to first removing the gate on price and then allowing the rest of the remarkable experience levers to really do their work, which is a lot of what gave us the confidence to underwrite a fiscal year plan this year that has us investing heavily not only in addressing those price cliffs and gaps where we have them, but also in innovation and marketing spending. I would expect that as we start to lap some of the first round of investments, we would want to see evidence that the marketing is driving the lift. And I would expect, based on our continued progress so far that we like what we're seeing. So you're right, long-term that we do need the consumer to kind of settle into a different sentiment for a full price/mix to return to levels that would support a 2% to 3% growth. We think part of our responsibility is to help create those conditions by inviting them back not only with price value address, but also with the ideas that remind them why our brands are relevant and matter in their lives. So I think that's why you hear us talking consistently about the remarkability framework because we see that as a path through. And the path through this environment candidly is best viewed towards organic sales growth.

Go to Max Gumport back here.

Kofi, turning to the levers you laid out, I think 2 of them stand out to me because on the first, with regard to organic sales, it's been a few years now of below expected results, which you've acknowledged. I'm wondering how you see the company positioned to navigate through an environment if this difficult environment does persist. And then on the other hand, with regard to working capital and then turning your profit and the cash, you've done quite well over this last decade. But I'm also wondering how much continued room do you see on accounts payable, most notably, but then also on inventory? And I have a follow-up.

Yes. So I would expect to see us continue to drive improvement on accounts payable in places where we still have gaps against the competitive set. Some of our businesses outside of NAF and North America retail continue to show opportunity. I think some of the digital tools will also enable us to do a better job of managing inventory. And then I think to your point on the environment, we obviously don't control it. We would prefer a much better consumer sentiment. But the near-term focus for us and the things that we do control and that are within our sphere of influence are around the competitiveness of our products. And I think we will do the job that is necessary to ensure that we can ultimately set ourselves up to outrun our peers even if it takes a little longer for the consumer and the consumer environment to come back to a place where we see that normal price/mix equation.

We'll go to Rob Moskow here on the side.

I wanted to know if there was any thought process, Kofi and Jeff, to maybe tamping down the long-term growth algorithm. There's some real changes over the past few years, more evidence that population growth in the U.S. is slowing. Your platform in emerging markets is smaller than it used to be. And there's all these questions about whether pricing can come back, not to mention distrust, rising consumer distrust to process foods more broadly. So given all that, like is 2% to 3% equally in your mind, what you're capable of doing? Or is there maybe more risk that it might be a little slower?

Yes, Rob, I mean, look, we give a lot of thought to what our future growth prospects are. And we still believe that 2% to 3% is the right place for us to be because that's what we believe our categories will grow to. The key really is going to be getting some price mix because if we look at volume and price/mix over time, we think that is going to be the key. I mean you noted a lot of changes. It sounds kind of dire. But what I will tell you is we've been around for 160 years, not because we've been afraid to change, but because we have. And the key is for us to keep changing with consumers and where they're going. And whether that's GLP-1 usage or whether that's a rising Hispanic population, whatever that may be, that's our job to do. And what we've done it really, really well over the course of time, and that's how we've gotten to be a $20 billion company. And so whenever someone talks about change to me, I see opportunity. Do I see threats? Of course. The threat is we don't change. But we've shown ourselves time and time again that we're more than capable of changing, whether it's our capabilities, which you heard about earlier, how we're generating cash with Kofi talked about or how we're generating demand with consumers. And so yes, we've given a lot of thought to our long-term algorithm, and we fully believe over time that we can get back to that. We don't think it will be as high as it was during the pandemic because 3 years ago, you would have been asking me, are you sure you can't grow 5% because that's what you've been growing in the last couple of years. But I don't think this recency bias should have an effect on us either. I mean it really is what do we think the long-term growth is, and that's what we believe. Time will be the final judge, but that's what we believe.

Can I ask a follow-up just for Kofi. I noticed CapEx as a percentage of sales at 4%. It's averaged in the low 3% for the past 5 years. Is this because of the commitment to spending more on digital and technology? Is there a higher need for spending going forward? It's about -- it's like $200 million a year. So I just wanted to know.

Yes. We start our annual long-range capital budgeting process with that kind of as a targeted headroom. And obviously, we have a hard filter on capital deployment in terms of return, especially on growth-facing projects, which comprise the bulk of the budget. I would expect that even with that, we've been able to accommodate pretty significant investments in digital capabilities largely because we're now at a space where we've moved from making a lot of the foundational investments necessary to get started, which really, for us, was a journey that started in earnest in 2022, to a place where most of those have their own returns attached to them. Some of those will show up in our admin, our SG&A spending; and obviously, some of them also end up getting capitalized as a result of some of the changes in accounting treatment for that type of expense.

Great. Can we go to Scott Marks here in the front?

Scott Marks from Jefferies. You've highlighted today how your remarkable experiences framework is impacting some brands and categories. Wondering if you can talk about where you think it's been working well, where you think it hasn't been working as well and where you see the room for improvement?

First of all, one of the great things in my view about the remarkable experience framework is that there's always room for improvement. It really has spoken like a true CEO, I know. But there is always room for improvement. And that's one of the great things about it, and we have 5 different categories. And unless you're green on all 5, you have not arrived yet. And there are very, very few businesses that are green on all 5. If you get to 3 or 4, you're doing pretty well. So that's the most important thing I can tell you actually is that I think there's always room for improvement. Where are things working particularly well? I'm particularly proud of Liz's team and what they have done on Tastefuls, for example. And we talk about Wilderness, we get lots of questions on Wilderness and as we should because it hasn't worked as well as we want. But we don't get a lot of questions on Tastefuls, that's because it's working. And we changed the pack size, we changed the brand, we changed the advertising. It went from declining to actually growing mid-single digits. So I think that's a place where it's worked really well. It's worked really well on Pillsbury, which is another $1 billion brand. I'm really proud of the work that Dana and her team have done on Pillsbury and bringing the Doughboy back. And we talk about the pricing on Pillsbury, just as remarkable, the advertising is remarkable. And we're doing a lot with the product quality on our core as well as with new product innovation. So I think what we've done on that is remarkable. The other is Haagen-Dazs and StickBar. I mean international doesn't get a tremendous amount of attention because it's relatively small relative to NAR, for example, the attention that pet gets. But we have really grown our Haagen-Dazs business. I think it was 7% in the first quarter behind our core renovation. It was really focusing on our core flavors and these new StickBar, and particularly in China, and Ricardo was very humble and he didn't have a chance to go into it, but we shifted production to China for StickBar. We lowered the cost of it. We actually made the product incredibly remarkable. And not only did we gain distribution on that, but we gained distribution on our core as well. And so the growth on Haagen-Dazs is no accident. And then finally, I would highlight maybe Nature Valley in Europe. France is our highest share of market of Nature Valley in the world at 53%. And a decade ago, people told us we couldn't sell Nature Valley there. So I could give lots and lots of examples of where it works really well. Foodservice, I'll give you another, foodservice. I mean, I think we have an 84% market share of cereal in schools. And as I've reminded Pankaj, that means there's 16 to go. But the reason why we've done it is we've been remarkable. We have taken out sugar from our cereals. We made them taste good. We've added different sizes and varieties. And so the great thing about remarkable experience framework is not only does it -- is it something you can keep changing over time, but it also applies to all of our businesses. So anyway, there are a few examples. Catch the segment leaders later on. I'm sure they'd be happy to give you more that I have not covered here.

Matt Smith, here in the back.

Matt Smith from Stifel. Kofi, just wanted to ask about the level of investment behind the business as you exit this year. If you see that as being sufficient to balance the needs as you look forward, especially given the launch in fresh pet food. Should we think about that multiyear support associated with fresh food as being kind of a reallocation of the level that you set exiting this year or if you see more incremental spending requirements ahead?

Yes. Great question. I think let me back up and tell you kind of how we thought about this year. As we exited fiscal '25 and we're setting expectations for fiscal '26, we saw a real need to make a dramatic step change to allow our brands to do the work. And that required us kind of addressing one of the primary gates, which was price value. The quantum of investment this year is significant size, I wouldn't expect to have to make that level of sort of investment step change again as we move forward, especially if it continues to show signs of working as it does. Specifically on fresh pet, though, we do see that as a multiyear project. It is going to take more than 1 fiscal year for us to build to national scale. And until we get to a point where we start to hit full scale, I think there will be margin headwinds as we're investing in supporting that brand ahead of building the kind of awareness that we need to hit that scale window. I think once we hit that inflection point, then obviously, we would expect to see a path from there to improving margins and ultimately to at least margin parity with the rest of the company.

Can we go to Megan back here in the second row?

Megan Clapp, Morgan Stanley. Kofi, maybe just a follow-up on the NAR side of things, as it relates to that question. Clearly, controlling what you can control. The consumer environment is not one of them. Price/mix, it seems like it's a bit of a wait and see. But the volume recovery has maybe been, as talked about today, a bit slower. So as we think about as we get to the back half of this year, if volumes have taken a bit longer to recover, how do you think about balancing the need for continued reinvestment versus some of those near-term ROI and margin implications? I guess, maybe said differently, how do you think about potentially having to thread what seems like a pretty challenging needle between sustaining the volume momentum you're seeing and your competitiveness and protecting profitability?

Yes. Great question. And I think the way we view it, first, I would just kind of recalibrate on we are seeing roughly what we expected at this point in the year. So it's -- I'm certainly not in the camp where I'm throwing in a towel or kind of at the point where I need to make those trade-offs, which is my way of saying we're getting the return and the ROI out of the investment that we need to see in order to justify continuing the investment. Obviously, this is an environment where, I think to your point, we don't control the pace of the consumer recovery. We do control maybe the levers of influence over how they experience and interact with our products and the competitiveness of our products on shelf and the visibility and impact of our packaging, those things are all within our control. And where we see and have measured gaps, we're going to continue to address those. And if there's return there, we will be comfortable making that investment. I'm -- at this point, I think we reaffirm guidance because I think the path we see right now would tell us even as we make these investments in NAR that we will be able to deliver profit within the range even if we have to make some modest adjustments to investment throughout the year.

Good. I think we're going to have to wrap it up there for the formal Q&A time. So maybe before we close, Jeff, I'll turn it to you for some closing remarks.

Okay. Well, first of all, thanks to the team here, everybody who set this up and also the team General Mills, who hopefully are listening online for not only a good conference so far, but also driving the results that we have. And I want to thank all of you here today for spending some time with us. We started our presentation by covering objectives for the day, the chance to hear directly from our leaders and to anchor our theme of remarkability, how we're leveraging it to drive growth and the bold choices we're making to enable that. And as we know, and what we just talked about, the world around us isn't standing still. I mean it continues to change. Consumers are, markets are shifting, technologies like AI are reshaping how we work. But we're not standing still either, and I want you to hear that directly from me. We're adapting, and we're investing to stay ahead. And the message you've heard from us today has been clear. It sounds like it's been clear. Good is not good enough. To truly stand out in this place, you must be remarkable. And remarkable on how we -- and what we know and how we serve our consumers, remarkable in the bold choices we make, remarkable in the way we invest in our brands and our portfolio and our people. And remarkable in the discipline we bring to the execution, whether it's on our core or through M&A. And as I said before, our #1 focus is on restoring consistent organic sales growth, enabled by investment to deliver remarkable experiences for our consumers. And with this improving momentum and disciplined execution, General Mills is well positioned to continue accelerating our growth and creating long-term value for our consumers, for our customers and our shareholders. So again, thank you for spending time with us today. We'll now break from the presentation portion and transition to the in-person programming for the remainder of the day. So thank you all.