General Mills, Inc. 2027 Q1 Earnings Call

Jeff, please go ahead. Thank you, Warren, and good morning to everyone.

Thanks for joining us today for this live Q&A session on our first quarter fiscal 2027 results. I hope you all had time to review our press release, listen to the prepared remarks, and view our presentation materials, which we made available this morning on our investor relations website. Please note that in our Q&A session, we may make forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions. Please refer to this morning's press release for factors that could impact forward-looking statements and for reconciliations of non-GAAP information, which we may discuss on today's call. I am here this morning with Jeff Harmening, our Chairman and CEO, Dana McNabb, our COO, and Kofi Bruce, our CFO. With that, we will go ahead and open it up for Q&A. Warren, can you please get us started?

Good morning, Andrew. Thanks for the question. Our focus is really on continuing to improve dollar share trends. I'm not going to get into quarterly Nielsen estimates, but we are pleased with the improvement. We saw a 2-point improvement in dollar sales. We did improve our share performance in the majority of our categories. But as you probably noticed, we're not all the way to growth yet, so we still have work to do. Where we're focused is really the first thing you'll see is we expect an improvement in price mix. If you recall, in Q1, we hadn't lapped our base price investments yet. We will start to do that in Q2, and we like the plans we have against product mix, premium innovation, and price pack architecture. We also will see accelerated innovation and renovation, and we really like how our marketing is performing right now.

We'll continue to focus on that. Again, we still have work to do. We had the Totino's business that was a problem for us all last year. We've cut those declines in half. That's an area we'll continue to focus on, and we expect to see improved dollar performance throughout the year.

Thanks so much. Well, as you mentioned, we were in a tough spot last year.

This year we have seen pretty good improvement, and we are encouraged by the momentum. We saw improvement in the majority of our categories, and I will give you a couple examples. I look at cereal, where last year in Q1, our share was down 0.9. This year in Q1, we are only down 0.1. Soup, another big business, we were down 0.4 in share. This year, we are only down 0.1. So, we really do like what we are seeing, and we are not to growth yet. We know we still have more work to do, and that is going to be an emphasis on price mix and innovation and renovation. The two spots that we are keeping our eye on where we need to see more improvement is Totino's, which I have already talked to.

Pleased again that we cut those declines in half, but we have more work to do, and we have really good product innovation, Blasted Rolls. We have some better merchandising. We have strong renovation coming, so we feel good about that. Then we have some challenges on fruit snacks. The category is growing remarkably fast. It is up about 13% in Q1. But we are really seeing some small insurgent brands enter and drive that with increased distribution. So we need to up our game there. We are going to really leverage our Annie's brand to bring some very strong new products to market. We have just launched Annie's Organic Nature Pals, which is a high-fiber fruit snack, great taste. We have some great renovation coming on our core business. So Totino's and fruit is where we will focus on, and then we expect to see continued improvement in the rest of our brands.