This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
spk00: For joining, I'm Pam Kaufman, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Food and Tobacco Analyst. I'm very excited to be on stage this afternoon with W.K. Kellogg's leadership team. We have CEO Gary Pilnick and Dave McEntree, CFO. So thank you both for joining us. Before we get started, I just need to cover the standard disclaimer. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com slash researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. I'll kick it off with questions, and we'll open it up to Q&A at the end. Obviously, a very exciting time for the company, just recently spun off as an independent company. Why don't we kind of start by getting your perspective on the U.S. consumer. It's been a dynamic time for the consumer over the last couple of years and we've seen trends decelerate within the food space. So what are you seeing and how would you characterize the current environment?
spk02: It's a great place to start. And I think it's probably fair to say the consumer is not a monolith, but we're all consumers. And I think the consumer base is under pressure. We see what's happening with inflation. We see credit card debt. It's rising. So I think it's very fair to say that we have a dynamic right now where we're responding to a consumer under pressure. And we expect that to continue, at least for the near term. Now, what's interesting for us is the cereal category tends to do well in moments like this, in economic moments like this. And the primary reason for that is it's a very affordable category. We've said publicly you don't get a lot of meals for about a dollar or less than a dollar when a bowl of cereal and milk. So these moments were all very difficult for consumers. Actually, the category is a place that they would seek value because we would think they'd be value-seeking when they're under pressure. And a couple dynamics when you think about shifting, you would immediately go to, well, what about private label? And in our category, private label has seen an uptick. What's interesting about private label in our category, it holds about a 7% share. That's relatively low when you compare that to other categories in the food space. Earlier this year, there was some more TDPs provided to private label. Their share went up, but it stabilized around 7%. What's even more interesting is the dynamic within our category of premiumization. You would think when consumers are under pressure, the premium side of the category wouldn't be growing. It is. It's growing meaningfully. Now, it's a smaller part of the category. We're participating. Special K Zero, the first product into the category with zero added sugar. Special K High Protein. We develop both of these during the spin. And others are in there as well. And we're going to participate even more. But it just shows the dynamic nature and affordability of the category. Maybe the last thing I would say is, potentially our category could be even more important to retailers right now in that they're looking to drive traffic. If any people are listening are shoppers, you know that cereal's on your list. We're a destination category. We drive traffic. So maybe at this point in time, our category could be that much more robust because the consumer is under pressure.
spk00: And since some investors might be newer to your story, given you are a newly public company, can you maybe talk about some of the benefits of the spin and how you expect that to help the business strategically?
spk02: The underlying logic of the spin, and Dave, you and I will probably hand this one, but the underlying logic of the spin is that we would be a stronger company. WK Kellogg Co. would be a stronger company as an independent company. That's a bit counterintuitive because the Kellogg company, $15 billion, global in nature, has all this capability and resources. Why would W.K. Kellogg, why would the cereal business be stronger independently? Well, it starts with where we came from. We said publicly as a company, it was rhetorical, if you were a cereal company, who would you rather compete with? A global company that's deprioritized the business or a single focus company that all they do is cereal? Well, you'd rather compete against the deprioritized business. So it starts with we inherited a deprioritized business. We also had a few idiosyncratic events catastrophic fire in one of our plants we also had a strike so we inherited that so on the way in we now get to go focus on that business and we think there's real value we could create now we can create it because everything we're going to do is in service of cereal that starts with we're going to go integrate five separate businesses typically with a spin you're lifting and shifting and operating business they have a P&L and should operate better because of the additional focus for us it's five separate businesses The Caribbean, Canada, food away from home, Kashi and Bear Naked were operated separately as well, and then US retail. We bring those all together. Now, it was the right thing to do as the Kellogg company because each and most of those businesses were cereal and snacks. For us, it's just cereal. We bring it together. The benefit there is it allows us to harmonize those businesses and also scale up big ideas. We're also maintaining so much more visibility because of that integration. We know more about this business today than we did before. So that's the first thing. The second thing is the Salesforce. The Kellogg company felt Salesforce is well known in the industry as being a fine Salesforce. It is one of the better sales forces in the industry. For us, we now have a sales force that has largely the same coverage, but all they're going to do is focus on cereal. Before, seven or eight different categories going into the store. For us, it's just going to be cereal. So you can just intuitively see the power of that. The last thing, and I'll stop here, I promise, Pam. The last thing would be we have our own balance sheet. Now that cereal is the enterprise priority, we decide how we leverage our balance sheet, and now we get to go modernize our supply chains. It's the centerpiece of our margin enhancement program. But don't underestimate the power of that investment on driving the top line. If your supply chain is not as reliable as it should be, you start to lose trust with your retail partners. You need to be there. If you have a promotion, the food better be there on time. We want to make this investment. We'll be more reliable. We do think that translates not just to profitability, but top line as well. So Dave, I just picked three big pieces. Is there anything else that you'd want to add to that?
spk01: No, I think you did great. I think you hit on all the key points.
spk00: Okay. Great. So in your outlook, you are targeting stable top line growth, stable top line over the next several years. How should we think about the drivers behind that? Historically, if we look at the serial category, it's been in secular decline. So what's your expectation for the category? And then how do you expect to grow within that?
spk02: The way we would look at it is, look, we think this is a great category. And let's start with, over the years, you've had the company that invented this category deprioritize it. We're interested to see what happens when we, as the originator of the category, focuses only on these products, only on this category. We think something special could happen. Now, in terms of the top line, I said it a moment ago. We start with the business deprioritized and fire and strike. We still haven't come out of that. We lost 500 basis points of share during the fire and the strike. We've regained, give or take, about 300 basis points of that, so there's more to come. Now, we have to go earn that. What we'll talk about a little bit, Dave, I'll turn it over to you for real this time. We'll talk about TDPs and merchandising. The total distribution points and merchandising, we think that uniquely can impact our business going forward. Dave, why don't you talk a little bit about that?
spk01: Yeah, I think, again, the starting point is the low single-digit decline. And if you go back, Pam, I think what you're alluding to, if you go back to roughly the 10 years preceding COVID, that's about the decline we would have seen from the category. And given where we've been since 2020, we think that that's a rather prudent starting point. So as Gary alluded to, if you go for specific to W.K. Kellogg and then the challenges we had surrounding the fire and strike and how that hit our business, Our points of distribution are about 90%, give or take, of where they were in 2019. The cereal category is at 100%. So the cereal category has the exact same position within the store that it had back in 2019, but we're about 10 points behind where we were. Same thing on merchandising. It's about the same dynamic. 100% for the category, we're about 90%. And so as we think about it, those are two big opportunity areas. And it's really getting our full assortment back on the shelf. If you think about the 500 basis points, you get the first 300, there's some, I'll call it low hanging fruit, right? The secondary skew on Frosted Flakes. But now as we think about it, we want to make sure our full assortment across all of our brands, our sizes, our secondary skews, all of them are on shelf. The other thing that we think about is how do we drive incremental points of distribution through innovation, right? Exciting new innovation that we can delight our consumers and excite our customers and continue to drive traffic and news into the category. So those are the big things. I think the other thing, I talked about the merchandising gap back to 2019, is the focus sales force. So if you think about the focus sales forces, they're entering into store, their focus is how do we drive that incremental display to drive that incremental purchase by the shopper? And that's where our focus is on the sales force is really executing in the store with just the one category. And that's an important thing. So as we think about going forward and what we've said going back to Investor Day, low single digit decline on the category and then our closing that gap that we alluded to to 2019 gets us back to flat. And that's what we've assumed in our financial model going forward.
spk00: And then how should we think about the breakdown of price versus volume growth going forward?
spk01: Yeah, great question. I mean, if you look at the last couple years, we've seen a totally different dynamic in the cereal category than we've seen really at any time in history, right? We've been through a robust list price cycle here. Generally speaking, we said this on the Q3 call, is we expect list prices kind of stabilize at current levels. As we move forward we're going to start lapping all of our price increases here really as we get into q1 So what we said back at the q3 call is we expect the gap between value dollars and Volume in the category to narrow begin to narrow So that's what we said is we lap all those list price increases that that'll narrow Until we've left the final one which was really in q1 now Beyond that, we think that price realization is important for the category. We think it's important for us. We think it's important for our retailers. We're going to continue to focus on RGM, but I would suggest it's probably not through list price, but rather other things like PPA, promo optimization, premiumization. Those are the things that we're going to continue to do. I would expect once we lap the price increase, we see kind of a divergence from current levels, but we do want to continue to drive price.
spk00: I guess looking at some of the recent market share trends, how should we think about the dynamics that are happening, that we're seeing in the category? Sales are declining low single digits. It seems like there's some increased competition from private label. I guess how would you explain the recent elasticities and market share trends?
spk02: Why don't I start and we'll just go back and forth. I think the way we'd say it is from a category perspective, the category is in growth this year and we're gaining shares. So we feel good about where the category is. There are a variety of dynamics going on and it's not unique to our category. When you look at what's happening with volumes, everybody's wondering where's all the volume going, but that's not unique to the ready-to-eat cereal category. The way we look at our business, we're brand new to this journey. The business is operating the way we expect it to operate. Q3 was unique. As Dave said, price elasticity for a lot of companies really was benign for a while and saw a significant uptick recently. The timing of our price increases as we're lapping. Plus, we were lapping last year's launch of the business. We came out of the strike in 2021, and in 2022, the first half of the year, we were getting product back on shelf. The back half of 2022, we really revved the commercial engine and we were driving our business the back half of 2022. That's what we were lapping right now. If you look too near term, you can start drawing conclusions that perhaps aren't as accurate as when you step back and look longer term. We're performing consistently with where the market is and the business is performing as we would expect it. And we've yet to actually apply the brand new tools that we're creating through our priorities. the integrated business, the new sales force that only focuses on cereal, and we're just in the beginning stages of investing to modernize our supply chain. So I think nearer term, it's doing what we thought it would do, and Dave and I were able to provide some guidance at Investor Day back in early August before we were a publicly traded company for 23 and 24. We were able to reaffirm that, actually modestly increase that at our earnings call. It gives you a sense that the business is performing as we thought it would.
spk00: Right. And maybe just shifting gears to innovation, where are you focused around innovation and where do you see opportunity to enhance the portfolio?
spk02: The cereal category is the exact right place to go for innovation. It demands innovation. It's one of the reasons why private label hasn't had the expansion that you've seen in other categories. It's because the big manufacturers invest in the brands, invest in the food, invest in innovation. We've continued to do that through the spin. We talked a little bit about Special K Zero, Special K High Protein. We've also communicated our 2024 innovation plan into the market, and it's being positively received. So we're really excited about that. If we think about our portfolio, we actually have a fairly broad portfolio. Think about taste, balance, and health and wellness. You go end to end. Taste and balance, you know our brands. Apple Jacks and Fruit Loops. You go to balance, think about Frosted Flakes, health and wellness. Bare Naked Kashi, and there's lots of other examples. We innovate across all of them. We talked about the premium side, but one of the top-selling innovations last year was Frosted Flakes Strawberry Milkshake. Those are the types of things that are important to bring to the market. We're looking at that, so we're looking at innovation across our portfolio, and I think we're particularly excited about what's happening in the premium space right now, so we're going to be leaning into that even more. It's important to note, as we did the spin, you're creating a brand new organization. The innovation team that we had pre-spin is with us now. Doug Vanderbilt is our chief growth officer. What we're excited about is under Doug, he now has the marketing function, data and analytics, but also the R&D and innovation group, all under one leader. And he's driving that collectively with the team.
spk00: Great. And then maybe just shifting gears to your margin target. So you're targeting 500 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion through 2026. Can you talk about the key drivers of that margin expansion?
spk02: We talked about this during Investor Day, and we do think when you think about our model, if we hold our top line and drive 500 basis points of margin, that should generate, would generate significant value for our stakeholders. When we were put together as a team, it was over a year ago now, we knew that our EBITDA margin was about 9%. We realized that that just couldn't be the dynamic for the business going forward. We had to do something different. So we're pulling a bunch of different levers. But the centerpiece of the program is modernizing our supply chain. And that's when we're going to be investing $450 to $500 million across our network to create the network of the future. That is where a lot of this margin is going to be coming from. When you think about where it's going to come from, during Investor Day, we talked about a couple of things. We said think new and think consolidate and as we change the footprint for our network. So when you realign the network and invest in new, think new packaging, think new production, think new technology, and focusing that investment on those facilities and those platforms that are the most efficient. If you go back to the Investor Day deck, you're going to see a slide, a very simple slide, but pretty meaningful to us, that identified the gap between the most efficient and least efficient facilities. There's a 50% cost per kilo difference between most and least efficient facilities. So you could see when we invest in new and direct that and focus that investment on the more efficient facilities, you could see why that would generate the margin expansion that we're looking for.
spk00: And then I guess how do you think about balancing delivering on that margin expansion with reinvesting in support of top-line growth?
spk02: Yeah, Dave, I'm going to turn it over to you, but I think I'll tell you that we've developed a P&L that actually does both. There's no tradeoff here, but Dave.
spk01: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I think we look at it as a both. It's an and. So we feel like we have the right amount of investment in our P&L to drive the top-line outcomes that we want. And we feel like we can then put that margin back into the P&L. And look, what we're focused on is really driving effectiveness and efficiency out of our investment dollars. Think about that in the commercial space, but really across our P&L. We're trying to make sure that every dollar we spend is coming with positive return to it. So as we think about the commercial side, we're always looking at how can we make it better. And so we're analyzing each one of our promotions, the mediums in which they're delivering to our consumers and saying, okay, where can we shift allocation of dollars to make sure that we're maximizing the return on it? Similar with our promo dollars. So we're trying to make sure that our promo dollars are pointed in the right place, that it's going to drive incremental boxes of cereal into the consumer's cart and really drive that higher ROI. So as we think about it, it's both. We're optimizing the investment side of things. We think we have the right amount in the P&L, but we think we can make it better. And as we get smarter, as we use the data analytics, we use those things, we think we can do that over time as well.
spk00: And then in thinking about where that margin expansion is going to come from, I believe you said it will largely be from gross margins. So how should we think about the contribution from various factors? moderating inflation, RGM versus the supply chain optimization?
spk01: Yeah, we've talked. The centerpiece is going to be our supply chain optimization. We've talked about PPA and RGM and all these different levels of driver of EBITDA margin, and those are definitely contemplated. But as we come back to it, the center of it is really the 500 basis points that we get from the supply chain modernization that comes with that investment. So we're looking at all levers, but that's going to be the big centerpiece of it.
spk00: Can you talk about some of the projects that you have underway on the supply chain optimization side and I guess the cadence of margin expansion over that period?
spk02: I think the way we would respond to that is we would give you an example of something that's already in flight. We announced in September of 2021 as the Kellogg company that we were going to expand our Belleville Canada facility. Very well functioning facility. We were going to build out their facility to actually so they could produce even more. and move some production around from other plants. That is illustrative of the way we're thinking about this investment. So that's what we talked about before the spin. We'll be providing more information along the way as this develops. But we have a plan in place, working with our board, putting all the details together. But that is a very good example of the type of investment that we're making to create the supply chain of the future.
spk00: And then thinking about your long-term margins, I think even with the margins that you're targeting, it would seem that there's still opportunity to go higher. So how should we think about where you see your margins beyond that 2026 target?
spk02: We would agree with that. The way we describe it is we have two different horizons. The first horizon is We're now responsible for driving this scale $2.7 billion business that our founder created 117 years ago. And the first couple years of the business, we want to go reinvest. We want to make sure we're optimizing it. It's already cash generative, but we believe we can make it even more cash generative. When we talk about 500 basis points of march, we talk about 9% to mid-teens. For us, we call it a mile marker, but not a destination. Because think about it. After the first three years, the modernization, the transformation is done. We would have made the investment, supply chain of the future. We would have first started leveraging the completed modernized supply chain. So we know there'll be even more. Plus, going forward, as we get to the next horizon, we're going to have the financial flexibility to continue investing in the business. And of course, we're going to find other opportunities. So again, this is a stopping point for us. When we first designed the program, the research we did suggested that peer median, not category peer median, but peer median was mid-teens. So our view is, hey, the first place we're going to go to is let's go be average. There is no reason to believe why this organization shouldn't be better than average, and that's what our goals would be. But right now our focus is let's go from nine to mid-teens. That's a dramatic amount of value that we're going to create, and, yes, we think there's more that comes from that from there.
spk00: Embedded in that, what are your expectations for input cost inflation over the midterm? That's obviously been a major headwind over the last few years, but – How are you thinking about inflation and what's your hedging strategy?
spk01: Yeah, I'd say generally, as we get into specifics of 2024, we'll talk more about that in February. But how I would outline the market is we've seen a moderate moderate moderation from kind of a higher level. Right. So we've all seen the increase. we've seen it kind of stabilize at this higher level. If we think about then, that's an aggregate. If you think about the different drivers within our cost portfolio, we have some that have come down. And you could look at the CBOT corn or CBOT wheat market and point to those as ones that would come down. There's other ones like the domestic sugar market that's actually gone the other way. So I would suggest that it's been kind of stable at these elevated levels. similar to what we've seen any of the PPI or CPI type indexes showing as well. So we haven't seen any significant declines or anything like that at this point in time. From here as we go forward, we're assuming that this kind of baseline or the trends we're seeing currently are kind of where we're at in the market. And that's kind of how we're thinking about it going forward. As far as our hedging strategy, We look at all the market dynamics. We try to understand what's going on within all of our inputs. If we have a opportunity to hedge out and get in front of prices that we think and our experts and everyone else thinks they're going to go higher, we'll take that opportunity. So we'll use various derivative strategies to manage that risk or forward contracts with suppliers, whatever it may be, without getting into specific ingredients or raw material inputs. But that's how we think about it, and we do manage that risk. And I think we manage it quite well over the long term. You know, you can look at short terms and any isolation, but over the long term, I think we manage that risk quite well.
spk00: Gary, you talk about some of the initiatives that you have to drive top-line growth, your improved sales force and focused sales force, your innovation. How about marketing? What are some of the marketing initiatives that you have in place, and what should we expect from a promotional standpoint?
spk02: Well, if you take a step back and think about how we built the organization, I mentioned somebody's name earlier. So Doug, this Doug Vanderbilt is somebody who runs our growth organization. And he's the one who's been in cereal for several decades. He's forgotten more about cereal than most people ever know in their lifetime. So he's running the organization. Well, we're very excited about his ability to integrate the business and be able to put, to harness the energy of his marketing organization, the chops that we have against our brands. And we've already seen the early, the, the green shoots coming out from what Doug and team are doing. And we're super excited about that. Now, a couple of examples about that. Um, if you think about one of the ad campaigns we have right now, and this will give you an example of not just how we want to market, but also the opportunity in the marketplace. We have, we called it, call it dinner for breakfast. Meat was sweet. It's a multi-brand campaign against an occasion outside actually. Cereal for dinner. Not dinner for breakfast. Cereal for dinner. Sorry about that. That made absolutely no sense. So the idea is that's an occasion. What you might find interesting is over 25% of our sales are outside of the breakfast occasion already. So this ad reminds people there's an occasion out there that you might want to consider. If you haven't seen it, it's a terrific spot. But we're also doing something called multi-brand. We're using more than one brand. We have Mini Wheats. We've got Frosted Flakes. We've got Fruit Loops in that spot. We're advertising all three of them. It's more efficient. It drives the brand equity for each. So we're excited about that type of campaign. There's a lot of other ones as well that we're excited about. In particular, we could talk about Bare Naked, but we might talk about that later. But you tell me how you'd like to go.
spk00: Yeah, it would be great to hear how you're thinking about the opportunity for Bare Naked and Kashi in the premium segment.
spk02: So when those brands, if you look in the public data, have not been performing well, and there's a reason for that. If you go all the way back to COVID-19, And then the fire and the strike. Those are brands that have smaller SKUs. When we were in COVID and trying to meet demand, just meet demand because the demands were so elevated. Then you had a fire where you now needed to figure out how you're going to make your foods and then the strike the same way. We weren't able to make as much and coming out of it, it was all about how do you drive as much volume as you can. which means you focus on your big excuse. That's not Kashi. That's not Barenaked. For that reason, we lost shelf. We lost a lot in those businesses, but we knew that was going to happen because we needed to focus on producing volume. So disproportionately hurt by COVID, by the fire, and by the strike. The second thing for us is, and what gets us excited as we look forward now is, It's under new management. It was operated separately. It was operated with Kashi and Bare Naked was operated separately because it has a different type of consumer running snacks and cereal. It's now under our organization where collectively we can drive the force of these two brands. Third thing we'll tell you as you think about Kashi and Bare Naked, Kashi is still the number one natural brand. Kashi was the number one granola. These brands are positioned exactly where you'd want them for some of today's consumers. They're unique. They resonate. Their positioning is exactly where we want it to be. And this team has already launched a new Kashi brand, a rebranded Kashi, new packaging, new food, new campaign. That's already in the marketplace already. It gives you a sense of the agility of this organization as we were executing the spin. So we're very excited about what those brands can do in the marketplace today.
spk00: Maybe just switching gears now to your capital structure and cash needs over the next several years, obviously making a number of investments in the supply chain. So how should we think about your cash flow generation in the midterm?
spk01: Yeah. So where we're at today, our base business, we think about it as our base business, then the investment that's going to drive the margin expansion. Our base business is cash flow generative, as Gary mentioned earlier. And think about that as about a conversion rate of about 100% of net income, right? So it's a very cash generative business. As we go forward, we have the investments and the one-time costs that have to do with standing up the business, right? Separating, you have to invest in IT infrastructure. We have to split some warehouses, things like that. But then the supply chain modernization. If you think about those investments, those will largely happen over the next 24 months. is you think of what that's going to mean is we're going to be cash flow negative in total over the next 24 months, and our leverage will go up. We're about two times leverage. We have a very manageable capital structure at this point in time, and we feel good about where we're at, the financing we have in place, and we're very confident in those cash flows as we go forward that we'll peak at about three times leverage in 2025, and then given the return, on those investments and the EBITDA margin enhancement and the cash flow that it will generate from it, we'll be able to pretty rapidly deleverage back to our longer-term leverage rate, which is in that one-and-a-half to two times range.
spk02: And, Pam, I think the fact that it's probably worth mentioning the dividend in the context of cash flow, because Dave just talked about what the trajectory looks like for our cash flow, and while technically we're going to be cash flow negative, we also have a nice dividend right now. That gives you a sense of how confident we are in the cash generative nature of this business. We thought it was the right thing for our share owners while they're on the ride with us, so this is the right reward for them as we're modernizing our supply chain, as we're driving our incremental margins. We thought that was the right thing to do, but it just gives you a sense of our confidence in our cash flow.
spk00: And longer term, how are you thinking about the composition of the business? Is M&A something that's on the horizon, and so where would you be interested?
spk02: The way we've talked about it as a team is two different horizons. The first horizon is we've just inherited a business that has not been prioritized, still coming through the fire and strike. We need to focus on this scaled business and make it foundational for us into the future. It's hard to know when horizons begin and end. When you look into the horizon, it's a little bit fuzzy, but we like to call that about the next three years. That's what we're going to focus on, and we're We just talked about the cash-generative nature of the business today. It should be even more cash-generating the next three years from now as we're building out the organization, modernizing our supply chain, and moving our EBITDA from 9% to mid-teens. Now, at that point, we get to invest even more in the business, but it also gives us the financial flexibility to think about that next horizon, and we do think M&A could be on the horizons. I ran corporate development for 20 years at the Kellogg Company. I saw the power of evolving a portfolio. And when we talk about acquisition opportunities, the way we like to describe it is, for which business would we be the natural parent? So you would take a look at the capabilities of the organization and what businesses are out there that would benefit the most from the capabilities that we can then apply to that business. We're building out a company that will have strong distribution. a national sales force. We also have brands that are iconic. That's not hyperbole. Everybody knows Tony, everybody knows Toucan Sam, Fruit Loose, Frosted Flakes, all of our brands, people know our brands. And these brands we know can travel. So we will be thinking about that for the next horizon. But it's important to know that this first horizon, we want and will focus on our key priorities of unplugging from the Kellogg company, integrating our business, standing up the sales force, and modernizing supply chain. And that next horizon will come, and we're excited about that as well.
spk00: I'm going to ask about this because this is something I've been spending a lot of time on and doing work on this theme, but I guess how are you thinking about the impact of GLP-1 drugs? Is that something that you're evaluating from a serial standpoint? And I guess internally, what's your view?
spk02: We've read a lot of your materials, so Thank you. Very well done. What we would say is, yes, we're looking at that. And we need to look at that. And it's one of the many things that we need to look at because it could potentially change consumer behavior. There's a lot of things that happen in our environment. If it's going to change consumer behaviors or has a potential for that, we need to look at that. We need to understand it and then adjust accordingly. That's happened over time to great food companies. So that's what we would be doing. think I would say right now there are more questions unanswered than are answered but that said we know there are some people on GLP-1 the way we look at it is if people are going to be seeking nutrition which you have to seek nutrition you just have to no matter what they're seeking that the cereal category might be a terrific destination for them so one thing we've talked about internally is would we be a good companion for folks who are using GLP-1 would we be a good alternative to for folks who are seeking the same type of health benefits but aren't on GLP-1. And the reason we say that is you need nutrition. You need protein in your diet. You need fiber in your diet. We are a protein and fiber delivery system. So we are likely a very good candidate for the nutrition that folks would be looking for for anybody who is using GLP-1. And for folks who are looking for the same type of effect or the same type of health benefit, again, The cereal category, it's nutrient dense. It's low calorie, low saturated fat, low fat. And we provide fiber and protein. You need protein for your muscle structure. You can't just stop eating. And you need fiber for your digestive health. We're a very good place for these people to be coming to. That's the way we think about it. But again, I think it's fair to say we need to answer even more questions. But it's certainly something we're looking at. You can sense by my answer, that's what the team is already doing.
spk00: Great, and just want to see if there's any questions from the audience. Great, well, thank you for participating, and thank you all for being here. Hope everyone has a great holiday season, and good afternoon.
spk02: Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everyone.
Disclaimer