Jeffrey Harmening
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer at General Mills
Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. That's right. I mean, improving value is really number one mission we have to get competitiveness. If I take a step back and look at this past year, our categories in terms of volume performance and pound performance improved through the first half of the last year, which was -- they were down 2.4% in terms of volume or categories to up 0.5% in the fourth quarter.
And I think that's important because, as we had talked about previously, there are a few events in the back half of our fiscal year which we thought would improve category performance, and they did -- gradually, they did. And that really is the lapping of pricing from a year ago, lapping of SNAP benefits and the on-shelf availability of private label and some other smaller brands. And so that indeed took place. And so the job for us to do now is to increase our level of competitiveness.
And the fact is that inflation has been higher than longer -- higher for longer than many people assumed it would be. Not in food, necessarily. Actually, food inflation is actually coming down. But if you look at the broader macroeconomic environment, we're still seeing inflation of 3% to 4% in the broader environment. So the job to do is create more value for our consumers.
As you rightly point out, that value can take place in a variety of ways. And I guess I would start at the point of brand communication. And the fact of the matter is we will have a meaningful increase in the amount of spending we have on consumer spending next year. You've probably done the math and seen that our productivity levels are higher than what we see for inflation. So our gross margins should be okay. And so the job to do then is to spend the money there wisely.
And we start with brand communication, and so we'll have a meaningful increase. But also, again, some really good news. I start with pet food and Wilderness. We have some new advertising coming up next week. I just saw it yesterday. It's fantastic advertising. We've already gotten Life Protection Formula back to growth and tasteful. So now Wilderness is a job to do in Pet.
If you look at what we're doing in cereal, another big global business for us, we've got great taste news coming in our cereal category. The Kelce brothers are highlighting that in the first quarter, but we've got more coming in the second and third quarter, bringing the Doughboy back after a few years. And private label, they don't have a Doughboy. We do. And not only is he coming back, he's got all kinds of news to share about flakier crust and things like that. So we feel great about that. We've got -- we're sponsoring the Olympics in many countries. And then Totino's has some good marketing. So we feel good about our brand investment.
But also, it comes down to the product themselves. We got really good product news, probably twice the taste news that we did a year ago when -- in our categories, taste is really king. And so whether that's flakier biscuits or cheesier Andy's Mac and Cheese, or fudgier Betty Crocker or brownies or reducing sugar in our kids cereals in K through 12. Those are all kinds of great taste news. And our new product should be up somewhere around the neighborhood of 40%, where we're investing in new product activity and really good ones on our big brand. So Fruity Cheerios in the cereal category, Mott's breakfast bars, which are off to a great start so far this year, as well as Nature Valley lunchbox, which is allergy free that we know the moms really like, Totino's breakfast roll. So we've got really good innovation.
And then there is -- there -- so those are a lot of ways that we can add value, variety packs, things like that. But also, we're increasing our couponing by about 20% or so in the beginning of the year. And we have found, because we have a lot of first-party data, which differentiates us from many other manufacturers. We can target effectively with good ROIs, and not every manufacturer can do that, but we have the ability to do that. So we are increasing our coupon spending and we have the research that tells us that it's highly effective when we do that. So we'll do that. Are there some price points we have to sharpen? There are, but there always are. We talked about in pet food, it's wet pet food. We had to get under a price clip, but we didn't have pricing options in other places. And so we feel good about the amount of value that we will create for consumers. And that really is job number one as we look at next year.
