Carlos A. Abrams-Rivera
U.S. Zone President at Kraft Heinz
Let me -- thank you, Pamela, for the question. I imagine a lot of those questions you had in there. I think there were three accounted, but they were related to the U.S., so I'll take it. I guess for me, I would say, yes, first of all, the way I think about the business is we want to make sure we continue to drive household penetration and repeat rates, which we are doing. And -- well, there were some short-term share pressures in during the back-to-school as really the demand really outgrew our capacity in a few categories. Over the long term, the fact that we are driving household penetration and repeat rates shows the strength of our portfolio and interest of our business and how we are actually managed through all that. But I would say, yes, to that. I'm very much focused on making sure that we win by maximizing the controllables. And our recipe for winning is to essentially consistently focus on satisfying the consumer needs better than anyone else, and it doesn't matter exactly what's happening at this particular moment. As we go forward, I'll tell you, I see three specific advantage that for us, it's going to be our play in which we're going to win. We have continued to renovate our portfolio. We have controlled the cost in our brands so that we can optimize the value with our -- for our consumers.
And really, that is the best recipe for us to kind of withstand against anyone else coming, any competition that comes in. And essentially, what we're doing, we are increasing the equation of what it's worth buying for at the shelf. The second advantage we have also is we're making sure that we are differentiated at each rung of a price ladder, whether it's entry to mainstream, to premium, so that consumers can stay within our franchise even as their circumstances might change. And if you think about Mac & Cheese, we've got everywhere from an Easy Mac to the original version for consumers. And then the third piece I would say is, we are transforming our portfolio through all these divestitures that actually have significantly reduced our private label exposure. So we have continued to renovate and manage our cost.
We have continued to bring -- making sure that we have differentiated products within our categories, no matter what the circumstances of the consumers are. And we have a portfolio that is much reduced versus private label. And frankly, we continue to see opportunities to capture profitable growth, focusing on our consumer platforms. So we are executing with excellence and leveraging this broad renovation, innovation and the rest of creating that our teams are doing. I think, Pamela, you also spoke -- a part of your question dealt about the supply chain constraints that we're seeing. I think the way I would look at it is across the industry, we are seeing a supply chain that is being tested on a daily basis. But what I will say is our supply chain team has been very agile, taking advantage of our global scale. We're showing agility in labor, in manufacturing, in logistics.
And I'll give you some examples of what I mean. We are reducing the amount of time to hire and significantly increase the applicant pool by leveraging new digital tools at Kraft Heinz. We are improving the flexibility in terms of the materials that are available with really an ownership mindset across sales, procurement and manufacturing. And those things will change in our plans, 39 of them across the U.S., sometimes on a weekly basis. And then in logistics, we've actually increased the throughput on warehouses by shifting more of how we operate 24/7 and increasing the automation since the pre-pandemic time. So having said that, I will tell you that we do have a good line of sight of continuing to improve our customer service levels as we move forward. And because, frankly, restoring the top-tier customer service to the pre-pandemic level is a continued focus for us and entire team. And thanks for your question, Pamela.
