General Mills, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to General Mills' third quarter fiscal 2026 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 Corporate Finance. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Julianne, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for a live Q&A session on our third quarter fiscal 26 results. I hope everyone 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. Please refer to this morning's press release for factors that could impact forward-looking statements and for reconciliations of non-GAAP information, which may be discussed on today's call. I'm here with Jeff Harmoning, our Chairman and CEO, Kofi Bruce, our CFO, and Dana McNabb, Group President of North America Retail and North America Pet. And before we get to Q&A, I'll turn it over to Jeff for some opening remarks.

Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everybody. We'll turn to Q&A here in a couple minutes, but I thought I'd just take a minute or two to provide some context of what we've been through through the first three quarters of this year. And then based on the progress we've been able to demonstrate, you know, how we're positioned to deliver a significant step up in financial performance, which will start in our fourth quarter, which is why we reaffirmed our guidance for fiscal 26th. You know, as a reminder, as we entered this fiscal year, you know, we made a proactive and strategic decision to reinvest to improve the remarkability of our brands with full awareness that this would weigh on near-term results as we sharpened our competitiveness. So now three-quarters into that plan, we're seeing strengthened momentum on critical building blocks for sustainable growth, namely household penetration, improved baseline volume, distribution, and market shares. And this progress only reinforces our conviction that this strategy is the right one for General Mills. In North America retail, our investments in remarkability are resonating with consumers. We're rebuilding household penetration and baseline growth, which are the key indicators of future growth. In pet, we're adding households as well and fueling our fast-growing cat feeding portfolio and also taking steps to accelerate our growth through Love Made Fresh. And we're continuing to be competitive in North American food service and international. We know there's still more work ahead. We know that. But with most of the reinvestment phase behind us, we expect to deliver meaningful, better top-line and bottom-line performance in Q4 and beyond. I also want to talk briefly about the other piece of news you may have seen yesterday, which was our agreement to sell our Brazil business. And this builds on a strong track record we have of portfolio shaping, both in acquisitions and investitures, nearly a third of our portfolio once this is complete over the last number of years. And Brazil includes our Yoki and Catano brands. And while it's not on the scale of PET or the yogurt transactions, it's the same discipline approach we've consistently taken to reshape our portfolio. And namely, you know, our desire to prioritize our resources and investments on brands and platforms where we have the strongest opportunity to generate profitable growth. This deal will enhance our margins and increases the international segment's focus on our key global platforms, including super premium ice cream, Mexican foods, snack bars, and pet food, where we have stronger margin and excellent growth prospects. So with this transaction, as I said, we've turned over nearly a third of our net sales since fiscal 2028. As we look to fiscal 27 as well, as we said in our press release, Our number one goal is going to be to continue to improve our organic sales results while at the same time maintaining our industry-leading HMM as well as the transformation initiative we have to make sure we're maintaining efficiency. In 2026, we're really pleased with the pound share competitiveness we've had in NAR as well as dollar share in the other segments. As we look at fiscal 27, we'll aim to improve our dollar share performance in NAR, really as we've lapped a lot of these price investments and the rest of our marketability framework elements take hold. So with that, we're confident in the strategy we have and we know that we're making progress. We'll continue to do that in Q4 and into fiscal 27. And with that, let's open it up for Q&A.