Sean Connolly
Analyst · Bernstein. Please go ahead
Yes, great question, Alexia. Innovation performance over the last several years has just gotten better and better and better every year and it was good to start with. So we've wrapped really good innovation years. And each year, we make progress in innovation, both in terms of TPDs that we're able to secure but also velocity per TPD has gotten better and better. And this year is better than last year, and last year was better than the year before. So I'm very pleased with where we are on innovation, and we'll continue to share more about some of the success stories that we've had with innovation. But I think your second question speaks to also what's driving a lot, not all, a lot of the innovation success. There's undoubtedly a lot of consumer focus these days on health and wellness. And has been the case for fifty years. Kind of the definition of what does good health and wellness food look like in 2026 is different than it looked ten years ago. Which is different than it looked twenty years before that. So right now, and wellness is heavily, as everybody knows and can see, heavily about protein. So the presence of protein in products is hugely important to consumers. That's a major part of our benefit bundle that we've baked into a lot of our innovations. I would say, secondly, clean label continues to be really important as well as vegetable nutrition. So if you think about our portfolio with brands like Birds Eye Vegetables, which are just awesome vegetables frozen at the peak of ripeness, you think about protein, meat sticks, as well as seeds, you think about our frozen businesses like Healthy Choice, which are incredibly clean label, incredibly healthy, high in protein, low in sugar, low in carbs, things like that. It's very well positioned. And so I probably feel like our portfolio is as well positioned today as it's been to compete in a world that's very focused on health and wellness. And one of the things I find most interesting about the double click on that is its young consumers. Young consumers, which we over-index with, are more focused on health and wellness than I've seen in a while. And it is playing right into some of our tailwind businesses, like our protein-focused brands. And that's a real positive. And you see it in categories outside of food, like they're drinking less, things like that. And so you get a good return when you can secure young consumers because you keep them around a lot longer. And we've had really good progress with our young consumers and that's helping us, because obviously young consumers also tend to be lower-income consumers because they're just getting started in their career, and we have a lot of good value products.