General Mills Inc – Management Reinvesting in Legacy
Products – 14 October 2021
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Specialist: Howard Riebling (HR)
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
Former Director, National Retail Sales Organisation at General Mills Inc
Agenda:
1. Drivers of General Mills’ (NYSE: GIS) market share gains in cereal
2. Innovation – category opportunities for cross-branding
3. Distribution models analysis and data impact
4. Price increase elasticity outlook for 2022
Contents
Q: How has US cereal and snacking changed throughout your time in the industry? There’s been many shifts
3
away from and back to cereal. Could you outline the trends you’ve noticed and what you’re monitoring?
Q: What factors have driven cereal’s decline over the years? How have manufacturers adapted to this,
whether through packaging or changing the product’s format? This trend has been going on for a long time. 4
Q: What have you noticed with the shelf-space dynamic? Consumers can still find large aisles full of cereal in
4
grocery stores. Why are retailers keeping this category alive through shelf space?
Q: You talked about the variety of flavours within cereal. How is cereal intersecting with snacking? How does
the cereal bar dynamic play into this? Are these considered snacks, given the profile is the consumer who
usually would have cereal, but is replacing it with a bar? How are category volumes and pricing playing out
here?
4
Q: How are you assessing the cereal distribution landscape and channel dynamics? Is it still 90% retail
grocery, 10% fragmented through different convenience stores?
Q: Could you discuss consumer behaviour within the general snacking category and its subcategories? You
mentioned trends such as organic.
5
5
Q: Could you expand on the proliferation of brands and barriers to entry in snacking? It seems to be a boom-
and-bust cycle for brands – they come up, they get buzz and they get acquired or shut down. Where have you
noticed the most or the highest turnover of start-ups within snacking? Is it the bars or in savoury? How does
the distribution aspect play into whether a brand will be successful or not?
6
Q: How does General Mills think about the opportunity of scale, considering its strategy of buying up some
smaller brands or making the initial limited partnership and then seeking to fully acquire the business? Once
it decides to buy a business, does it buy it with scale into all channels? I believe Hershey does something
similar, but that can backfire if it gets too big too fast. How does a company go about properly scaling
acquisitions? Does General Mills decide to scale an acquisition slightly more in a certain region, but keep it
segmented to another area?
6
Q: How has General Mills performed with brand management and not letting any of its significant portfolio
fall off a cliff? If a company takes the methodical approach to giving a brand time to mature, does it flood the
marketing leads or does it flood them with advertising? Is that a lot easier than physically scaling them into
channels?
7
Q: How does distribution play into the coronavirus impact and supply? You spoke about the DSD [direct
store delivery] model. Why is it so prevalent? What does and doesn’t work about distribution over
warehousing?
8
Q: DSD allows manufacturers to have more control over their data, but why has it been so hard for retailers
to give back data? Retailers are likely not telling manufacturers who’s buying their product to the detail they
want. How does that conversation go and why is there a wall between a lot of the data?
9
Q: Why hasn’t there been a true push for a D2C approach within snacking? I don’t believe you can just buy
snacks from General Mills’ website and have them delivered to your house – you usually have to go through a
9
third party. Could you discuss this dynamic and the barriers there?
Q: There’s a trend towards health and wellness across categories and there was a big shift back to indulgence
during coronavirus. How does General Mills balance its portfolio between pure indulgence and
healthfulness? What challenges come with managing a balanced portfolio such as this?
10
General Mills Inc – Management Reinvesting in Legacy
Products
Transcription begins at 00:00:08 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled General Mills Inc – Management Reinvesting in
Legacy Products. I’m Nyree Hinton and I’ll be facilitating today’s Interview with Mr Howard Riebling, former
Director of the National Retail Sales Organisation at General Mills Inc.
Howard, before we get started with today’s Interview, please state I agree or I disagree to the following
statement: You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any
such information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.
HR: I agree.
NH: Thank you, Howard. Could you start by giving an introduction to your background and the various roles
you’ve held in the industry?
HR: I worked for 38 years for General Mills. Worked across a bunch of different areas. As a Director, I was a
Trade Director for the different General Mills’ divisions, including snacks, for 12 years, and the most recent 12
years, I worked and ran our national retail sales organisation, which is all the people that go into the stores,
and work with all the store managers and provide in-store services. I’m retired as of 16 March. I was a Senior
Director and worked at corporate headquarters for the last 24 years or so.
[00:01:44]
Q: How has US cereal and snacking changed throughout your time in the industry? There’s been many shifts
away from and back to cereal. Could you outline the trends you’ve noticed and what you’re monitoring?
HR: I think for many, many years, we were known as the cereal company, but over the last 20 years, they’ve
been changing that perspective, and acquiring and getting bigger in the snacks arena, and as you know,
General Mills bought Annie’s. General Mills is actually the second or third largest natural organic
manufacturer in the industry in the US, and so they have the Annie’s brand, Cascadian and Epic, and that was,
as you know, where most of the growth was coming. That growth is on a very small base, but there was
substantial growth in that area, and so General Mills made significant investments in that area to capture that.
In my time at General Mills, I think that one of the big, underlying things that they’ve done from a strategy
standpoint is improve the product, and what I mean by that is where we could use all-natural ingredients for
products, health became a bigger issue in cereal. They always fortified it with vitamins and stuff, but they went
more of the heart-healthy, so the messaging has really changed and it’s really been just more about improving
the overall portfolio not only from a taste standpoint, but from a health standpoint. Right now and most
recently, General Mills continues to be more focused on where they believe the growth is going to be, and so
cereals still is their anchor. Worldwide, we have a partnership with Nestlé, so we’ve got cereal partners
worldwide, but in the US, cereal still becomes a mainstay, and although the category has declined over the past
few years, they do anticipate that that’s flattening out, but where they see the growth is in snacks, in snacking,
so that’s where they’re putting a lot of their new initiatives in place.
Private and confidential 3
[00:04:59]
Q: What factors have driven cereal’s decline over the years? How have manufacturers adapted to this, whether
through packaging or changing the product’s format? This trend has been going on for a long time.
HR: The dollar sales have slightly increased, even though the overall category has declined, and General Mills
actually has increased their share, so they haven’t been really hurt by the decline in the category. What I would
say is that, again, besides improving the health profile of the products, packaging has stayed pretty much the
same, but it has really been about flavour proliferation. If you look at Cheerios, Honey Nut Cheerios is the
biggest brand in the whole cereal category. It’s the number one brand, but the Cheerios franchise now has
probably 12 different flavours of Cheerios that are out there, so it’s really been about flavour proliferation.
People love variety. The second thing is really just bringing in the natural organic, so we have Cascadian
Farms, really got into the granola through Nature Valley, Nature Valley Granola cereal, and there’s Annie’s
cereal also, and I think moving forward, one of the bigger things that has always been a challenge in the cereal
industry has really been private label. There are not that many technical barriers to putting a cereal on the
shelf, and so focus has really been on taste because ultimately, it doesn’t matter if a cereal is healthier or has
better attributes, if it doesn’t taste good, people just won’t buy it, so focus very much on the taste aspect of
cereal. I would just say that I didn’t work in the Big G operating unit, but overall, the company is still pretty
optimistic about cereal, and particularly during COVID, with more kids at home and stuff, there was more
penetration in cereal and they believe that some of that penetration will stick moving forward.
[00:08:03]
Q: What have you noticed with the shelf-space dynamic? Consumers can still find large aisles full of cereal in
grocery stores. Why are retailers keeping this category alive through shelf space?
HR: First of all, if you look at the economics, there is a lot of value in a bowl of cereal vs buying breakfast at
some retail outlet or something, so there’s value, but secondly, for retailers, cereal is very profitable not
because they have high margins, because they have a high volume, so it’s still big business. I think when you
walk down the aisle and they’re trying to grow the categories, it’s really about there are just so many new
flavours and flankers, I guess is what we call them, so that’s why you get a lot of that space taken up. I think if
you walk down the aisle, you also see a lot of open space because cereal is such a high volume that the real
challenge for retailers right now is out-of-stocks. You take big brands like Cheerios or Honey Nut Cheerios and
the volume is so high, yet they’re so limited. You say that the aisle is really big, but it’s not big enough to allow
every SKU to have enough space on the shelf to prevent out-of-stocks. That has been one of the biggest
challenges for the retailers, but it’s still a big draw. All family sales are still very significant, and so I think
that’s why it’s such an anchor in the dry grocery area of the retail stores.
[00:10:27]
Q: You talked about the variety of flavours within cereal. How is cereal intersecting with snacking? How does
the cereal bar dynamic play into this? Are these considered snacks, given the profile is the consumer who
usually would have cereal, but is replacing it with a bar? How are category volumes and pricing playing out
here?
HR: I think you are starting to see more packaging innovation that allows on-the-go snacking from the cereal
and obviously, cereal is also used in bars. For example, at General Mills, they have their Cinnamon Toast
Crunch bars, they have Trix bars, they have several indulgent kid-type bars which are cereals, but just
specifically in the cereal area, you’re starting to see more single-unit sales, variety packs and more recently,
more pouch-type introductions. I would say those are relatively small still. They’re incremental to the
category, but they’re still pretty small, and so at this point, they’re not that significant, but there’s no doubt the
overall trend across the whole eating dynamic is snacking on the go. There are a couple of stats out there. 90%
of people snack multiple times during the day. I’m sure you’re probably very aware of that. 10% of people don’t
Private and confidential 4
even eat meals, they just snack, and 92% replace at least one meal with snacks, and so definitely snacking on
the go is a big overriding trend for not only cereal, but for snacks, and particularly the bars.
[00:13:07]
Q: How are you assessing the cereal distribution landscape and channel dynamics? Is it still 90% retail
grocery, 10% fragmented through different convenience stores?
HR: I’m not sure I can give you the exact percentages. I would say that club cereal is pretty big and
convenience, not as big. Convenience stores are small. There’s usually very limited space for cereal. It’s not
bubba food, which is typically what c-stores sell mostly, so most predominant sales of cereal really are in mass
merch, which is Walmart, Target and all the major chains, and also in club. Club has a huge cereal business
and the clubs also, as you know, sell to convenience stores. A lot of convenience, or not so much convenience
stores, but ma-and-pa stores, and bodegas and that type of business really pull a lot of their business out of the
club, so they get the benefit of that type of cereal sales, but if I were to guess, I would say that it’s probably 15%
of the sales are in club for cereal and I’d say probably another 10% would be in the convenience area, between
convenience and dollar stores.
[00:15:16]
Q: Could you discuss consumer behaviour within the general snacking category and its subcategories? You
mentioned trends such as organic.
HR: There are so many subcategories within snacks, I wouldn’t even be able to go into them, but at General
Mills, you have salty snacks, and I would just say like Chex Mix and Bugles, and you probably don’t really want
to talk about the salty snacks as much as bars and fruit, but salty snacks is a very, very tough area to get entry.
General Mills items are warehouse-delivered, but most of salty snack items are DSD, and so DSD pretty much
dominates the shelves in those aisles, and there, it’s really mostly indulgent, almost all indulgent, and again,
it’s about flavours. It’s really been about bold flavours and getting more the jalapeño, the bold, but the granola
bar is, again, just many, many different segments. Nature Valley actually is the number one granola bar
internationally. Worldwide, it’s the number one share. In the US, it’s not, but we’re probably a number two
share, last I looked, and that category really started as an alternative to candy, and so a healthier alternative to
candy for families, but over the years, it has gone from that to meal replacement to diet-related. I think, again,
the overall trend there is not only is it food on the go, but it is a meal replacement-type food on the go. Protein
was one really big trend that really affected the different subcategories there and also just really gut-friendly-
type items. Fiber One, when that first came out, Fiber One was absolutely huge because there were a lot of
stomach issues, particularly in younger kids, so that product was really huge. Now, it’s really transformed to
meal replacement. There are some gluten-free items, but gluten free is really a pretty small area to get in there,
and sugar-free or plant-based, so there are many, many different items. I can tell you how General Mills goes
about deciding what they’re going after, if that’s of interest for you in bars.
Because they believe snacks, and particularly granola bars and that snacking on the go is actually going to
grow over the next 5-10 years, General Mills has what they call 301 Inc. I don’t know if you’re familiar with
that or not, but it’s an area where we go out and buy shares, buy into these little, small start-up companies. We
don’t buy a dominant share. What we do is also give them access to our resources. In other words, we’ll help
them on manufacturing, we’ll help them with marketing, we’ll just give them advice, sometimes we’re on their
boards, and as those businesses grow, then we have the opportunity to come in at a later time to possibly
acquire them or we divest out of those. That’s one area. A second area is, General Mills does have its own
research laboratory. They’ve made huge investments on the data analytics side recently, in the last 2-3 years,
that, along with our research centre and just creating a pipeline of innovation that they can test and learn. We
used to just launch items and see what would stick. Now, General Mills has more of a grassroots-type initiative
where they’ll actually go into a very small market, go into some stores and see how the product does before
they start expanding on that, and the last thing is that I think General Mills will continue to divest in meals.
Private and confidential 5
They’ve got a huge meals portfolio, but I think that they will continue to take certain categories, and divest
those and in turn, invest more in the snacking.
I haven’t talked about fruit, but there’s also all the fruit that’s there as part of the snacks too, and that’s less as
dynamic as the bars because it’s really about fun and flavour, and there are some all-natural in that, but it’s
really about snacking for kids, but the bars is much more dynamic in terms of the segments that people are
coming into, and I think, again, the barrier of entry is not big there. There are not a lot of technological areas
for people to get into the bars and get into the snacking area, and so the balance for retailers really becomes,
how many and how much space do they want to dedicate to potential of products? You see a high turnover of
items because a lot of these items that are small start-up, grassroots, may be coming over from natural organic
into traditional retail, they typically get a chance and get put on the shelf, but then they’ve got to hold their
space. The second thing retailers have to deal with is when you bring in a bunch of small regional or small even
private label or small start-up brands, there’s no marketing that comes with it or very, very little, and so if you
don’t have a major manufacturer that’s out there advertising, whether it’s digital or national or commercial,
using commercials, you’re not bringing anybody to the section. That’s a balance that, if you were to get too
heavy on private label, too heavy on regional and start-up brands, you’re probably not going to see the people
shop the section like you would if you had national brands that are drawing people to the section with
consumer, so that’s the other thing that they have to weigh for these sections.
[00:23:53]
Q: Could you expand on the proliferation of brands and barriers to entry in snacking? It seems to be a boom-
and-bust cycle for brands – they come up, they get buzz and they get acquired or shut down. Where have you
noticed the most or the highest turnover of start-ups within snacking? Is it the bars or in savoury? How does
the distribution aspect play into whether a brand will be successful or not?
HR: I guess I’ll try. There are so many different variables that impact that. Space is one. Buyers, they typically
will reset their sections. If it’s not once a year, sometimes, they do it twice a year. Before every time they redo
their planograms, they evaluate terms, profitability, other factors such as penetration and draw, and so the
cold, hard fact is, if it doesn’t move and it doesn’t sell, they’re not going to make any margin. They may bring
in some new users and they’d have to evaluate the shopping basket impact of a new user, but that’s why you
always see turnover. I think retailers, typically, there’s a price to get a product on the shelf, whether they give
them free product or they just pay a slotting fee, and so retailers, because they want to make margin, allocate
space to a lot of these brands. They may only last six months or 12 months, and so you’re going to always see a
lot of turnover because retailers don’t want to miss out on a big, new innovation. At the same time, they’re not
going to give them a whole lot of time to really get seated. I would say that it’s a little different in the natural
organic and traditional retailers that have natural organic sections, they typically tend to be much more
patient on whether or not a brand is going to make it or not. I think the other thing too, and you mentioned it,
I do think a lot of these small start-ups are looking to get acquired. If a manufacturer feels like there’s a niche
and they have the opportunity to grow, I think that you’re either going to see the Kelloggs, the General Mills,
the Nestlés or Hersheys of the world, looking to acquire and get into that space. If you look at what Hershey
has done over the years, Kellogg, General Mills, if you look at all the acquisitions that have happened, 20-30
years ago, that just never happened. In the last 15 years, you see a lot of big manufacturers bringing in or going
out and acquiring new brands.
[00:27:51]
Q: How does General Mills think about the opportunity of scale, considering its strategy of buying up some
smaller brands or making the initial limited partnership and then seeking to fully acquire the business? Once
it decides to buy a business, does it buy it with scale into all channels? I believe Hershey does something
similar, but that can backfire if it gets too big too fast. How does a company go about properly scaling
acquisitions? Does General Mills decide to scale an acquisition slightly more in a certain region, but keep it
Private and confidential 6
segmented to another area?
HR: I think we learned our lesson, General Mills has learned their lesson on that, so where we would have
tended to bring items in, and try and make them national, it’s very, very different now. It’s much more of a
market area, regional look than a national look. We do leverage supply chain. We do leverage all the functional
support. For example, my retail sales organisation, we were responsible for all General Mills’ items at retail.
Take Epic, for example. We invested in Epic, watched Epic for two or three years, saw the growth, worked out
a partnership with them where we bought Epic, but we left Epic headquarters in Austin. We staffed them
separately, so they stayed independent from General Mills until you got enough integration into the company,
and then at some point, they bring it over into the total General Mills portfolio, but in the past, we would have
done that right out of the blocks. We don’t do that any more, so some brands will stay regional for a long time.
I think we’re more focused on less about regional, because the customers that we deal with will determine if
it’s regional or national, and so if we get it into Target based on demographics or what have you, they may take
in a product, but maybe in just a few of their distribution centres.
Costco, Sam’s, there are a lot of brands that we have in those areas that are not across all their distribution
centres but are very localised, because that’s where the brands are strong and they’re not strong in other
markets, so it’s much more of a category management approach. It used to be, if you had a natural organic
item and you took it to Walmart, your business would die because everybody else would just discontinue
items. That’s still a concern, but as the years go by, it’s less and less a concern because natural organic is
becoming more mainstream. There are not as many dedicated sections to natural organic. They’re integrating
it more into the primary sections. To answer your point, I think that there’s a very careful expansion approach
to the brands that they bring on now that are very strong regionally or by market, and try and build off of that.
I’ve got a dog food example, but that’s probably not what you want to hear. We bought Blue Buffalo, and Blue
Buffalo was not in any traditional retail stores, and so over the past 4-5 years, we now have probably 80% ACV
across the United States, but it was a very targeted, very slow expansion of going from just pet locations to
traditional retail and other outlets.
[00:32:53]
Q: How has General Mills performed with brand management and not letting any of its significant portfolio
fall off a cliff? If a company takes the methodical approach to giving a brand time to mature, does it flood the
marketing leads or does it flood them with advertising? Is that a lot easier than physically scaling them into
channels?
HR: I think the way that they’re structured, there are lots of pros and cons, I guess. You could say that a little
company is more focused on individual brands, but then they don’t have the investment resources that can be
allocated from a bigger company. The way it really works is, it starts at the executive level. What are the key
strategies? Where do they want to grow? Those strategies go down into the operating units, so there’s the
cereal, there’s a breakfast operating unit, there’s a meals operating unit, there’s a snacking operating unit, but
those portfolios, they determine what are the biggest priorities, what has the most potential, and then they
optimise brand spending and functional spending down to the brands. With some smaller brands, potentially
not get what they need and they would die off. That definitely has happened. I think digital marketing has
changed that dynamic quite a bit because it doesn’t cost as much to do some of the digital marketing and our
customer teams have a big say in where the spending goes, and so they have these joint partnerships with the
retailers where they determine how best to use digital marketing, but I think where the big benefit is, I’ll just
take Epic, for example.
Epic really had no retail coverage, so they didn’t have the eyes and ears in the stores to watch out for their
product, which is a big, big deal, and they didn’t have the supply chain expertise. If they bought advertising
and got consumer, they were buying it as a small entity vs a bigger entity which could leverage big buys to get
cheaper, more efficient media or any kind of consumer, and then just the expertise, just the core capability
around what they’re developing from data analytics, and core competency around digital marketing and stuff
they can bring to these smaller brands that they don’t have. I would say that, and General Mills has been guilty
of this, we’ve had a lot of brands that we bought that died out because they didn’t get the attention they
Private and confidential 7
needed. That’s been the challenge and that’s why they’ve changed the way they integrate new products or new
acquisitions. They basically leave them as standing entities for quite some time until it looks like that they can
become a bigger player and get to a point where they can leverage more of the General Mills assets. There are a
lot of brands at General Mills and they don’t get all treated equally, which I think is your point.
NH: How was that changed due to coronavirus and lack of supply? How did General Mills determine the
prioritisation of that large portfolio?
HR: I would say there were a couple of things that happened during COVID. Number one, it really wasn’t
about marketing or consumer or priority, because there was no trade activation really that was taking place or
very minimal that was taking place at the retailers because it became all about just being able to get product to
the store, get product on the shelf. I’d been in a lot of meetings with General Mills before I retired and with
customers, and we got super, super high marks during COVID for being able to supply. We were, like
everybody else, restrained, but during COVID, it was really honestly just about getting product on the shelf,
and our manufacturing facilities actually had a very high level of efficiency, so we did a lot of COVID protocols,
and so they really came through in a big way. There’s an allocation process because basically, everything was
on allocation, an allocation process that tries to be fair and equitable across all customers. Were there some
trade-offs between brands? Sure. It was relatively minimal, but there were some trade-offs from a
manufacturing standpoint for seasonal items. For example, our refrigerated baked goods as we were coming
into the holidays would take more manufacturing and we’d take it away from other brands that might not be
as significant during that time period. It was really all the operating units working closely with supply chain to
try and maximise, and optimise what they could produce, but a big part of that really was just supply chain
being able to get ingredients and being able to get trucking, and you’re seeing all that happening still today in a
big way, bigger way actually, but that’s what was happening during COVID.
I would like to say though, during COVID, the one thing that we did, three things really happened, and I’ll
probably forget the third one here in a minute, but one is bars, granola bars and that whole bars section, which
are on-the-go-type items, actually suffered quite a bit during the beginning of COVID because the kids were at
home and they weren’t going to school. A lot of the families would buy bars, put them in their backpacks and
stuff for their sporting events and all that kind of stuff, and so the bar segment actually really suffered during
COVID. As we come out of COVID, expect that to spring back pretty significantly. I think it probably already
has, so that was one of the big changes. I think the second one is, as you’re well aware of, but online shopping,
so click and collect at Walmart just exploded. We expected to be at 7% of total business on online, on click and
collect. That was their projection over about a five-year period. COVID exponentially put that up, and online
grocery is really in the mid-15% for a lot of retailers or higher and they don’t expect that to go down, so that’s
another revelation. Consistency, this is where the big company’s have a little bit of an advantage because it’s
the big brands that really seem to anchor those click and collect or the online ordering on that. I knew I’d
forget the third thing. I’ll probably remember it in a little bit, but those two things had a significant piece to
play during COVID.
[00:43:06]
Q: How does distribution play into the coronavirus impact and supply? You spoke about the DSD [direct store
delivery] model. Why is it so prevalent? What does and doesn’t work about distribution over warehousing?
HR: DSD is extremely expensive. I’ve met with a lot of consultants over that over the years because General
Mills has worked in DSD. If you’re in DSD, you stay in DSD because you can’t get out of it, and if you’re not in
DSD, you never go to DSD. Having said that, DSD, it allows you to have all the data all the way down to SKUs
by store, so the advantage there is, when you’re working with a store or even if you’re working with buyers,
you’ve got all the data, you understand what the trends are, where the opportunities are and you have
somebody in the store every day. DSD 10 years ago was 2x as important as it is today, and the reason is
because retailers today have very strict planograms and they are very good at executing their planograms. If
you go back 10 years ago and 15 years ago, it was the wild, wild west on shelf management. They put a
planogram out there, but they didn’t have a way to really make sure all the stores were executing it, and DSD
could navigate that, but today, DSD has to work along with everybody else to get what space is going to be
Private and confidential 8
committed to them. In the past, DSD had the advantage of playing around with the shelf and also the
merchandising, and today, their biggest advantage is really merchandising opportunities.
As an example, I’ll take Target. I’ll pick on them for a little bit. There may be a warehouse-delivered item that’s
supposed to be on display for three weeks, but all the product sells through, so the end cap is open, so the store
goes to DSD and says, “I’ve got an open end cap. Can you fill it for me?” They get that end cap, they didn’t pay
for it, and so they can be much more opportunistic. That’s what we were combating pretty successfully against
DSD once we started providing retail service to Target, so that’s what I meant by DSD can be pretty aggressive
at retail, and the second thing is that those are big, big companies. It’s Frito-Lay, PepsiCo, and they will do a
lot of initiatives to prevent new products from coming in. They’ll heat up the market, they’ll advertise, they’ll
drop coupons, they’ll do whatever they need to, but they’re pretty cut-throat. I don’t know if I answered your
question. Retailers actually prefer to go through their warehouse because it leverages their fixed costs, and if
companies like Hershey, General Mills, Kellogg, Nestlé have retail services out there where they’re in the store
at least once a week, maybe sometimes twice a week, then warehouse is the preferred method. It’s cheaper,
more efficient, leverages more the assets. The battles of the retail are still there. They’re just not as significant
as they were 10 years ago.
[00:47:47]
Q: DSD allows manufacturers to have more control over their data, but why has it been so hard for retailers to
give back data? Retailers are likely not telling manufacturers who’s buying their product to the detail they
want. How does that conversation go and why is there a wall between a lot of the data?
HR: That’s a great question. That’s a really great question, and the answer to that is, they don’t trust the
manufacturers or they don’t trust the Nielsens or IRI, that they’ll share information. General Mills buys both
Nielsen, primarily Nielsen, but IRI for those other customers that don’t provide us with Nielsen, and I think
almost every customer will give some type of category management data, but you take a Walmart or you take a
Target, and they give you access to all the data, all the Retail Link data, all the movement. You can get it
basically hourly, and then you have some retailers that won’t share any and they don’t share any because they
feel that it will be used against them competitively. It’s a hard one to really understand because most
manufacturers use that data to take workload off of buyers and to provide them with really high-level
analytics, and category management and consumer insights, but if you don’t have the data, you can’t do hardly
any of that, and so it falls back on the retailer. You take a look at Target or Walmart or Kroger who give you
access to their data, the type of analytics that they’re getting to help their buyers make decisions and stuff is
really, really outstanding, so you’d think it would be, it probably is, I’m sure it is, a competitive advantage.
[00:50:41]
Q: Why hasn’t there been a true push for a D2C approach within snacking? I don’t believe you can just buy
snacks from General Mills’ website and have them delivered to your house – you usually have to go through a
third party. Could you discuss this dynamic and the barriers there?
HR: I think there is some experimentation going around on that. I think it just comes down to logistics and
cost of logistics, but I wouldn’t doubt that at some point, that actually happens. I’ve sat in some meetings with
McKinsey and some other, Boston Consulting where they’ve laid out visions for the future, and one of those
areas is exactly what you’re talking about, is manufacturer to the home. Part of the problem with that is once a
retailer understands that’s what you’re doing, they’re probably going to discontinue your product, so now, you
don’t have the velocity and mass to be efficient, and so it’s a very touchy model. You’re not on the shelf at
Walmart, chances are, you’re not going to succeed as a brand, and so until that model could just be
safeguarded in a way, that would be a tough one to go after. A lot of the stuff that they’re looking at that would
be direct-to-consumer would be custom products, so in other words, if you’re diabetic, there are items that we
can produce for diabetics. If you need gluten-free, so it’s more around certain health initiatives. It’s a small
business. Can be fairly profitable. Very niche, and so there’s probably been more discussion around that area
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than your mainstream items.
[00:54:09]
Q: There’s a trend towards health and wellness across categories and there was a big shift back to indulgence
during coronavirus. How does General Mills balance its portfolio between pure indulgence and healthfulness?
What challenges come with managing a balanced portfolio such as this?
HR: I think that’s all data-related. As much as people want to believe that it’s all about natural organic or
whole natural or health, the reality is, there’s a huge segment of the consumers that don’t care about that, and
so what General Mills does and what all major manufacturers do is they just continue to mine the data.
General Mills wanted to make available healthy items, make available indulgent items, want to make available
for shoppers all natural items and make available natural organic items, make available some that didn’t use
the… What am I trying to think? Some people were very much against genetic grains, so we’d make products
that did not have genetic hybrids, but the reality is those are all X amount of size, and so a managed portfolio
just constantly has to look at what is actually trending up and trending down, and it’s harder to do a three- and
five-year plan because of that, but it’s not as hard to do a one-year plan based on that. I think that’s really
behind it. The same with value. I know in a question there, you asked about value and it’s the same with value.
You do want in your portfolio to have some low-cost, efficient, low-margin-type items that can be really high
volume and low cost, and it’s really just about meeting the needs of the consumers that are coming to the
stores, so that’s how they approach it. It’s easier to make something indulgent than it is to figure out the health
thing, but I think there are more resources going towards the health and wellness area. The other thing I didn’t
remember, the third thing from COVID is General Mills’ penetration in households on established, what you’d
call, older brands was very significant. Households were bringing in some of these brands that they hadn’t
brought in for years, and the expectation is that some of those old, reliable brands which have been improved
over the years and with new users using them, that some of that penetration will stick, and the early read is
that’s been true. That was one of the other impacts from COVID.
[00:58:11]
NH: We’re just about out of questions, so I think that’s a good place to end our Interview. Let me just close by
saying thank you, Howard, for your time today. It was very comprehensive. We covered an extensive amount,
and thank you clients for joining Third Bridge Forum’s Interview. If you’d like to speak with Howard in a
private call or meeting, please let your relationship manager know. Have a good one.
HR: Great. Thank you.
Transcription ends at 00:58:26 of the recorded material
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