Jeffrey Harmening
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer at General Mills
Yeah. Let me start in a little bit different place and I'll work my way back maybe to your question. I would say one of the shifts we've seen since the beginning of the pandemic is more food consumption at home. And so food consumption at home is a couple of points higher than it was going into the pandemic. So roughly about 86% of food is served at home. And the reason for that is because food served at home is such a great value and it's about 4 times less expensive to eat at home than it is to eat out at a restaurant on average. And so as Americans have felt the challenges with inflation, part of the way they deal with value is that they eat food at home rather than out. And obviously, we were a great source of value when it comes to that.
That's actually probably one of the biggest shifts. Interestingly, private label shares are about the same now as where they were before the pandemic. And the categories that we're in, private label is about 10% of the category. In fact, they're down 10 basis points from when the pandemic began. And overall, food and beverage is about 19 points. And so we haven't actually seen a big shift when it comes to value there. When it comes to specific categories, one of the things I'm most pleased with our performance over the last few years is our ability to hold our gross share in half of our categories over that time and so it's broad based.
And we've seen some big gains in our business, like Pillsbury refrigerated dough, which has done quite well in meals and baking over time, the same with fruit snacks. Both of those businesses are up 60% over the last few years and we've consistently gained market share in those businesses. Obviously, we haven't in Pillsbury this year because private label is getting back on shelf, but over the course of time. So we feel really good about that. We've had some struggles in bars as you well know. But I can say one of the things I'm pleased with as we look at our business now, Nature Valley is back to growing share and it was even before one of our competitors had a big recall.
So it's not a recall induced kind of activity. We've had some good new product innovation in Nature Valley. Our marketing is working in Nature Valley. I think we shared some of that at Cagney. And so that's one category where we had struggled where we feel like we're getting a little bit of momentum and then on yogurt too. It's an area where we have struggled as well, but we has done well. We've got yoplay protein out there right now, which is off to a nice start. But broadly speaking, I would say we haven't seen huge changes category by category in consumption.