GIS - General Mills Inc. (GIS) Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference (Transcript)
2024-05-29 14:20:20 ET
General Mills, Inc. (GIS)
Bernstein’s 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference
May 29, 2024 10:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Jeff Harmening - Chief Executive Officer
Conference Call Participants
Alexia Howard - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co
Presentation
Alexia Howard
Okay. Good morning, everybody. My name is Alexia Howard, and I cover the U.S. food sector for Bernstein. And it's my great pleasure to welcome Jeff Harmening, the CEO of General Mills since 2017. Now as we all know, the U.S. food industry seems to be at something of a crossroads with high hope for some improvement in volume trends as the headwinds of 2023 are lapped. General Mills has made a good deal of product in shaping the portfolio over the past several years in a bid to tap into fast growth markets and make the company more defiant in the face of more frequent disruptive change. So very many thanks for joining us today, Jeff.
Jeff Harmening
Thanks for having me here.
Alexia Howard
Great. So you became CEO of General Mills back in 2017. And the industry has certainly seen some pretty tumultuous times since then. What has changed across the sector in your view over the last seven years?
Jeff Harmening
First of all, I want to start by saying I don't take any credit for causing those tumultuous times. I didn't pick the 2017 that it kind of picked me. I think back on where we were then, it's been an interesting time for the whole sector. And in 2016, recall, we were just coming out of what I would call the 3G era, which is really focused on cost cutting and limited brand building and really trying to optimize short-term profitability. And we're just coming out of that kind of getting back to the middle or above, which is what I would call it, say, look, we got to get back to growth, but we need to do it profitably. We were kind of in the midst of doing that. We had just bought Blue Buffalo.
And then we were hit by pandemic. And following that, supply chain disruptions and following that inflation, which we hadn't seen in my 30 year career. And so I guess, there are two questions. What do we learn from all that? And then what do we see coming up? The first thing I would say we learned is just the importance of continuing to invest in our business. And we saw that coming out of the prior area. We certainly reinvested during the pandemic and everything that followed, both in the terms of our capabilities, our digital and technology capabilities but also our brand building, which is up 40% over the last few years. And so one of the things we learned is that through a period like we have just seen, you need to keep investing in your brands. And it may seem like a throwaway line, but for us it's critically important. And as a result, we now have $9 billion brands at General Mills. ...
General Mills, Inc. (GIS) Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference (Transcript)