Jeffrey Harmening
Analyst · TD Cowen
Yes. So Rob, a couple of answers to those really, really important questions. Look, I'm about to tell you things I know that you already know because you've been doing this a long time as I have, but over the long term, to get an algorithm to work in the food space, what you need is about half your growth from volume and half your growth from pricing. I mean, you get pricing and mix and all that. So you need both of those things over time. There's a period of time when we saw record in -- there's a dog in the background. I'm sure thing he's being fed Blue Buffalo. He is probably asking for Blue Buffalo. The -- but if you look over time, you need a mix of price/mix and volume. We saw when we had record inflation for a period of about 3 years, all we had was pricing, and there was no volume. Now we're a little bit of a period where there's a lot more volume than there is price/mix given the consumer sentiment kind of where we are. But over time, those things seem to level out. So you're right. Over the course of time, to get the P&L to really work the way you want it to, you need a mix of pricing and you need a mix of price/mix and a little bit of volume as well. But this is a period where we're going to lean more on volume just as we did more on price/mix when we had record inflation a few years ago. And so you're right, but we're in a period of time where we know what we need to do. In terms of what comes next and tariffs and inflation, I mean, your guess is kind of as good as mine. I mean, what's going to happen without -- we're not really sure. I mean, all of our options are still open as to how we deal with the inflation we see in front of us. If inflation continues to pick up, then, yes, we go to productivity, HMM and all those things, but we have a great strategic revenue management toolkit. And so we'll be very willing to work with that as well to the extent that we need to. And so -- but it's a pretty unpredictable environment right now. So we're not really sure how that's going to play out. But know that we're agile enough with enough of the capabilities to make that work. Your second question about Fresh Pet Food, you talked about the growth rates and how they've slowed to 12%, I might add, and how we think about that. The first, I would say, vis-a-vis where we started looking at Fresh Pet Food a few years ago, the category is like twice the size. So the pool of the -- or the pond in which we'll be fishing in will be about twice the size as it was a few years ago. So that would be the starting point, which gives us reason to believe that our fresh offering has a chance to be a really big offering. And growing 12% is nothing to sneeze at. And the continuation of humanization of pets is an ongoing trend. It's a 20-year trend. And it manifests itself in a lot of different ways versus how treating works, to wanting natural pet food, which Blue Buffalo serves, wanting fresh offerings, which we're about to get into. And so we're confident that this humanization of pet food is going to continue, especially because it's particularly relevant among Gen Z and millennial consumers. And so as they form households more and more and they buy pets, we're confident that this trend will continue.