Operator: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, welcome to General Mills fiscal 26 Q4 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star, 1. To raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Jeff Siemon vice president, investor relations and corporate finance. Jeffrey, please go ahead.

Jeff Siemon: Thank you, Samantha, and good morning to everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our live Q&A session on our Q4 and full year fiscal '26 results. I hope you all had time to review our press release, listen to the prepared remarks and view our presentation materials, which we made available this morning on our Investor Relations website. I'm here with Jeff Harmening, our Chairman and CEO; Dana McNabb, our COO; and Kofi Bruce, our CFO. Now let me turn it over to Jeff for some opening remarks.

Jeffrey Harmening: Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everybody. Before we get going today, I thought I'd provide a brief summary of the main messages for today — really how we finished fiscal '26 and where General Mills is headed in fiscal '27. As we entered fiscal '26, we made a bold decision to reinvest in remarkability, and most importantly, adjusting our base prices across a meaningful part of our portfolio to strengthen the fundamentals of our business. We certainly encountered some challenges this past fiscal year, including a more difficult consumer backdrop that impacted the pace and the cost of the volume improvement, as well as some specific headwinds on Totino's and Wilderness. But I can confidently say that we exited the year with a stronger foundation, with encouraging improvements in household penetration and base volume and innovation that gives us confidence as we look to fiscal '27. I'm equally confident that fiscal '27 will be a better year for General Mills. Our priorities for the coming year are quite clear. First, we're focused on improving our top line growth by driving a step change in the remarkability of our brands. With our base price investments behind us, we're shifting our focus more toward innovation and renovation — to packaging and brand communication that deliver the benefits that matter most to today's consumers, supported by stronger price/mix with a heavy emphasis on mix from premium innovation, price-pack architecture and trade efficiency. Whether it's Cheerios or Blue Buffalo or Häagen-Dazs or Annie's, we have really good plans going into fiscal '27 to meet consumers where they are. Second, as we accelerate and expand our enterprise transformation efforts to drive greater speed and efficiency and flexibility across our business, we expect to deliver $3 billion in cumulative cost savings over the 4 years through fiscal 2030, primarily through our Holistic Margin Management productivity program and our global transformation initiative. We're expecting $750 million to be delivered in fiscal '27. These savings are critical to help offset inflation, fund our growth investments, and support stronger earnings and cash flow over time. Third, we will stay disciplined on capital allocation. Our focus is on driving cash flow, working on leverage and restoring profitable growth over time. While fiscal '27 will include elevated inflation and some mechanical headwinds, we believe the combination of stronger brand remarkability, sharper execution and a more aggressive productivity agenda positions us to build momentum and create sustainable shareholder value over the long term. With that, operator, let's get started on Q&A.

Operator: Your first question comes from the line of Max Gumport with BNP Paribas.

Max Gumport: FY '27 seems like a big pivot from price-based investments in FY '26 to innovation and renovation-based investments focusing on offering consumers better-for-you attributes. Can you talk about some of the learnings that informed this shift and your level of confidence it will deliver the results you're expecting?

Jeffrey Harmening: Max, I would say we always felt like we would be pivoting based on where we started last year. Recall last year I talked about it being a 2-step process. The first thing we had to do was get our base pricing back in line — not necessarily equal to competition, but making sure we are under key price cliffs and thresholds. The job last year when we talked about remarkability was really about value, and we have effectively done that. But that's only the first step in a 2-step process to get back to profitable organic volume growth. The second step, with that foundation behind us and it worked as we thought it would, is to make sure it now allows the rest of our marketing to work even better. Dana and her team have done a really nice job improving brand communications, packaging, price/mix and new product innovation and renovation. All those things work a lot better when you get your base pricing right. We increased household penetration for the first time in a number of years. We increased our pound share in NAR. We were competitive in the other 3 segments. The work we're doing this year we can only do because of the work done last year, and I'm pleased with how we've done that and even more pleased with the innovation we have coming ahead.

Max Gumport: And just as a follow-up — last year, you saw your fiscal year get dented by changes in the macro environment, specifically consumers in the middle of the fiscal year demonstrating an increased propensity to wait to buy on promotion. Have you seen that behavior dissipate? And what level of flexibility have you embedded in your FY '27 outlook for other such unexpected changes in consumer behavior?

Dana McNabb: As we go into this new fiscal year, the consumer is going to continue to be pressured. We expect to see them continue to change their behavior — being more deliberate in how and where they shop, buying more on promotion and less on everyday prices, making trade-offs between pack sizes and channels, all with value at the forefront. As we exited Q4, we saw categories slow down by about 1 point. We're not anticipating that to change going into this fiscal year. But even as we say that, consumers are still willing to pay for benefits that matter most to them — think functional nutrition, bold flavors. This really reinforces the importance of our focus on remarkability. When we do that well, like on Cheerios Protein or renovated Chex Mix snacks or Tastefuls and Tiki Cat offerings, we can unlock growth even in this more challenging consumer environment. Our assumption is the consumer will remain pressured, and we'll stay focused on the levers that we can control.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Peter Grom with UBS.

Peter Grom: I wanted to start with a bigger picture question on the category outlook. It feels like we've been talking about growth below long-term trends for a while. As you think about what you're seeing from a category standpoint, do you continue to view this as cyclical dynamics? Or is there a view that maybe long-term category growth rates may not be as applicable moving forward?

Jeffrey Harmening: There are some trends that we know are long term in nature. Things like demographics — the 55-plus consumer base growing, increasing Hispanic population in the U.S., pet humanization, which 25 years in is probably a trend. There are other things that are certainly cyclical. Consumers have always cared about things like their food tasting good and being good for them, value and convenience. But those definitions change over time — e-commerce is the new convenience, consumers care a lot about value, which is why the base pricing worked so well last year, they care about health, and now it's really all about protein. The question is how long will these things last? And the answer is really kind of unknowable in a volatile environment. What we do know is that our focus this coming year on driving improved organic growth and doing it profitably is the right path. Dana mentioned Cheerios Protein, which is off to a great start; Tiki Cat, which is growing quite nicely; Bold Flavor Chex Mix, which is doing well. All those things resonate with today's consumers.

Peter Grom: Any way to put some guardrails on how much below the full year guidance you'd expect the first quarter to start? And how do you see that evolving through the year?

Kofi Bruce: I'm probably not going to satisfy your question because I don't want to get too specific or get in the habit of providing quarterly guidance, other than to reiterate what we said in our prepared remarks. We would expect the shipment timing headwinds on Pet to continue into Q1, but we would expect some reversal on North America Retail as we step into Q1 — those will have both top and bottom line implications. And as a reminder, we divested Yogurt at the end of June in fiscal '26, so that will be a comparison headwind. We would also expect our net inflation, the impact of inflation net of all our cost savings initiatives, to be negative and progressively improve as we move through Q2 and into Q3 in the back half. Other than that, I wouldn't get more specific.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Lazar with Barclays.

Andrew Lazar: What should our expectations be around both volume share and value share as we move through this year? The sort of transfer from volume to value share is really the key point in a lot of the work you did last year around price points. Trying to get a better sense so we can track that in market data as we move forward.

Jeffrey Harmening: Andrew, this past year, we focused on volume share in NAR — specifically pound share because of the pricing actions we took. And we focused on dollar share in the other 3 segments. Having those largely behind us as we enter this new year, our goal is to be competitive across dollar share across all 4 of our segments. That doesn't mean we completely abandon what we do with pounds — we like to stay in the middle of the boat, and the same would hold true on pound and dollar share as we enter this year. Our job is to do both — continue to grow household penetration and generate the price/mix we're looking for so that we're competitive on a dollar basis. Whether it's in NAR, Pet, Foodservice or International, we want to be competitive on a dollar basis. As we pivot to the innovation, renovation and price/mix — which is heavily focused on mix — we'll be looking for dollar competitiveness.

Andrew Lazar: Specifically to NAR on dollar share — as you diagnose where some of that share has gone, it doesn't seem like private label is that big a factor. It seems more like smaller insurgent players. What's your diagnosis of where some of that share has gone? And how does the work you're doing this year to step up remarkability address that?

Dana McNabb: Andrew, when we were on this call last year from a share perspective, we had seen private label get stronger in pretty much all of our categories — they were stealing share. We also saw small brands stealing share, and we were squarely in the middle and had to take action to become more competitive. As we diagnosed where we were struggling most, it was really on affordability and value. That's why in fiscal '26 we focused on remarkability with most of our investment on price. And we saw it work — that was about fixing our base volume. Sitting here last year, we were looking at base volume down about 10%. Now we're entering the year with our base volume where we invested on price up about 1%, and we have household penetration growth. We're entering this fiscal year with a much stronger foundation. Now it's about making sure that we are delivering the benefits that consumers are willing to pay for — making a significant step-up in innovation, in renovation, in packaging in terms of format and functionality, which will allow us to get a modest improvement in price/mix, with emphasis on mix. That will be a difference maker in terms of our ability to improve dollar share performance. I'm confident we will see improved organic sales results in NAR.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Tom Palmer with JPMorgan.

Thomas Palmer: On the cost savings — the $3 billion in planned savings over the next 4 years. Can you provide detail on what pieces such as HMM were already underway versus the pieces that are new and should ramp over the next 4 years?

Dana McNabb: As we talk about transformation, we have to start first by reminding everyone that our primary goal is to restore profitable organic sales growth, and all our cost-saving efforts are in service to that goal. We have approximately $2 billion of that $3 billion expected to come from HMM, at a rate consistent with what we've delivered over the past few years. HMM is a really strong capability — our commercial teams lead it, it's about understanding what the consumer values, putting back in what they do value and taking out what they don't. That's been consistent over the years. The other $1 billion is expected to come from the acceleration of our global transformation initiative and other cost-saving actions — that's really about improving our end-to-end business processes and identifying new ways of working with new tools, technology and operating models to be more agile. One area we talked about in our prepared remarks is our supply chain transformation. Our supply chain is truly the best in food, but it was built for a different time and a little bit lower volume. We need faster innovation and more packaging flexibility. We're still in the early phases of this design, so we don't have more to share, but we will come back with more details.

Thomas Palmer: On cost inflation expectations in this dynamic environment — how did you make your assumptions on how the year progresses from an inflation standpoint, how you're assuming fuel costs look, and how much visibility versus assumptions are embedded in the 4% to 5%?

Kofi Bruce: Our inflation outlook of 4% to 5% assumes about $100 a barrel on oil on the uncovered portion of the year, and conversion cost based on a lagging PPI. We're covered about 8 to 9 months out, so the uncovered portion of the year is relatively small and we're fairly locked in. As we work through the year, we would expect that any meaningful change in oil on its own would fall within our range of guidance given the amount we've got covered through the year.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of David Palmer with Evercore ISI.

David Palmer: A follow-up on your comments on dollar market share trends improving in fiscal '27. Any more specifics on what sort of dollar category growth you think will happen this year? And do you anticipate Mills starting to grow in line with the category by the end of the fiscal year?

Dana McNabb: I don't think I'll predict dollar share on all of our categories — that would probably get me into trouble. But as we said in our prepared remarks, we're assuming our categories will track roughly in line with fiscal '26. For NAR, that's roughly flat in dollars. We expect to deliver improved NAR retail sales performance with a combination of remarkability. We do think we'll see some modest price/mix because price/mix was a real headwind for us this year, and that will help from a dollar share perspective. That modest price/mix is going to be driven entirely by mix, from packaging formats, innovation and renovation. I also think when you look at our dollar share performance for NAR, you can miss the fact that Totino's was a real problem for us this year — we just didn't execute at our standard. We had a price-pack architecture conversion that wasn't great, we didn't have the innovation we needed. Going into fiscal '27, we've improved almost every lever of remarkability — strong merchandising, the price-pack architecture is fixed, really good innovation with Blasted Totino's Rolls, Ultimate Pizza that's doing really well. In the frozen segment, we see Asian snacks and Mexican snacks growing really well — we're launching an Old El Paso frozen snack, we have Wanchai Ferry coming over. We've diagnosed that business well and are already seeing improvement into June. Just stabilizing that business alone — and 4 weeks is not necessarily a trend — we've improved our hot snacks trend by 1 point and our pizza trend by almost 5 points. Stabilizing that alone is going to have a big impact on our dollar share performance.

David Palmer: I was seeing some data showing that very low-income consumers, say under $50,000, were actually spending more on at-home food because they're trading down from restaurants. The over $100,000 crowd was also spending more on at-home food trading into higher-priced, often smaller brands, protein-centric or wellness-oriented. The middle third is a little more compressed. Where are the trends by income cohort today, and where do you see the improvement coming in '27 and beyond?

Dana McNabb: When we look at at-home eating consumption, we saw it pretty stable in the last quarter at 86% — it didn't move around. We did see middle-lower income households eat a little bit more at-home and spend a little bit more on staples — think cooking from home — but nothing significant. When you have brands as big as ours, you have a wide consumer base to serve. You have to make sure that your everyday shelf price is right, that you have opening price points that are easier for lower income households to access through packaging innovation, and that for larger families you have large packs that deliver value. What we're being really smart about is making sure we understand how stressed the consumer is going into this fiscal year, we don't take that for granted, and we make sure we're bringing the right value. And then for the portion of the K economy that will spend more, we've got to make sure we have the benefits and new products and renovations they're willing to pay for — functional nutrition, bold flavors. We're bringing a significant amount of new product innovation. Think Cheerios Protein in almost every category, our humanization trend in pet continuing — cats are on fire, so Tiki Cat and our BLUE Tastefuls and our Wilderness Cat will continue to perform. It's about understanding exactly where the consumer is, not underestimating how stressed they are, and making sure we have the benefits in the right places to deliver for them.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Peter Galbo with Bank of America.

Peter Galbo: Dana, you've spent a lot of time on innovation and renovation. Obviously, that is probably the right next move to improve product quality or attributes, but it comes at a cost. And we often think of HMM cost savings coming from the cost line that you're obviously boosting up products. Can you help us bridge how those two ideas can coexist within General Mills?

Dana McNabb: I think it comes back to what I talked about from an HMM perspective. This is led by our commercial teams — it's really about making sure we understand what the consumer values and is willing to pay for, and what they don't value, and taking that out. If we start with the consumer, it allows you to have benefits that you launch that they're willing to pay for, and you can manage margins appropriately. For example, Cheerios Protein was a benefit that consumers are willing to pay for, and we were able to premium price that to the core and offset the cost of that innovation and renovation. That is really our focus going into next fiscal year — what are consumers willing to pay for. We're going to see a little bit of price/mix appreciation, majority of that will be mix. And then as we always do with HMM, the teams will focus on what are the things consumers don't value and take it out accordingly, in order to reinvest that back into the things they do value.

Kofi Bruce: From an annual financial modeling perspective, we would expect every year to see some significant portion of reinvestment back in the product, either through renovation or new product innovation with costs. And to the extent those costs come in, we're relying largely on HMM. In fact, the genesis of our HMM discipline was all about being able to reinvest back in the business, both in product as well as in marketing, messaging and other ideas to drive growth. Fundamentally, this is the step-up we're seeing in fiscal '26 and expecting in fiscal '27, all contained within our normal gearing of HMM, and we can comfortably cover it even with a little bit of the step-up in inflation pressure.

Peter Galbo: On inflation, your HMM numbers for this year with 4% to 5% roughly matching the inflation number — on a like-for-like basis in '27, are you thinking about gross margins as being relatively flat for the year? Just trying to bridge from gross down to operating.

Kofi Bruce: I would expect modestly less pressure on gross margin than operating margin. But given the shape of the P&L, there would be some modest pressure on gross margin.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Matt Smith with Stifel.

Matthew Smith: Kofi, a follow-up question on the cost outlook — can you clarify if that 4% to 5% net inflation includes any tariff refunds and your expectation for timing?

Kofi Bruce: It does include expectations for tariff refunds. As a reminder, our biggest tariff exposure is on steel and aluminum. Those tariffs are still in place and not subject to refunds. We are and have been realizing some modest amount of tariff refunds that have frankly been somewhat immaterial. I would not expect a material contribution that we'd be talking about on a go-forward basis for fiscal '27.

Matthew Smith: Going back to the expectations for organic sales — how do you think about the gating factors for getting back to positive growth for the year at the high end of your range? Is that dependent more on your initiatives around innovation and renovation and driving favorable mix, or would you weight it more heavily toward overall category performance?

Kofi Bruce: I would say the former more than the latter. Our expectation would be that if we're in the more favorable end of our range, we would see better price/mix accretion and less volume pressure from the places where we're expecting that appreciation. All things equal, we view that as largely within our control and somewhat independent of category development.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Chris Carey with Wells Fargo Securities.

Christopher Carey: Can you contextualize the relative importance of improving share trends in Totino's and improving Wilderness dog food? You called out in the prepared remarks that these businesses were pretty material impacts on pound volume declines. When you think about the outlook in these 2 businesses specifically relative to the rest of your portfolio, how important are share gains here and what are your expectations?

Jeffrey Harmening: As I think about it, it's in hand. We need to improve the things that haven't been working as well. Dana was pretty clear on that in Totino's and Wilderness — Totino's was a bigger challenge than Wilderness just due to the absolute size of the business. Getting that more stable would be helpful. But even more importantly, I think, is doubling down on the things that are working. Dana talked about Tiki Cat and cat food, which is working, or Love Made Fresh, which is up 80% in the last quarter, or Cheerios Protein, which is now a $100 million business for us. For me, our ability to get back to growth and improve share is really about improving the things that needed to improve like Totino's and Wilderness, and doubling down on the things that are working. I'd also cite our International business, which has returned to growth, and specifically the Häagen-Dazs business which has done well there. We're not anticipating an improved consumer environment or an improved category environment. We're going to make our own success this year, and we're confident that we can do that.

Christopher Carey: On Pet — consumption trends have been okay, but the inventory volatility has been intermittent. Is there some visibility in the smoothing out of this inventory volatility? The guidance implies it gets better. The business has actually been improving better in the consumption data than what we've seen, and I wonder if there's some visibility in a narrowing of this inventory gap over time.

Dana McNabb: We are pleased with our Pet performance — we finished the year with retail sales up 1%, growing share on our Life Protection Formula, on our cat businesses, and seeing a significant improvement in Love Made Fresh. As it comes to our retail sales versus our inventory sell-in, as we've dug deeper, we've seen a consistent headwind from customer mix with our fastest-growing customers — think e-com and mass — carrying significantly less inventory than our traditional customers. That was really the key component of the 2-point gap between our organic sales and our retail sales in Q4. For the full year, our channel sales were up 1%, but organic sales lagged about 4 points. We think it's prudent as we go into next year to assume a low single-digit headwind from retail inventory in fiscal '27, with customer mix being the key contributing factor.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Rob Dickerson with BTIG.

Robert Dickerson: Maybe I'll try to recap and summarize a bit on the organic sales outlook for the year. Jeff said focus on dollar share, price/mix must be more of a contributor, flat category assumption, better than Q1, and the guide is still actually down year-over-year. So is it fair to assume volumes will still be down for the year? And I don't hear any commentary around turning positive in the back half. Maybe that's just a function of this being the year where you're shifting that mix to get to a point where you can actually grow volumes later, and that in some core brands, there might be a little bit more volume contraction necessary to find that base. And then when we get into '28, that's the hope along with the cost savings for volume to come back.

Jeffrey Harmening: There's a lot in there, you summarized a lot of what we're doing. I would back it up to the first principle, which is that our job is to improve our organic sales trajectory and to do that profitably. All the things you just mentioned are in service to that, as well as the transformation we also discussed. We made improvements in household penetration and our base business this year. The next step in that evolution is really to improve the trajectory of our organic sales and then do it profitably. That's what we're looking to do this year, against the backdrop of a consumer environment which we still think will be stressed. Our focus is squarely on improving upon what we had last year, and we feel like we have the plans in place to do that, both on the sales line and HMM as well as the transformation.

Robert Dickerson: You've made a fair amount of portfolio adjustments over the past 3 to 5 years, you're going to deleverage with excess cash. Would you say you feel great about the portfolio and don't foresee anything in the near term? Or are you still looking at certain parts of the portfolio strategically?

Jeffrey Harmening: We're very proud of our portfolio shaping over the last number of years — we've been effective and disciplined at it. Whether additions like Blue Buffalo or Tiki, or divestitures like Yogurt or what we've announced with Brazil or our Häagen-Dazs shops, we've been very disciplined on both sides. We have an "Always On" capability when it comes to M&A, and we haven't really changed how we think about M&A or capital allocation. But what I would say is that our focus now is squarely on organic sales growth and doing it profitably. To that extent, given where we are on the balance sheet, our bar for M&A is going to be very, very high, specifically on the acquisition front. While we haven't changed how we think about it, the bar for portfolio shaping is high and our #1 priority is getting back to organic sales growth and doing that profitably.

Operator: We have reached the end of the Q&A session. Jeff Siemon for closing remarks.

Jeff Siemon: Thank you, Samantha. I appreciate everyone's good discussion this morning. Thanks for the engagement. I know we didn't quite get to everyone's questions, so please don't hesitate to reach out for any follow-ups. I wish everybody a great summer. Go U.S. National team today, and we'll talk to you all soon. Thank you very much.

Operator: This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.