General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript September 18, 2024 9:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Jeff Siemon - VP of IR and Treasurer
Jeffrey Harmening - Chairman and CEO
Kofi Bruce - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Matt Smith - Stifel
Andrew Lazar - Barclays
Michael Lavery - Piper Sandler
Max Gumport - BNP Paribas
Rob Dickerson - Jefferies
Bryan Spillane - Bank of America
Leah Jordan - Goldman Sachs
Robert Moskow - TD Cowen
John Baumgartner - Mizuho Securities
Operator
Good morning and welcome to General Mills' First Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ remarks, we will have a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Jeff Siemon, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Jeff Siemon
Hi, thank you, Julianne, and good morning to everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for our Q&A session on our first quarter fiscal ‘25 results. I hope you had time to review our press release, listen to our prepared remarks, and view the presentation materials which we made available this morning on our investor relations website. Please do note that in our Q&A session we may make forward-looking statements that are based on our current views and assumptions. Please refer to this morning's press release for factors that could impact forward-looking statements and for reconciliations of non-GAAP information, which may be discussed on today's call. I'm here this morning with Jeffrey Harmening, our Chairman and CEO; and Kofi Bruce, our CFO.
So, Julianne, we can go ahead and get to the first question. Will you please open it up?
Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Matt Smith from Stifel. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Matt Smith
Hi, good morning. I believe when you initially provided fiscal ‘25 guidance, you weren't assuming much improvement in your categories with more emphasis on your competitiveness. Does the shift in more at-home food consumption give you more confidence in the organic sales outlook or are you seeing that benefit muted by continued value-seeking behavior?
Jeffrey Harmening
Good morning and thanks for the question. First, I would say that the quarter played out from a macro environment kind of as we had anticipated and we thought we'd see gradual improvement in our categories throughout the year and we saw an improvement in our categories. In fact, if you look at our North America retail categories, they're up a couple percent, a mix of a little bit of volume and a little bit of pricing in the categories. And so it's played out kind of as we expected. And for us, as we said in the fourth quarter, the key for us is to keep improving our competitiveness. And we made a step in the right direction in that in the first quarter and we have some more work to do across our portfolio. And so the job for us to do for the rest of the year really is to keep improving. We did see a slight uptick in food consumption at home in the quarter. We did anticipate that might be the case as we see consumers seeking value. And the fact is that now food at home is four times less expensive than food eating out on average. And so eating at home is a great value for consumers and consumers still economically stress. So that played out the way we thought. And as we look at the rest of the year, I wouldn't say that our guidance is predicated on our category's continued improvement. What it's predicated on is our continued improvement in competitiveness, which we're confident we can do, even got a continuing momentum into the second quarter here because we've got really great news on all of our billion dollar brands.