“The scratch cooking behavior shift we saw a year ago seems to be running its course… Consumers have pivoted back to convenience, which we are capitalizing on in our frozen space… We are more active, as we should be, as the leaders in frozen than just about anybody else in the space, and we’re gaining as a result. So we invested to kind of nudge consumers back to this practice, but we had tremendous confidence that of all the consumer benefit areas we’ve tracked in the last 50 years, the single most unshakable one is the need for convenience. And that’s what we offer with our frozen business.”
— Sean Connolly, president & CEO, Conagra Brands, Q1 2025 earnings call
“We’re starting to realize the benefits from the [technology] work that was done this past year. Members are very excited about being able to check warehouse inventory via the Costco app. And the membership card scanners installed at the front doors have delivered on the goal of speeding up the checkout process… More improvements are currently underway, which should further benefit our business both online and in our warehouses.”
— Ron Vachris, CEO, Costco Wholesale Corp., Q4 2024 earnings call
“We saw early evidence of U.S. restaurant traffic trends improving during the summer months as QSRs stepped up promotional activity and as consumers continued to adjust to the cumulative effect of menu price inflation. However, traffic remained negative. Overall, U.S. restaurant traffic, as well as QSR traffic, in the quarter was down 2% versus the prior year. That’s a sequential improvement from the down 3% that we observed during our fiscal 2024 fourth quarter.”
— Tom Werner, president, CEO, Lamb Weston Holdings, Q1 2025 earnings call
“Our own transformation around the omni proposition has been to enhance efficiency — the way we manage materials, for example, in our own operations; the way that we’re managing energy; and then what we’ve done and continue to do to optimize our network of fulfillment centers, distribution centers, supercenters, neighborhood markets, last-mile delivery, pickup, etc.… That created all kinds of benefits. We’ve talked a lot about these [improvements] in some of our recent calls around lower inventory, which then frees up time for our associates, makes the stores easier to shop for our customers… We’ve been using technology certainly to power all of that, but then also to drive productivity of our associates. So instead of spending time looking around the back room for the item, things are coming already on the pallets and just flow right out to the stores, and it’s the right quantities that we need to sell. Or instead of having to spend a lot of time unloading boxes and so on, we can automate that and then repurpose that associate time to serve the customer.”
— Kathleen McLaughlin, executive vp and chief sustainability officer, Walmart, Goldman Sachs Global Sustainability Forum
“We still don’t see promotions going back to kind of the pre-pandemic levels. So for now, we have modeled some level of improvement but not…significant improvement back to the pre-pandemic levels.”
—Matteo Tarditi, president and CFO, United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), Q4 2024 earnings call
“The declines we previously experienced in the prepared food categories that we participate in like frozen and Asian, which represent a small part of our portfolio, have now stabilized, and we are seeing improved growth. We continue to make progress on total distribution points.”
— Brendan Foley, president and CEO, McCormick & Company, Q3 2024 earnings call
“We have built an incredible, powerful ice cream business. But it’s always been a very clear outlier in our portfolio… Ice cream has a different channel profile. It’s an out-of-home channel business. It’s a cold chain versus an ambient chain. It has higher capital intensity. It has a lower margin structure. It has lower cash conversion. So, basically, we always saw ice cream as a clear outlier in our business. It’s a business also that doesn’t get a lot of benefit from our global presence and our presence in rural areas because it’s a city business… We believe that this is a business [that], to thrive, requires a different owner- ship structure.”
— Fernando Fernandez, CFO, Unilever PLC, Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference 2024
Some quotes have been edited for clarity and conciseness.
