Primo Brands Corporation Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference

Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having us. We're very excited to be here. I think one of the things that's really encouraging is just the business model and the business opportunity. We're really pleased with the progress. I know we'll get a chance to talk about that. When I entered the door, there was some disruption on the Customer Direct business.

But if you really take a step back and look at where can this business go, and you think about it through the lens of a very healthy, attractive, large, growing, profitable category, if you take a look at it on our position within that category as the clear leader in water and healthy hydration, a major player across liquid refreshment beverages, which also has continued to grow year to date, and then you take a look at the brand portfolio of leading brands and this flexible patchwork quilt of route-to-market options, there's just a whole lot to like. Coming into the CEO role, it was really important for us to make the priorities line up in terms of importance. Number one, get the customer experience fixed on the Customer Direct business. We've done that. Second, make sure the business gets back to growth. We've done that. We've had two quarters of beats and raises on the top line.

As we think about this business going forward, it's a business that still has tremendous growth potential, multiple growth vectors, whether you think about that through the Customer Direct delivery lens or the retail lens. Again, for us, it was really important to stabilize. We're now beginning to move into the optimize and ultimately we'll get into unlocking the long-term growth algorithm and financial flywheel.

Yeah, I think, again, what we have done and what's behind us, I believe, is we've stabilized the supply chain, getting a better sales forecast, getting product produced to schedule, getting warehouse out of stocks eliminated. That's enabled us to go on the service front, provide great customer service at the moment of truth, right product, right place, right time, account services scheduled, an important metric on time in full, that's now back up north of 90% and has been so consistently. I think as we think about this, what you've seen happen now to the business is you're seeing less calls. You're seeing a much quicker ability for us to respond and recover if there is a customer opportunity. Importantly, the overall growth trajectory of that business returned to growth in second quarter, which we found encouraging, and we would expect that trajectory to continue.

Sure. I think culture's really important to a winning team. As we thought about culture, one of the first things we did was we went back and revisited what is our mission each and every day, which is all around hydrating a healthier America. Importantly, we had to make some changes to a couple of our values. We moved up the importance of this customer-first mindset. We also moved up an important value around frontline first and making sure as leaders we're all obsessed with giving them the training tools, technology, anybody on the frontline that's make moving, selling or delivering our product. From there, I think it was really trying to implement both a performance culture and a recognition culture. We've tried to invest in capability.

We want to make sure that all leaders, whether they're in a specific function or line of business, are thinking more like a general manager and thinking through an enterprise mindset and lens to how their role in helping optimize the enterprise and help it reach its full potential. We've done a lot of that. We recently made some changes on the leadership front, particularly on our Customer Direct business, brought in somebody with real deep experience in selling excellence, route to market excellence, which will help us on that journey, whether it's service selling, or operational excellence. So good progress, more work to do.

I think there's three milestones. One, it's a business that should provide an absolute great customer experience consistently each and every day at the moment of truth. I think, second, it should be able to unlock a growth flywheel that is delivering consistent, sustainable, balanced top-line growth. I think the vehicle to do that is multidimensional. So if you think about the way this model should work is we've got to make sure we're keeping a good handle and focus on retaining our valued customers. We need to add that through new quality customers that are quality, durable, and payable customers for us. We need to make sure we have a more comprehensive effort. Once we have a customer that, in most instances in HOD, is a 5-gallon customer, we can attach our premium water or our regional spring waters to that.

And then obviously we have the pricing lever. Then we have had a proven tuck-in acquisition model that has been accretive. So that's the growth flywheel. That's number two. Then third is operational excellence. We have to find a way to make sure, in a route and direct door-delivered business model, that we have the right metrics around getting that product there in an effective and efficient way. So those three things to me are really milestones that should be achievable in this business.