General Mills, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to General Mills' second quarter fiscal 2025 earnings conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question at this time, you'll need to press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Jeff Seaman, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. And thank you, Julianne. We appreciate you all joining us today for our Q&A session on our second quarter fiscal 2025 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. It's important to note that in our Q&A session, we may make forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions. And so 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'm joined this morning by Jeff Harmoning, our Chairman and CEO, Kofi Bruce, our CFO, Dana McNabb, Group President of North America Retail, and John Newdy, Group President of our North America Pet, Food Service, and our International segments. Before we open for questions, I'm going to hand it over to Jeff Harmoning for a few opening remarks.

All right, thanks, Jeff. And as Eddie said, before we get into Q&A and a more detailed business discussion, let me lay out kind of an overarching perspective. And I go back to June. We laid out our plans for fiscal 25, and then we said our top priority for this year is to accelerate our organic sales growth, and specifically our volume growth. And we do that by leveraging a remarkable experience framework to improve our market share. And through the first half of the year, we've executed that plan, and we're seeing good results with broad-based improvements in our volume and our shared trends. And we've done that by stepping up our investment in the business above our original plans in response to a more prolonged and, I would say, significant value-seeking behaviors on the part of consumers. We're bringing more value to consumers across all aspects of our total product offering, including increased product renovation news, increased brand building, and promotional support. And as I said, these investments are working. Leaning into our greening and superiority messaging, for example, on Blue Buffalo pet food business has led us back to growth. Strong brand campaigns and innovation have helped return our U.S. cereal business to pound share growth. And we drove accelerated retail sales performance in some other really important U.S. categories, including fruit snacks and Mexican food, soup, snack bars, as well as food service channels in many of our international markets. But we do have other work to do in other places, like on U.S. refrigerated dough. So we're adjusting our plans there and already have adjusted our plans there to ensure that Pillsbury brings more value to consumers across a broader portion of our portfolio. And so stepping back, we are confident in our strategy and the investments we're making to further improve our momentum in the back half of the year. And while stepping up our investment is impacting our profit outlook for the back half of the year, I am very confident that it's the right choice to position us for stronger growth in fiscal 26 and beyond. And so with that, Jeff, I'll turn it back to you, and let's get started on the Q&A. Okay.