The Kraft Heinz Company (KHC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. If we could find our seats, we'll kick off our first presentation of the day, and thanks, everybody, for being willing to make an early start today. So it's my pleasure to introduce Kraft Heinz. Please join me first in thanking the company for sponsoring breakfast this morning. Kraft Heinz has made a significant commitment to stepping up investments this year with a focus on contemporizing brands to align with consumer preferences, enhancing commercial execution and delivering a more balanced value equation. Please join me in welcoming Steve Cahillane, Chief Executive Officer; and Andre Maciel, Chief Financial Officer. Over to you, Steve, and thanks for being here.

Thank you, Andrew. Andre and I are very excited to be with you here today. Thank you for braving the 7:00 a.m. hour. Very, very impressive. Before we begin, please keep in mind that today's presentation will include some forward-looking statements. Now let's kick things off with a short brief clip. [Presentation]

That right there is why I am here. These brands are so iconic, so special, so well known. But unfortunately, for too long, we have been relying too much on only that. We recognize that it is imperative to drive volume-led, sustainable and profitable growth. and to do this while continuing to generate attractive free cash flow. We can't do that by continuing to rely on old ads on the nostalgia of the brands alone. Instead, we need to make these brands relevant for today. We need to contemporize them and I am very excited to be here to do just that. When I joined Kraft Heinz earlier this year, I quickly saw that in addition to these iconic brands, we have some very powerful proof points or blueprints, if you will, in pockets across the company. These blueprints have led to volume-driven top line growth and share gains. Today, I will share with you some of these examples. You will see why I am so energized about this turnaround and why we are confident that we can do this. I'll show you what is possible with a simplified operating model. This is what we did in Canada. The new model, along with investments across innovation and renovation, helped to grow the business at a 4% CAGR over the past 3 years with consistent sales growth and market share gains. You will also see how in the U.K., we returned a nostalgic brand, Heinz Beans to share growth through innovation, renovation and a more balanced value equation after suffering from a decade of share declines. And we will look at how we are leveraging the power of one of the most recognizable brands in the world, the Heinz brand. With more and improved marketing and sales support, we help to grow the brand by 13% in emerging markets. These are tangible repeatable blueprints and just a few examples that we can replicate and we can scale. So we will be making a meaningful step-up in investments this year. approximately $600 million in total. With this incremental investment, along with the insights and capabilities we've gained, we can fix those places that need fixing, particularly the U.S. market as well as accelerate momentum in those markets and brands in which we already have initial traction, including Heinz across the U.K., Europe and emerging markets and our portfolio of brands in Canada. In fact, I believe in this so much and see that so much is within our control to fix that as we announced just last week, the entire organization will be 100% focused on doing just this. After I share these reasons to believe and show you how we will replicate and scale them to turn around the U.S. business, Andre will give more color on the necessary investments to make this happen and how we are self-funding these investments. He will also cover our capital allocation priorities. So let's get started. First with Canada, which represents approximately 7% of total Kraft Heinz net sales. From 2019 to 2021, Canada's top line and market share declined each year. When we looked at the business, when the team looked at the business, the primary hurdle was our operating complexity. We were buried in a matrix that slowed us down. So our first move was to simplify the operating model. We traded that complexity for decision speed and clear ownership. We increased investments and prioritized our resources on our core businesses, particularly committing innovation to a few big bets. But a strategy is only as good as its delivery. Because we kept the plan simple, we were able to get the entire organization aligned and moving in the same direction. We backed that up with a maniacal focus on execution and clear channel priorities. The result is a business that is now faster and built to win. The organization is focused on 2 big bets currently. The first was winning with Heinz through expansion beyond ketchup and better-for-you offerings such as Heinz Zero, which doesn't have any added sugar or salt. The second is nutrition, where we are accelerating our core through benefits led growth, including adding protein to some favorites, including our KD Mac & Cheese and our Kraft Peanut Butter. As a result, over the last couple of years, we grew net sales in Canada at a 4% CAGR, and we gained market share with core brands delivering about 80% of the growth. Now turning to our international developed markets in Europe and the Pacific region that represent approximately 14% of our total net sales. Here, our teams have been successfully leveraging our global Heinz campaign, scaling innovation and focusing on building stronger, mutually beneficial customer relationships. In these markets, we are successfully leveraging the strength of the Heinz brand in large and competitive categories. For example, we have expanded into a new occasion with the introduction of Heinz pasta sauce which is nearly 60% incremental to the category. And we continue to gain market share. In under 4 years, we have gone from not playing in the space at all to earning 7% share. We are also broadening our sauce offerings, focusing on the large and fast-growing Mayo segment. This is a $2 billion market and 2x the size of ketchup. Leveraging our brand power and unique appeal with younger consumers, we launched a superior Heinz Mayo recipe. And as a result, we reached 20% market share in the U.K. and 13% in Germany. And a final example, Heinz Beans, where we contemporized an old favorite. Let's dive a little bit more into what we specifically did here because I think it's truly an exciting story. While Heinz Beans has been an iconic brand and a staple in British culture for decades, we have been losing share consistently for the last 10 years. The brand was suffering from a lack of investment, inferior product quality and packaging, price points that were too high and insufficient media support. To address this, we used insights from the brand growth system analysis to make targeted investments. First, we focused on contemporizing the core product. We optimized the formulation to reduce water migration from the beans into the sauce. This resulted in a thicker sauce, firmer beans and better overall texture. We also changed our revenue management strategy and introduced new price pack architecture to rebalance our value equation. We worked alongside our customers and developed more constructive joint business plans. We then rebooted the innovation engine and expanded into new flavors. We knew that over 70% of consumers were adding flavors to their beans already and that 50% of consumers were looking for bold flavors. The team didn't stop there, expanding into heat-to-eat pouches that are healthy with functional benefits provide convenience and create another moment for flavor exploration. The heat-to-eat pouches segment has been growing at a 130% CAGR over the last 2 years as consumers are looking for flavor, convenience and better-for-you solutions. Our heat-to-eat pouches are delighting consumers as an excellent source of protein made from natural ingredients and with no added sugar. And importantly, these pouches are nearly 70% incremental. With a better product better value offering and exciting innovation, we then added 30% in marketing to support the brand. Impressively, not only did we reverse course on 10 years of market share loss, we did so while preserving the brand's very attractive margins. I think you can see why I'm excited about our future. Our teams have shown that we can turn around nostalgic brands that had lost their way to go from market share loss to market share gains. Now let's turn to emerging markets, which is an area for great growth potential. Today, it represents only 11% of our business. We expect the Taste Elevation industry to continue to grow double digits. And with half the penetration in emerging markets as we have in developed markets, there is a lot of white space available for us to capture. Plus with only 11% of our business in emerging markets, you can see that we have a long runway in front of us to reach just the levels of other CPG companies. We have been using 3 proven levers to drive growth in emerging markets. First, through Heinz. It represents over $1 billion of revenue in emerging markets and delivered an impressive organic net sales growth of 13% in 2025. Second, our go-to-market model. as we continue to drive distribution in existing markets while exploring white space opportunities. Through this proven model, we expanded distribution points by 13% in 2025. We and third, through Heinz-led innovation. We will continue to accelerate the growth of our Heinz brand through flavor exploration, driving value through the right portfolio and pack size and expanding usage occasions. Let me share an example that comes from China, where we are expanding into a new occasion and growing Heinz by educating and encouraging more families to cook with Heinz ketchup. Today, in China, only 30% of households use ketchup. However, tomato scrambled eggs is an extremely popular dish, so popular that it is often the first dish that people learn to make with over 10 billion batches made each year. Our social media analytics showed us there was one critical pain point with this dish. It was that imperfect tomatoes that are under ripe, watery or just too firm can spoil the entire dish. So we decided to introduce a new way to make it with ketchup. Heinz Ketchup is made with 10 sun-ripened tomatoes in every bottle, and it is an ideal replacement for tomatoes and eggs. Its consistency and reliability make it a perfect ingredient. We educated and met consumers where they were with end-to-end execution. Online, we set out on a campaign to share with consumers that Heinz Ketchup is the reliable ingredient they were missing. We also showed up very strong in store, displaying ketchup next to eggs. And we showed up in their everyday lives, making billboard advertisements out of diner shutters during the Chinese New Year with ketchup packets and recipes taped directly to them. And we tailored our messaging, communicating the pain point and doing it creatively. And the results, well, they speak for themselves. We generated approximately 170 basis points of share improvement and reached 32% market share in ketchup, our highest ever. We also gained 18 basis points of household penetration and grew e-commerce sales during Chinese New Year 30% year-over-year. Let's take a look at this video. You'll see how the team executed extremely well against this very sizable opportunity. [Presentation]

And by the way, there are so many more ways families can incorporate Heinz Ketchup into their traditional dishes. Take the favorite sweet and sour flavored dishes. Yes, that's right. We're showing our consumers how to show off their cooking skills this Chinese New Year with a Heinz sweet and sour recipe. As you can hopefully see, from Canada to the U.K. to China, we have proven that we can recover market share, whether it be by simplifying an operating model, improving our renovation and innovation or leaning into sales and marketing. Through our investment plan, we now need to accelerate the momentum we are seeing outside of the U.S. as well as bring these insights and capabilities into the U.S. business. Let's take a look. It is in the U.S. where the bulk of our issues exist today. It's also where 67% of our total business resides. And while it is our largest and most mature market, there are still plenty of opportunities. We have iconic brands with category-leading share positions. In retail, 70% of our revenue is from brands that have a #1 or #2 share position. And we are in nearly every household with 96% household penetration. And when you look at household penetration by brand, the market share opportunity becomes very evident. In the Away from Home channel, we are in a unique advantaged position in that this $2 billion business is evenly split between front of the house and back of the house. Front of the house provides powerful brand awareness with tens of billions of impressions. And we have significant opportunity for growth, whether growing beyond ketchup into other condiments, dips and spreads or expanding into a higher growth, higher-margin channels like entertainment and travel and leisure. We also have runway to expand our distribution in QSRs, delighting more consumers with more choices and varieties. But here's the problem. Despite this opportunity in both retail and Away from Home, our U.S. business has consistently lost share during the last 10 years, with trends further worsening in 2025. These results are primarily driven by a complex operating model, underperforming innovation and a lack of necessary funding. The good news is that today, we are beginning to see traction from last year's stepped-up investments. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we generated a 20 basis point improvement relative to the full year. We are also significantly ramping up investments, as I mentioned, by approximately $600 million to improve our competitiveness across marketing, sales, R&D as well as price and product superiority. Lastly, we only need modest recovery today to make a meaningful difference. You see the business has been losing on average, 30 basis points of share for the last 10 years. And as I mentioned, we recovered quite a bit as we progressed throughout 2025, ending the fourth quarter with improved trends. By continuing on this path and returning to even just the historical but disappointing 10-year average, we can improve our North America top line performance by 2 percentage points. This is clearly very doable. But let me be very clear. This is not a level that we will be happy with, but reaching our guidance is a very realistic and meaningful first step. The initial share recovery can be seen in a few areas of the U.S. business. One is Taste Elevation. By the fourth quarter of 2025, over 70% of our Taste Elevation categories in the U.S. were gaining share. This includes ketchup, salad dressing, cream cheese and mustard. We have also generated sales recovery in those categories that were creating the most headwinds at the beginning of 2025, including Mac & Cheese, Lunchables, Mayo and Capri Sun. Through product quality improvement, better communication on packaging and value offerings, we saw improvements across each of these brands by year-end. One that gets me very excited is Capri Sun. Let's take a closer look at this example. Even though 1/3 of all beverages are purchased in the convenience channel and on-the-go shelves, we did not have a solution for this channel and this occasion. But we knew what we needed to do. We needed to reposition Capri Sun for families on the go by selling in the highly incremental convenience channel while maintaining profitability and competitiveness. We know that parents prefer single-serve bottles that are portable and resealable for their kids. In other words, we simply needed a new package for the occasion. So for the first time ever, we took Capri Sun out of its iconic pouch and into a format that's single-serve, resealable and fits in cooler shelves. And we did it in a way that drove both sales and profitability. The bottle has a higher margin than our base Capri Sun business and is 60% incremental. We generated 11% ACV growth in C-stores, adding 16,000 new stores since its launch. We also gained new Capri Sun consumers as the single-serve offering over indexes to households with kids between the ages of 12 and 17, an older age group compared to our core Capri Sun consumers. Capri Sun is a great brand, and the teams have done a great job capturing this opportunity, but there are many more opportunities across our brands in the U.S. One of these opportunities is within innovation. Innovation is a huge priority for me personally. And while I am excited about what we've done so far, we need to strengthen the pipeline going forward. With the incremental investment, we expect to increase our percent contribution to consumption from innovation, closing the gap to competition. Our innovation strategy is centered around 3 key consumer-driven platforms: convenience, new occasions and nutrition. Let me give you one example that I'm really excited about. In nutrition, we are committed to providing consumers with products that offer functional benefits to meet their dietary needs. Take Kraft Mac & Cheese Power Mac, which combines the comforting taste of our iconic brand with the protein and fiber that consumers want, offering more nutritional value than competition at a lower price point. By focusing on these consumer-driven platforms, we are confident we can build superior consumer experiences with our brands. As I said earlier, our goal is to drive volume-led, sustainable and profitable top line growth and generate attractive free cash flow. To meaningfully change the course of the business, we need to drive positive volume growth through better in-market execution, better products and better innovations that consumers love. This is the first step that will restore a virtuous cycle in our business model, leading to margin expansion and healthy long-term top and bottom line growth. We will continue to build on the great momentum we are already seeing in parts of the business, whether that be across Canada, Heinz and European markets or in our emerging markets. And we will replicate and scale the blueprints of this success to restore growth in our iconic leading brands in the U.S. To be successful, we are committed to make the necessary investments. Fueling our plans is an approximate $600 million investment that we will invest across key commercial levers. And that's where Andre comes in. I'll pass it off so he can talk more about those investments and the sources of funding. Over to you, Andre.

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. So as Steve mentioned, there are pockets of success across our business. We now need to make certain investments and adapt our incentives to scale the success across more markets and brands faster. We are going to invest to accelerate the things that are working and scale those blueprints to address what is not. But to support this, we are making investments across pricing, R&D, innovation, marketing and sales. Starting with price. In the U.S. market, we see pack sizes evolving across value and affordability. More and more consumers are seeking value through bulk pack sizes, which offers a lower price per unit. We also see an increasing number of consumers prioritizing affordability opting for smaller pack sizes to stretch their budgets and provide flexibility. And to cater to these needs, we will focus on providing optimal opening price points for consumers to drive trial and brand entry. Currently, we are not participating as much as we should be on the opening price points strength. We are not looking to make widespread material price investments. Rather, we intend to invest in opening price points across categories that represent about 40% of our U.S. portfolio. We will also be refining our price pack architecture to meet consumers where they are. And we will do this in a way that we also capture margin-accretive upside via small pack pricing while preserving purchase flexibility. In addition to a strong focus on opening price points, we will also work to maximize our return on promotions. Over the years, as you know, we have made progress in optimizing our promotional spend with a higher percentage now generating net positive return on investment. But to build on this in 2026, we are going to reallocate funds towards promotional activities that deliver the highest returns. And we are also going to plan with longer lead times. One of the reasons why we're going to concentrate our investments in the second half of 2026 to ensure a more strategic approach to our promotional efforts. And our incremental investment in infrastructure will also enhance our trade planning and execution capabilities. On the R&D front, we are increasing our investments by approximately 20%. We will focus our core and big bet innovations, much like we did in Canada. The elevated investments, along with disciplined prioritization will enable us to meet evolving consumer needs, drive superiority across both product and packaging improve our speed to market in addition to supporting our future productivity pipeline. On the marketing front, we are increasing our level of investments to approximately 5.5% of net sales -- 5.5% of net sales this year, up from 4.9% in 2025 and targeting investments towards our biggest growth opportunities. And at the same time, we will be focused on driving higher return on our ad spend. We increased our return on advertising spend by 12% in 2025, and we have more opportunity to close the gap to benchmark levels. With this incremental investment, we are strengthening our brands by improving consumer relevance and creating brand-centric experiences during key seasons. And by doing so, we aim to drive improvements in base velocities and brand equity, ultimately resulting in measurable incremental sales. And to further support both marketing and sales, we are growing both functions and increasing the size of our teams to close the gap with our peer benchmark. Doing so, we help to improve our retail partnerships and execution, allow us to be better equipped to drive demand through sharper consumer insights and strengthen brand positioning and better support product launches. When deciding which brands will be investing more in, we take into consideration our market share goals. For those brands where we want to hold like Oscar Mayer and Maxwell House, we will spend to defend market share. In those brands we are looking to win market share, like Capri Sun and Lunchables, we will invest selectively. And for those brands where we have the right to win big, like in our Taste Elevation brands such as Heinz and Philadelphia, we will distort more of our investments. Now to ensure that the organization is aligned on one common goal, we have refined our incentive program with an increased focus on market share milestones, particularly for our sales and marketing teams. We want to motivate our team to create momentum that aligns with the investments that we are making. And to help fund these investments, we need to continue to unlock efficiencies and productivity like we have done in the past several years. We are well on our way to exceeding our target of $2.5 billion in gross efficiencies by the end of 2026, which is 1 year ahead of our original plan. While we are proud of our progress and have proven to be an efficient operator, we have a lot more opportunities identified for improvements across manufacturing, logistics and procurement. This includes the use of digital tools to improve yield loss, automation within our factories, network optimization and further unlocking supplier efficiencies. Over the past 3 years, our productivity program has regularly generated over 4% of COGS. And we continue to make progress on other operational metrics, including OEE and waste, all of which are moving towards or exceeding best-in-class benchmarks. In addition to operational efficiencies, we are also capturing significant cost savings through the expansion of global business services. Over the past 3 years, we have grown our centralized service team and delivered an impressive $62 million in savings. We have also expanded scope to strengthen our collaboration with commercial teams driving value across the business. Consistent with investments we have outlined, our outlook remains unchanged from what we communicated on the last week's earnings call. Our goal is to deploy these investments to generate share momentum in the second half of the year to position the company to grow in 2027 with expectation that 2026 is the margin floor. We also continue to generate solid free cash flow conversion with expectations to generate approximately 100% this year. Our ability to improve working capital, maintain disciplined CapEx spend, recent strategic treasury initiatives and better aligned incentives have all contributed to these healthy conversion levels. Turning to capital allocation. Our priorities remain the same. First is to continue to step up investments in the business. Second is to maintain net leverage around 3x. This includes prioritizing deployment of excess cash to reduce debt in 2026. Third is to actively manage our portfolio and fourth is to return excess capital to shareholders. As Steve said, our goal is to drive volume-led sustainable and profitable growth while continuing to generate attractive free cash flow. This year, we will continue to build on the great momentum we are already seeing in parts of the business in our emerging markets in Canada, Kraft Heinz in Europe and Taste Elevation in the U.S. We know that when we make the right investments, it works, and we can drive improved performance. Our collective focus this year will be on replicating and scaling these blueprints to restore growth in our leading iconic brands in the U.S. We have started Heinz, and we'll be scaling to more brands across more markets faster. Take a look. [Presentation]

Great. So with that, I believe we have a few minutes left to take a couple of questions.

Michael Lavery, Piper Sandler. When you look at the promo chart, we've heard from Kraft Heinz management before how you'd almost maybe think they were reinventing the wheel, the degree to which they were confident they could increase return on shift to higher return promotions. And it looks like historically, it's only been 40% to 50% of the time. So can you give us a sense of what some of the structural limitations are and how you're confident now that you can really hit what would appear to be all-time highs?

Yes, Michael, I'd say we're not relying on just price and promotion. The $600 million incremental is on top of a slight step up last year, as we mentioned. So price and promotion are a part of it, but it's the entire mix. It's product superiority, packaging superiority, innovation, all of that working together. And I can't talk and don't want to talk about what they -- what was claimed in the past. But in the future, we've got some very realistic plans with really good investments behind it and proof points that we tried to show today looking for what's working, what has worked well in the past, where is it repeatable and where is it scalable, and we'll do more of that. And we'll continue to learn in price and promotion on what's most effective and lean into that but we'll be leaning the whole $600 million into what works the best across price, product, package, marketing sales, SG&A capabilities. So the whole mix to create a better outcome. And the other thing I'd say is part of probably the answer to your question is we acknowledge we have been more than lean the last 10 years. So if you don't have the people and the capabilities, it's really difficult to deliver, and we've been operating too lean, and we acknowledge that, and we're going to fix it.

Just to build on what Steve said is, as you know, we have talked throughout the years, we have invested a lot on the revenue management capability. And we did have 3, 4 years of consecutive improvement in ROI to the point that now we have the net ROI is positive. That is different than where we were back in 2021. Last year was not good, and we talk about that in the different occasions. And part of that is what Steve is saying. It is driven by execution continues to inherit our ability to do things the right way. I think the extra investments we're going to do in headcount on the sales front is going to help us a lot to improve the execution. Planning for longer lead time is also important. When we deploy resource in the last minute, we get suboptimal execution. I think that's one of the reasons why also we decided to concentrate a lot of the step-up in investments in the second half of the year, so we have proper time to plan.

Pete Galbo.

Steve, now that you've hit pause on the split, but Andre had in the capital allocation slide, actively managing the portfolio. And if I think if we rewind to CAGNY from 2 years ago, we were talking a lot about potential for asset sales. So just with the pause in mind and that kind of commentary around actively managing, maybe you can expand a little bit on what the go-forward might look like from a managing of the portfolio.

Yes, sure. The pause was really important. As I said, getting the company into a healthier position preserves optionality on the portfolio and any other strategic things that we may look at. And said a different way, the work to separate the business is so enormous. I know that as well as anybody. And the work to turn around a business that is declining is also an enormous task. Doing both of those things at the same time is very difficult, if not impossible, to do the way that you want to do them. So pausing the separation work and focusing 100% on fixing the business is where we are right now. And it preserves optionality because we'll be a stronger company, a healthier company that can decide to separate into the future and have 2 healthy businesses or something else or continue. But job 1, 2 and 3 is what we talked about right here today, which is fixing the business and stopping being a donor of market share.

We'll cut it there. We'll head over to the breakout. Please join me again in thanking Kraft Heinz for being here and for breakfast.