Ramon Laguarta
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is open
That's a good question, Dara. The way we think about it is we still see the international business has obviously continued to be very strong, this is a business now is going to cross $40 billion in this year. International beverage volumes is two-thirds of the total company volumes, international foods volumes is over 50%. Clearly the international business is becoming a very scaled part of our business and profit accretive. We're creating a diversification in our business that long term will give us a lot of rewards. When you focus on the U.S., we continue to think that the three pillars that we said were going to help us transform and accelerate our growth in the U.S.. One was affordability investments, make sure that our brands are in consumers' lives in the portions and prices that consumers can afford today. That's one vector. Continue to transform the portfolio at a faster pace, following the new dietary habits and food habits and food and beverage habits of consumers. The third one was accelerate away from home as incremental locations for us to capture new locations for our brands. The portfolio transformation is working very well. We feel good about the no sugar part of our beverage business. We feel good about the functional hydration. We feel good about our energy business, and we feel good about some of the innovation that we're going to scale in the second half of the year. That part is good. We feel good about the permissible portfolio in foods. It's already $3 billion and growing almost double digit, the portion control. All those elements that we explained quite well in our prepared remarks, we feel good, and I think that is really the long-term of the business as you see how consumers will engage with our categories. The away from home business continues to be a priority internationally and in the U.S. It slowed down a little bit in Q2. We think that is going to help us accelerate in the second half. It's a strategic opportunity where we're innovating, creating new business models, and adding some incremental locations. The affordability part, which is the one you're referring to, we accomplished what we wanted to accomplish, which was to get volume back into our categories in our core brands. That was not an obvious thing to do, and we managed to do this in the first half of the year. We're optimizing the return on those investments, and what we learn is that, yes, because of the consumer environment and the fact that gasoline prices were higher, consumers felt a little bit more the economic impact. We think that we will continue to optimize those investments for grocery, high low, there's type 1 investment, for everyday low price, other type of investments, et cetera. The system is getting much knowledgeable and much more intelligent in how we get the best return from those investments. What was different this quarter that we were not planning is the performance on the impulse channels. That is something that we're working on, to tell you the truth, in the last few months to try to get more conversion between people getting into the gas station and converting into purchases of beverages and foods. That's something that we're working with our partners. That is new. The gas prices have impacted. The gas prices will at one point come down, and then that will become, hopefully, less of an issue second half of the year or early into next year. That's the full picture. We don't think we need any sort of reset because we have a very strong productivity, record productivity in the first half of the year. We're going to add new layers of productivity second half of the year to be able to fund all these growth investments. Be it price, be it portfolio transformation, or the growth into away from home, which will drive the portfolio acceleration. That's how we're thinking about this now. Steve, any?