Jeff Harmening
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer at General Mills
Yeah. Sure, Andrew. We spent quite a bit of time on this. And it's very clear to us that there are three broad reasons. And so there's not one thing. I mean, there are kind of three and broad reasons for what we see in the marketplace now, especially as one looks at Nielsen trends. The first one, we touched upon this a little bit earlier, but we do see quite a bit of growth in non-measured channels. We're up double digits in NAR, in the first quarter in non-measured channel, for example. And so, that is certainly a piece of why you see Nielsen data as it is.
The second would be that food away from home, not necessarily in a restaurant. Restaurant traffic has been pretty flat. In fact, quick service restaurant traffic has been up. So there's a move toward value and restaurants, but that traffic has remained relatively flat. What has changed is that we've seen a reversion back to people being mobile and more at education, and healthcare, and hotels, and lodging and that sort of thing, which I think is logical. In fact, if you look at the movement data through airports, it's up year-over-year. Now it's only back to pre-pandemic levels, but it's up quite a bit year-over-year. So that would kind of corroborate that thinking. So that's the second reason. And the third is there's probably, as we've seen another kind of recession, the consumer recessionary periods, even though technically, we're not in a recession. Consumer behavior, trying to economize. And so that may be going to smaller sizes and things like that, which in the very short term destocks the pantry, but people aren't eating less. And we don't anticipate that they will be less. In fact, what I would say is as consumers start to get squeezed, what generally happens is people move more at home. And now the cost of eating out is roughly four times what it is eating at home. And so as consumers get more squeezed, and as people get in there [Indecipherable] routines in the fall, we would think that at-home eating will probably pick up a little bit, we'll find out. But that's what we think. And those are the three factors that is very clear to us are driving the current environment.