Good morning everybody. For those of you I haven’t had a chance to meet, I’m Kris Wenker and I want to welcome all of you that have joined us here in Boston. We’re also welcoming everyone who is listening on the webcast. Here with me are General Mill’s Chairman and CEO, Ken Powel, our CFO Don Mulligan, Chris O’Leary, who is Chief Operating Officer for our international businesses, and Ian Friendly, who is our Chief Operating Officer for US Retail. Before they begin I need to remind you that our presentation will include forward-looking statements that are based on management’s current views and assumptions and as the slide behind me illustrates, there are many factors that could cause our future results to be different than our estimates. We issued a press release earlier this morning that contains our fourth quarter and 2009 fiscal year results. You can find a copy of that press release on our website along with slides we’ll be using in today’s presentation and the last few slides will reconcile non-GAAP measures that we’ll be referencing today. So with that I will turn the meeting over to Ken Powel.

Okay well good morning to one and all. Thank you Kris. We are very glad that you have been able to join us this morning to hear us talk about General Mills’ strong performance in 2009 and our plans for continuing growth in 2010. Four years ago we established the model that you’re looking at right now for our earnings growth. It calls for low single-digit growth in net sales, mid single-digit growth in segment operating profit and high single-digit growth in earnings per share. And we believe that this earnings growth coupled with an attractive dividend yield should result in double-digit returns to General Mills shareholders over time. Now as we’ve said many times before this model is not the absolute best we can do but it is the level of growth we believe we should deliver to shareholders consistently and over time. In good years we can exceed this model and I’m very pleased to report that the fiscal 2009 was a very good year. Today’s press release summarizes our results which exceeded our long-term model and the specific targets we set for 2009 back when the year began. Net sales increased 8% to reach $14.7 billion. Segment operating profits grew faster than sales, up double-digits to exceed $2.6 billion. Earnings per share grew 2%. This includes several items that effect the comparability of our results year over year. Excluding those items earnings per share totaled $3.98 in 2009, up 13% from comparable earnings of $3.52 per share in 2008. Sales and earnings growth in 2009 include some benefit from an extra week this fiscal year. But our results exceeded our growth targets even without the extra week and we believe this represents strong financial performance in a very challenging operating environment. Our net sales growth in 2009…

Thanks Ken and good morning everyone. I’m happy to be here to update you on our 2009 performance and our plans to drive continuing growth for our categories and our brands in 2010. General Mills US retail businesses just wrapped up a terrific year. Sales were up 11% crossing the $10 billion mark for the first time. Profit growth was even stronger, up 12% and even with significantly higher input costs and strong marketing spending behind our brands, we grew our operating margin by 30 basis points to 22%. Our brands are one of our biggest assets and we continue to invest to keep them healthy and relevant. Consumer marketing spending for US retail was up 19% in 2009. Our total trade spending increased as well but our programs were more efficient so trade costs per case declined for the fourth quarter consecutive year. We delivered great innovation in 2009. We introduced 80 new items including two new product lines; Savorings and Macaroni Grill, that are both off to a good start. Our new introductions were highly incremental and margin accretive, consistent with our goals. More than 5% of our 2009 sales came from products introduced in the past year. We also improved the health attributes of our portfolio. Since 2005 we’ve made health improvements on 45% of our US retail products. Our product innovation and consumer marketing resulted in increased base line or non-promoted sales across most of our key categories last year. We’re pleased with these gains because base lines are one of the best indicators of the underlying health of a business. We drove strong growth across both measured and non-measured retail channels. In the channels where we have data our retail sales grew 7% overall last year. Growth in non-measured channels was even stronger. Our net…

Great thank Chris and good morning everyone. As Ken mentioned I’ve got two topics to cover today. I’ll start with a review of our bakeries and foodservice business. As we’ve discussed before the current economic trends are a headwind for this segment of our business. You can see the impact of weak foodservice industry conditions on our pound volume results for the year, which were below prior year levels. However sales and operating profits were up modestly and remember that last year included unusually strong grain merchandising earnings. If you exclude grain merchandising profits for both 2009 and 2008, operating profits for this business segment grew 15% in 2009. That is industry leading performance in this environment. We’re driving these results by prioritizing the branded portion of our product portfolio. Higher margin, branded products now generate more than 65% of our foodservice sales. And that percentage has consistently increased over the last few years. In 2009 net sales of our cereal brands in foodservice channels grew 7%, yogurt sales were up 13%, and sales for our snack brands are up 14% in these channels. We’re also continuing to prune this portfolio. During 2009 we divested a portion of our frozen, unbaked bread dough business along with our bread concentrate business. Together these two product lines generated roughly $150 million in annual net sales. However they were in lower growth segments. With these divestitures the percentage of our foodservice sales generated by higher margin, branded products will approach 70% in fiscal 2010. Our actions to reshape the portfolio are driving operating margin growth. Over the last four years we’ve improved the margin for this segment of our business by 200 basis points. Its not at the double-digit level yet, but that’s still our longer-term expectation. Our business today is split between…

Alright thanks Don, so I hope that in these presentations that we’ve demonstrated that General Mills is positioned to achieve another year of good growth and returns in fiscal 2010. We’ve been investing in our businesses and strengthening our brands and our business portfolio is resilient, built to deliver good performance through all seasons including today’s challenging environment. We believe our long-term growth model is serving us well. It focuses our organization on delivering consistent, high quality earnings growth and shareholder return. Back in 2006 we established sales and earnings goals for the year 2010 based on our growth model. Two years later in 2008 we were able to raise our 2010 targets as a result of strong financial performance and today, we’ve raised those 2010 targets once more based on the good growth of our businesses this year. With the year 2010 now at hand, we’ll need to set some new longer-term growth goals for the company and we’ll be conducting our annual long range planning process this fall and after that plan is completed, we’ll look forward to sharing some new long-term growth targets with you. We see five key drivers of our continuing growth, innovation and margin expansion are the bedrock of what we do. We innovate to develop products that meet consumer needs. Innovation also drives our productivity initiatives and these cost savings ideas help us protect and expand margins for our businesses around the world. Now beyond these two bedrock factors we grow by investing in advertising and other forms of consumer marketing to build our brands. We grow by partnering effectively with our customers and we grow by expanding our business in international markets where we’re really just getting started. We will stay sharply focused on this business model which is driven by holistic…

Yes, we’re certainly seeing in some of our key categories increased levels of merchandising. We’ve seen that a little bit from one competitor in cereal. We’ve seen it in yogurt. And I guess we expect it in soup. That being said, our competitors are normally a very rational set of competitors who are trying to grow the category and so far we don’t think its changed really the nature of our game. We’re competitive enough in that area and our level of innovation and our consumer brand support is really what we think will fuel base line growth which ultimately will be the tail of the tape but we’ll make sure that we’re appropriately competitive in the merchandising arena and while I’ve seen a little bit early in the year that I think hotter then I would normally like to see, I wouldn’t find any of it alarming.

So just to follow-up on that, have you changed your merchandising plans for the year in any way or are those pretty steady with what you expected in relation to that answer.

Yes, our merchandising plans for next year are pretty similar levels of expenditures for this year and so there are always adjustments to be made on how to do it better, but in gross terms we see it pretty similar.

If I could ask a question on HMM that encompasses a lot of things, cost savings and mix and one element of that is managing your mix well in the business, I’m just curious in a difficult economic environment as you look at 2010, do you expect mix to be positive in the year. The new products seem to be enhancing mix, any other general comments about the business mix across your portfolio.

Yes, I think mix has generally been very good and one of the things we just always have to remember is cereal is a category that absolutely thrives, well in good times and in bad, but it particularly thrives in more difficult economic times and cereal is the best mix play that General Mills can have. And so when cereal is growing at the rate its growing, it generally is very positive to us. So we’re that so even within other categories. We’re not seeing in our own portfolio a trade down effect per say, generally we’re seeing mix gains. But over our entire portfolio, cereal as a category is the one that really drives it.

The other thing I would add to that over the last three years, and I think Ian you mentioned this in your presentation we’ve had a really high focus in our new product activity on selecting for launch products that we thought would really be highly incremental and we’ve really improved the discipline around making sure that we’re launching new products that are either mix neutral or mix accretive. And our performance on that last measure of accretive new products has dramatically improved and so I think that’s another driver of positive mix as we go into this new year.

And you have both concentrated on US retail, but Chris you might want to say a word about mix internationally because you’re key platforms is working for you there too. Chris O’Leary : Yes, as obviously we are focused on margin expansion as our margins are below the company average but the good news is all these global platforms, Haagen-Dazs, Old El Paso, Nature Valley, have company, average margins above the company average and as you saw from the presentation we’re growing those brands quite strongly so our mix is going to naturally improve with that and that’s a key part of our strategy to improve margins around the globe. Eric Katzman – Deutsche Bank : Looking at your fiscal 2010 plan, you’re clearly relying much more on volume and very little on price in terms of driving the top line, which is not surprising given the current environment, looking at the fourth quarter reported volume numbers though, adjusting for the extra week, they looked like they were down slightly on a year on yea basis and perhaps both to the total company and in US retail, so I’m wondering whether you could address some of the factors that led to the volume declines in the fourth quarter for both the company and US retail. Did the divestitures in bakeries have a significant impact there and I know you had a tough comp with US retail volumes of 6% last year, if you could give us some color.

I can give you the US retail component and Ken or Don will comment on the rest, our sales dollar growth let’s say in the fourth quarter which was reported at 12 but might be if you took out the effect of the extra week would be a mid single-digit, 5%, which is very much in line with our growth model and if you looked at our consumer intake, off take I should say, over the same period it would be low to mid single-digit off take by Neilson and Wal-Mart retail [link] and so forth, so that’s about in line. In fact it was slightly stronger than what we were expecting. You may recall we said it at the Cagney and even at the beginning of the year that because in the year prior we had right size, right price push all our cereal particularly merchandising into Q4, that this year we would rebalance. We would have stronger merchandising spread out throughout the year and then Q4 we would be significantly below our levels of last year. That’s exactly what’s played out, mostly in cereals, its true in some of our other categories as well. And so our Q4 was very much designed to be that way and in actual fact relative to our expectations it outperformed and the reason it outperformed was the base line particularly in cereal were that much stronger than we had forecast. So we’re not concerned about Q4 per say. It was very much in line if not a little bit better with what we were expecting in US retail. Chris O’Leary : For the two other segments, international had 5% volume growth. It had very little impact from the 53rd week because most of our countries report on a monthly basis. So that was not heavily impacted by the 53rd week. And then on bakeries and foodservice we did have the impact of the divestiture which was $150 million, about 7% of the total portfolio. It was out for most of the quarter. In addition we also had some bakery flour, similar to what we saw in Q3 where as the pricing came down, we didn’t chase volume in that segment.

As you know, this is also one of the lumpiest measures that we have. You can look at it, its best to look at volume I think on a nine or 12 month basis and we’re quite confident that our volume expectation for next year is very reasonable given the category development that we continue to see.

I have a few questions, the first is a little more broader based. The company has done a, in my opinion, a great job in terms of being out front on weight loss, organic, and I suppose health oriented products and it seems like you’re gearing up for a more ethnic push but the last time the company tried that, it failed pretty quickly with [Power su Familia] and I think maybe a few other products. So I’m kind of wondering why you think now you’re going to be successful in the ethnic push.

Are you referring to some new products that you saw or—

Advertising.

If you look at the growth demographics of the country there’s the two most powerful on an age profile it’s the unfortunate aging of the baby boomers and so our health initiatives help with that. And then as it relates to families which we sell a lot of products to families most child and new family formation is going to be coming from consumers of a multicultural background. And I guess I don’t accept the premise, in fact we’ve been spending quite heavily, we’ve almost tripled our expenditures over the last three years against marketing to the Hispanic consumers and they’ve led our growth. They have grown stronger than the non-Hispanic consumer set. We are seeing great returns. We get an ROI on that just like we do on other aspects of our consumer spend. So as it relates to marketing to this very important large and growing part of consumers, both African American and Hispanic, we’re seeing great results. We’re very pleased with it. I think we have had, you’re quoting we’ve had, I think when we came out with products that were very specifically and narrowly designed for those communities, that hasn’t worked as well for us. When we take the products they already know and love, Honey Nut Cheerios, Yoplait yogurt, and market it in a more meaningful and targeted way, we have seen fabulous results and we’re going to do more of that.

The other thing I would add to that is that, our customers are very, very interested in this entire opportunity and so we are partnering with them, particularly in the southwestern parts of the US and where we have high concentrations of Hispanic consumers, we’re developing promotional activities that we can run with them in store and this is a very positive development and opportunity for us that as Ian said, its driving differential growth for us.

Two questions on the specific parts of the portfolio, one, can you comment on the Pillsbury dough business and the potential impact of the Nestle Tollhouse recall.

We’re sort of in the off season right now obviously so that business doesn’t really start hitting its high seasonal impact until September and my guess is most of that will have come and gone by that time. We’re seeing no impact, negative impact on our business at all. We’re surveying consumers and it is not translating from Tollhouse over to Pillsbury. We’re seeing customers clearly order more of our products right now as they have empty shelf slots to fill until Nestle gets back into business, but other then that, we’re not seeing any other effect.

And then last question on Progresso, in a lot of the slides that you put up you quote Nielson and Wal-Mart, but on Progresso, you only quote Nielson and according to Campbell’s if you include the Wal-Mart you aren’t gaining share. So can you talk a little bit more about your share trends in Progresso including Wal-Mart and alternative outlets and whether, what is the right data point between the two of you.

We do not get access as we’re not in charge of the category at Wal-Mart for soup so I can’t tell you the total category performance at Wal-Mart. I can certainly say that we did better this year with our traditional customers then we did at Wal-Mart. Campbell soup had, was in a special sort of merchandising arrangement at Wal-Mart so I assume they did very well and strong. Our best guess as we look at secondary data though is we held share overall in the marketplace but I can’t tell you specifically at Wal-Mart other then I do think Campbell soup grew very fast at Wal-Mart. I think they’re telling you accurate data there. We were not participants in that kind of program.

So a couple of questions, first one is back to that 53rd week, I do want to make sure that I’m clear on this, so 53rd week contributed 6% to sales growth in the fourth quarter, you’re saying that it did not have a significant impact on the international business thus its disproportionate, it’s a higher number so then it would be 7% or something like that to US retail. That would actually suggest a weaker volume performance on an organic basis within US retail then maybe my first look this morning. Chris O’Leary : Four to 5%, sales growth.

And then in bakeries and foodservice, it would just be the six points, it should flow through. There’s nothing funny there.

No there’s nothing unusual in the bakeries and foodservice.

Second question is that, and Ken this goes back to some of the comments you made about new products and Ian, there was I believe you announced in your presentation there’s 50 new products to be introduced in US retail in the first half of F09, I believe that’s going to be down about 15% versus what you produced, what you launched in the first half of 2009, 2009 was a good year. Certainly I believe you used the word fantastic and I don’t disagree so I almost want to throw this back to you and say why should I be happy to see a 15% reduction in new product activity in the first half of 2009, what’s the confidence level here that the incrementality of the new products that you’re doing is so much better than the ones you did in 2009 that were successful and maybe could you just put a number to it so that we can put this one to bed.

We’re quite excited about our new products. We have a plan. Obviously we’ll be also be introducing new products later in the year as we did this year as well. Roughly speaking our percent to volume that we expect next year from new products is in line with what we would have expected this time last year and don’t forget we have what we launched, we also have carryover, Banana Nut Cheerios which has been a big success, was launched middle of the year last year. It will be incremental to whole first half and that’s true for several other new items. So I think the combination of what we have in carryover and the size and scale of the ideas that we have next year, I would put them together and say its roughly comparable. I will also tell you that we’re out of the business of counting numbers and new SKUs and items. That’s a dangerous place. We were in that business for a while and it causes us to launch smaller ideas that don’t work and don’t get our base back for shareholders and so we have a very good level of new product activity next year. Hopefully bigger, better ideas as opposed to large numbers of ideas. The percent of volume that we expect to get is roughly similar.

The only thing I would add to that is I think Ian is right on. We’re very focused on incrementality and size and sort of benefit to the consumer but the other thing I would add to that is we’ve heard some of the players in our space talk about, this is a time to launch fewer new products and we’re going to kind of pull in and we’re not looking at it that way at all. We think this is a great time to launch new products and the feedback that we have generally from our customers is that our new product portfolio as we go into our new fiscal year is terrific. They would say that we are best in class right now so we feel, we think this is a terrific lineup of new products.

Final question, can you comment on trade deloading. Any trade deloading, have you seen any effects in the fourth quarter either domestically or internationally.

I should let Chris comment obviously on the international, domestically we don’t and in fact our movement and our deliveries were almost in sync in Q4 for us, very, very similar. So we do not see any effects of trade deloading in the US business. Chris O’Leary : Same around the globe, nothing material.

A question here, a couple of them, first is on holistic margin management, can you give us any kind of details as to how to quantify the savings that you’ve generated this year and what you expect next year. You mentioned hundreds of projects but can you give us just some examples of what are the key ones that are increasing productivity at your facilities and then secondly, I’ve heard some rumblings about some value offerings in the cereal category. I think you mentioned some entries of your own, what do you foresee in terms of value offerings, 25% more volume, in a box from yourself and from your competitors as the year goes on.

So we don’t give you numbers on HMM but I think the most meaningful and powerful set of numbers that we’ve shown you today is that we’ve been able over the last four or five years and particularly over the last two years in an environment of very significantly high input cost inflation, we’ve been able to basically protect our margins. And so I think that’s a very good testimony for the power of that HMM concept that we have going throughout General Mills. And there really are, its hundreds of projects. Someone asked about mix management and I think we gave you a little bit of a flavor of how we’re trying to drive mix because that is a positive driver of HMM but then you get down into our plants and that really is still a wheelhouse for us. The way we procure inputs, the way we process them in the plant. We’ve got lots of activities designed to eliminate waste in that manufacturing process. It then moves out into the logistics environment, the accuracy of our forecasting. We’ve got projects now that enable us to consolidate loads and fill trucks better and that takes trucks off the road and reduces diesel and lowers our costs. So it really is holistic. And that’s why we refer to it that way and its something that we’ve driven very deeply throughout the company around the world and the proof of the pudding I think is very impressive margin performance.

And I’ll add just if you’re looking, as Ken said there’s hundreds of examples. The one really interesting tangible one that we’re doing that started this year and will go into next year, we’re mostly divisionalized but what we’re finding often times is we’re a very big buyer of certain ingredients but the spec if ever so slightly different for the flour we might use in snack products versus cereal versus baking or the sugar spec and our R&D teams have been working on how much of that is functional, how much of that is just accidental because of independent development paths and so we’re looking at many of our ingredient streams across the company and seeing if the specs can be aligned so that the one being bought for snacks is not any different than the one being bought for cereal. And your negotiation strength to buy that ingredient is substantially higher and its generating significant savings as an example. So, we’re always finding new ways. I think now looking across the company and how to get in the [seams] between the divisions, not inside the divisions and the functions only, has been very productive for us as a, just to let you know that there’s always new trees to find HMM examples on. Your other question was on value offerings in cereal, and the one I had referenced is really that in some of our large retailers when you look at the value orientation consumers, they’re not buying the cheapest price on the shelf, the entry level price on the shelf, they’re buying very large volume packages and usually this is large families and so we have super sized versions of some of our largest SKUs. We’re adding to that and that trend really varies by customer. In some of our customers its all about the entry level price offering and other customers its all about having a very good price per ounce on a large size and so we are tailoring our strategies and efforts to the consumer base of our customers and it varies.

In looking forward then on HMM just as a quick follow-up to that, would it be a fair statement to say that the incremental saves that you generate in fiscal 2010 can be still equal to our more than maybe what you saw incrementally in fiscal 2009, just trying to sort of, because all of the projects and all the things you’ve talked about make sense, but that’s also sort of backward looking in terms of what you’ve been able to offset to keep your margins relatively stable. Just wanted to get a sense of, is there still enough going forward to now drive the margins further with inputs costs, inflation kind of backing off a bit.

We’ve got a good pipeline going forward and as you heard from Chris, we just started doing it really in the international business and it takes a while because we try to push this down so deeply in the organization. This is not something that starts up on a dime so it does take time. But Chris has it, I think really well entrenched in international, and in CPW. So that piece is going to ramp.

And then we’ve all I think heard and have been given a whole bunch of reasons why maybe the soup category hasn’t been quite as robust this past soup season as we all might have expected. Some may be reasonable, some less so. I still just don’t understand, I would still think that this category ought to be one that is thriving in this environment and so I just wanted to get your perspective on that to see if I’m just really missing something completely there and just the last one maybe just, anything we should think about in terms of the quarterly flow, if we’re thinking sales and EBIT line or EPS side given what may have, things that happened last year that we want to take into account as we kind of model out 2010.

I couldn’t agree with you more on soup, I think it’s a category that’s terrifically situated for most environments and this environment in particular and I think by focusing on positive messaging and good innovation. Focus on the consumer not the battles between manufacturers but focus on the consumer will drive and could drive category growth and so that’s certainly how we hope the category plays out next year. But I don’t see any reason why the soup category, the ready-to-serve soup category anyway couldn’t thrive in this environment.

And we’ve got some great drivers. We have fabulous messaging on soup. It’s a wonderful product. Its low in calorie, its high in nutrition, so we’ve got great messages. The Light segment which we invented a couple of years ago, we think has lots of growth. We think the reaction of retailers to high fiber soup is very positive and consumers kind of see that as a natural. They know there’s fiber in vegetables and so that is an idea that fits so, those are the kinds of things that we know across many categories, really build categories over a long period of time and so we’re, that’s what we’re focused on.

And as for phasing, for the reasons that I think everyone is aware of, comps and Forex in particular, you’d think the growth would be more backwards loaded, [overcoming] we had about a 21% EPS growth in the first half of this past fiscal year.

I think what I’m going to do is just pause here for a moment and say goodbye to the people that are on the webcast because we’re up to our window of time here.