Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Glanbia's Liam Hennigan's 2024 Interim Management Statement call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one-one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one-one again. Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Liam Hennigan, Group Secretary and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the Glanbia, Liam Hennigan Q3 2024 Interim Management Statement call. During today's call, the directors may make forward-looking statements. These statements have been made by the directors in good faith based on the information available to them up to the time of their approval of the Interim Management Statement. Due to the inherent uncertainties, including both economic and business risk factors underlying such forward-looking information, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Directors undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made on today's call, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I'm now handing the call over to Hugh McGuire, CEO of Glanbia plc.
Thank you, Liam. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Glanbia Liam Hennigan Q3 2024 Interim Management Statement call and presentation. On today's call, I will provide an overview of our performance for the first nine months of the year, and I'm joined by my colleague, Mark Garvey, who will cover the financials and outlook. At the end of the presentation, we will be happy to take your questions. I'm pleased to report that the Group delivered a good performance with strong volume growth across the Group's portfolio of better nutrition brands and ingredients. In GPN, we continue to see good consumer demand for our performance and healthy lifestyle brands with continued revenue growth in the third quarter. We're particularly pleased with the continued growth and momentum in Optimum Nutrition and Isopure, which both delivered double-digit volume growth in the period.
In Nutritional Solutions, we also saw good customer demand across the end-use markets, driving an acceleration in volume growth across our premix and protein solutions businesses. The Group is in a strong financial position, and we remain focused on shareholder returns. In terms of capital allocation, year-to-date, we've returned EUR 88.6 million to shareholders via share buybacks, and we've completed the acquisition of Flavor Producers in April. Today, we're announcing that the Board has approved a further EUR 50 million share buyback authority to commence in early 2025. We are also announcing the separation of our nutritional businesses into two new segments. In 2025, the Group will operate three segments: Performance Nutrition, Health and Nutrition, and Dairy Nutrition. The new structure is designed to further simplify our business and position ourselves for the next phase of growth.
As part of this change in our operating model, we are commencing a group-wide transformation program, which will allow us to realign the Group's functions to support the three segments to fund and drive growth. I will speak more about this shortly. Looking ahead to the remainder of 2024, we continue to focus on driving growth across our portfolio of leading brands and ingredient solutions. Based on the current market environment and expectations for the remainder of the year, we reiterate our full-year guidance of 5%-8% growth in adjusted earnings per share. Turning to GPN, revenue grew by 1.7%, driven by volume growth of 3.2%, a price decline of 4%, and the 53rd week impact delivering an increase of 2.5%. We're pleased with volume growth, which was driven by our Optimum Nutrition and healthy lifestyle nutrition brands.
The pricing was largely driven by our promotional activity and some specific tactical pricing initiatives, where we have seen a good volume uplift. From a regional perspective, Americas revenue was broadly in line with last year due to the weight management headwind and increased competition. Excluding the weight management impact, Americas revenue growth would be 5%. Our international business delivered growth of 4.7%, driven by strong volume growth in the Optimum Nutrition brand across key markets. This was supported by increased distribution, marketing investment, and the scaling of our market capabilities. Optimum Nutrition continues its strong global momentum, delivering like-for-like growth of 6.4% and double-digit volume growth. As a leading brand in the category, we're focused on driving recruitment, broadening the brand's appeal through education, broad-reach media, and highly visible partnerships. We continue to grow our household penetration and expand the brand's physical availability.
We're currently in the process of executing new distribution with FDM retailers as they reset their shelf sets, dedicating more space to the brand. This commenced in the third quarter and will continue into the fourth quarter. During the third quarter, we also began rolling out the new packaging design in U.S. retail. The new design features an enlarged Optimum Nutrition logo, a call-out of protein in the product descriptor highlighting the product benefit, and a bigger flavor call-out in front of pack as we broaden our appeal to new consumers. We've also launched a number of line extensions in the quarter across our protein and energy offerings, including new flavors of our flagship Gold Standard protein powder, creatine, and Amino Energy. U.S. consumption grew by 1.1% as we continue to see some softness in the specialty channel.
Excluding the specialty channel, consumption growth in the last 13 weeks would be approximately mid-single digits. Our healthy lifestyle portfolio of Isopure, think!, and Amazing Grass brands delivered like-for-like revenue growth of 3.5%, delivering a strong growth in the third quarter and 13-week consumption growth of 1.2%. We're particularly pleased with the performance of Isopure, where we continue to attract new consumers to the brand. We're driving reach as we invest behind the brand with our Add Less, Do More campaign, and we're seeing strong growth in household penetration as new consumers enter the category. In the fourth quarter, we will begin shipping the newly renovated Isopure product, which includes new branding and formulation. The new design significantly increases the Isopure branding, drives appetite appeal, and connects the different product offerings under the Isopure family.
The new formulation delivers an improved taste profile using our own NutraShield microencapsulation technology from Nutritional Solutions. As we look to the rest of 2024 and into next year, we remain focused on driving growth. Despite lapping a strong fourth quarter comparator from 2023 and a highly competitive landscape, we expect to deliver good growth in the fourth quarter. This will be driven by distribution, including the increased distribution in FDM and new product launches as we expand our energy offering. As we've outlined earlier this year, we are seeing whey, a key input in GPN, trend upwards and hitting record prices as we go into 2025.
Mark will speak further about these trends we're seeing, but I would like to highlight the dairy market's moving cycles, which we've navigated in the past, and with new supply coming online in late 2025, we expect that whey prices will reduce through the second half of 2025 and into 2026. Performance nutrition is a great category. We're continuing significant consumer interest. We'll continue to invest in increasing brand awareness and penetration while executing necessary short-term pricing actions, leveraging our revenue growth management tools and cost management initiatives to navigate the spike in whey input costs next year and be well positioned when those costs reverse. Moving to our second growth platform of Nutritional Solutions, where pro forma revenue grew by 14.4% in the first nine months.
This was driven by a 5% increase in volume, a 0.9% decline in price, a 7.2% increase driven by the impact of acquisitions, and a 3.1% increase driven by the 53rd week. The volume growth was driven by good performance in our premix and protein solutions businesses, while the price decline was driven largely by the impact of year-over-year market pricing. Demand remains strong in our priority end-use markets, with sustained demand from customers for vitamin and amino fortification and high-protein healthy snacking. We're seeing good growth in the functional beverage category and international, particularly EMEA, and good demand for our high-protein crisp offerings into bar and cereal applications as consumers continue to seek higher protein in a range of convenient formats. We continue to invest in innovation and capacity to ensure we have the best solutions to meet the growing needs of consumers and customers.
The recently acquired flavors and bioactive businesses are performing well with the integrations on track. As I mentioned earlier, today we've announced a change in our operating model from 2025, where we will separate Glanbia Nutritionals into two new segments to allow greater focus on our higher margin growth priorities, further simplifying our business and better serving our growing customers and end-use markets. The Health and Nutrition segment will comprise primarily the premix solutions and flavors platforms and will focus on growth priority end-use markets such as vitamins, minerals, and supplements, active lifestyle nutrition, and functional beverages. This is a business we've grown organically and via acquisitions in recent years to become a scale operator. We are the product development partner for both established and emerging brands with our ability to combine flavors with key functional ingredients and application science, providing a unique proposition for our customers.
We will continue to target acquisitions to further grow this segment. The Dairy Nutrition segment will combine our current U.S. cheese and Nutritional Solutions protein portfolios. This platform is largely one integrated manufacturing footprint with a high supply and operational interdependency and is also the route to market for our joint venture supply of whey and cheese ingredients. This segment provides a scale leadership position in dairy as the number one producer of whey protein isolate and the number one producer of American-style Cheddar cheese. As a leader in the industry, we will deliver differentiated expertise in Dairy Nutrition underpinned by key competitive advantages such as our scale and protein innovation capabilities. This platform will seek to optimize performance through operational efficiency and advanced dairy insights.
This new structure will provide enhanced visibility on the impact of Whey across our ingredients and consumer businesses and give better visibility to the different margin and growth profiles of both businesses. As a result of the change in our operating model, we're also commencing a group-wide transformation program designed to support the next phase of growth. This is part of a continuous evolution journey we've been on the last few years, and the goals of the program will be to support the setting up of our new fit-for-purpose operating model, accelerate our digital transformation, enhancing our capabilities to enable growth, and identify opportunities to enhance productivity and drive efficiencies across our operations. I'm confident that our new structure and transformation program will drive future opportunities, and I'm looking forward to talking to you in more detail about these early next year.
With that, I will hand over to Mark.
Thanks, Hugh, and good morning to everyone on the call. The Group has a strong balance sheet, and at the end of the third quarter, net debt was $620 million. We have committed facilities of over $1.3 billion, with an average maturity of over four years. At year-end, we expect net debt to EBITDA to be approximately one times. Capital expenditure, both strategic and business-sustaining for the year, is expected to be between $80 million and $90 million, with investments primarily related to new systems implementations, capacity enhancements, and acquisition integration. The Group is currently in the process of executing a €100 million share buyback program, and year-to-date, 5.24 million shares have been repurchased and canceled at an average price of €16.90, a total of €88.6 million completed so far.
The Board has approved an additional €50 million buyback program, which is expected to commence in early 2025. As Hugh has outlined, we are creating two new operating segments from 2025: Health and Nutrition and Dairy Nutrition. We will publish 2023 and 2024 pro forma financial information for these new segments in conjunction with our year-end results in February. For reference, for full year 2023, the new Dairy Nutrition segment on a pro forma basis, reflecting revised commercial arrangements with our joint venture, would have had revenues of approximately $1.3 billion, with high single-digit EBITDA margins, and the new Health and Nutrition segment on a pro forma basis, including the acquisition of Flavor Producers, would have had revenues of approximately $600 million, with high teens EBITDA margins. Also announced today is a group-wide transformation program focused on enhancing productivity and driving efficiencies across the Group.
In early 2025, we will provide an update on the expected costs and benefits associated with this program. Now turning to Outlook, and today we are reiterating our 2024 guidance. In GPN, revenue growth is expected to be between 2% and 5% as previously guided, including the 53rd week, with mid-single-digit volume-driven revenue growth expected in the fourth quarter. Pricing investment for the full year is expected to be between 3% and 3.5%, with somewhat reduced promotional activity in the fourth quarter. Optimum Nutrition is expected to deliver high single-digit volume growth for the full year. We continue to expect GPN EBITDA margins to be in the 16%-16.5% range compared to 15.7% in 2023. At our half-year results in August, we had procured whey up to January 2025, with higher costs evident.
Whey procurement has now been completed through April of 2025, and we continue to navigate an environment of higher whey costs, which we expect will peak towards the end of the first half. We expect whey costs will reduce during the second half of 2025, as we have seen in prior cycles, facilitated by capacity shifting into high-end whey production, as well as additional whey supply coming to market in late 2025 and into 2026. We are utilizing all available actions to mitigate short-term inflation through pricing and revenue growth management actions, focusing on productive marketing spend and an overall targeted approach to managing costs. We will provide more detail in our 2025 Outlook at our full year results in February, but at this point, we expect full year 2025 GPN EBITDA margins to be broadly in line with second half 2024 EBITDA margins.
Nutritional Solutions volume growth is expected to be between 3% and 5% for the year, and EBITDA margins are expected to be between 18% and 19%. We are seeing some benefit from higher whey prices in Protein Solutions in the second half and would expect that to continue into the first half of 2025. Operating cash flow conversion is expected to be over 80% for the year, and we are reiterating our adjusted earnings per share guidance of 5% to 8% growth for the full year. And with that, Hugh and I would be happy to take your questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one-one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.
We will now take our first question from the line of Patrick Higgins from Goodbody. Please go ahead.
Sorry, Patrick Higgins here. Good morning, everyone. A couple of questions on my side, if that's okay. Firstly, just on GPN, I think at the H1 point, you noted your distribution gains, and you mentioned in the presentation there just in terms of distribution gains for healthy lifestyle and ON. Could you just give a bit more color on how that's progressed? And was it always going to be a Q4 kind of ramp-up in terms of delivery on that new distribution points? The second question then I have is just around the performance in international markets for GPN. It looks a little bit softer versus H1 when you strip out the extra trading week. Maybe just a little bit more color on performance across your core kind of international markets, please.
Sure. Good morning, Patrick. Thank you for that. Just speaking to your several questions, just speaking to GPN and distribution gains, the simple answer is yes. The new distribution points we called out would have been 30% on ON and higher than on an ACGR for healthy lifestyle. And there was really a transition across the broader food, drug, mass. We've seen some of that go in across quarter three or quarter four. There's also, just in terms of a process transition, we're shifting from bags as well to pouches. And that's just in terms of how the retailers deal with that transition as well as taking a little bit of time. But overall, we're happy with progress, and you'll see the benefit of that as we go into quarter four.
In terms of international markets, probably quite similar to what we said at half-year results, Patrick, continue to see strong growth in India, in China, in the Middle East markets, which we called out before. Actually seeing good growth in continental Europe as well. The pullback for us really is where we see the most competitive pressure is some of our bigger markets, such as tier one markets such as the U.K. And then, as we called out, we'll continue to see competitive pressures in the online channel as well, primarily in Europe. But overall, happy with the volume growth of just under 5%.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of David Roux from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question, David.
Morning, gentlemen. Yeah, so just a couple from my side.
On GPN, I think the implied growth for Q4 to reach the bottom end of your guidance is low to mid-single digits. Could you perhaps just talk about what gives you the confidence you can achieve that relative to what you saw in Q3? The second question is just what was the like-for-like growth for SlimFast for the nine months? And then just lastly, on the share buyback, the €15 million incremental buyback, should we see this as a top-up to your usual sort of €100 million per year, or is this just slightly brought forward in terms of your usual cadence? Thank you.
Good morning, David. Just in terms of your questions in terms of GPN, yeah, we expect to have mid-single digit volume growth in the fourth quarter. As Hugh said, some of this is timing in terms of distribution coming through.
We expect the promotional activity to be moderated into the fourth quarter. We did see more pricing than you might have expected in the third. A third of that actually is related to tactical price reductions on things like creatine, where we're very comfortable with the margin profile, just passing that back to folks. So for us, that's rather promotion. It's more of a passback on input costs. So we feel fairly confident in terms of where we get to for the full year. In terms of SlimFast, I think what Hugh pointed out was ex-SlimFast, our growth in North America was 5% for the overall period. So from that perspective, that gives you a view as to where SlimFast was coming out.
On the share buyback program, again, you should regard that as a top-up by the Board, actually, in terms of how we came to the end of the year. Very comfortable with our cash flow program, and obviously fits nicely into our overall capital allocation as well.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Sloane from Barclays. Please go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for taking the questions, everyone. Just the first one, in terms of the reorganization, would you expect that to have any impact on customers of NS who might be buying both protein and some of the functional ingredients and flavors from you? Or is this more about how you're internally organizing and setting up and shouldn't have too much impact from a customer point of view? That's the first one.
And the second one, I guess in a world with potentially more tariffs, how are you thinking about the GPN footprint internationally? Do you have sufficient production outside of the U.S., or could this be something that you look to adapt to situations change on this front? Thanks.
Morning, Alex. Thank you for the questions. You kind of answered the question on reorganization. In reality, that's around bringing focus on two parts of our business, our dairy business and our Health and Nutrition business, but with different scale, different margin profiles. And it's really around prioritizing our growth opportunities. In terms of how we engage a customer, it still will be one face to customer. We'll be working on that operating model and how we present that over the course of the next few months.
But the goal of this is to bring absolute focus and prioritization around our growth opportunities. It isn't to duplicate costs. So we'll be setting that structure up as we move into 2025. In terms of tariff question, yeah, look, I suppose what I'd say is we're all waking up to some interesting news this morning. We've been here before. So in terms of our overall global manufacturing footprint, we clearly reacted to tariffs back in 2017 and 2018 by moving our manufacturing to local manufacturing for GPN and the likes of India and China. We have manufacturing for Europe, and obviously our scale of manufacturing in the U.S. is the same. On the GN side, we continue to look at local manufacturing opportunities.
And I think when we think about synergies and opportunities across the broader group as part of the transformation project, that's an area we'll be looking at too as well. It's how do we facilitate more kind of vertical integration of our operations across some of these international markets. But what I'd say generally is part of being a global business is we react to these tariff changes if they're to materialize over the course of the next year or two.
Thanks very much, Hugh.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Nicola Tang from BNP Paribas Exane. Please go ahead, Nicola.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. The first is on GPN margins into next year.
I think if I caught you, you said 2025 margins should be in line with the second half of this year, which I think implied by your guidance is around 15%. Firstly, did I hear that right? And secondly, given your comments on inputs easing in the back of next year based on the new capacities coming online, can you just run us through some of the other moving parts, which mean that you won't necessarily see any sequential change in margin versus H2 this year? And then link to that as a kind of longer-term question with the measures that you're looking to implement with this group-wide transformation program. How should we think about the mid-term profitability in GPN going forward?
And then as a kind of second question on our capital allocation, Mark, I listened to your recent podcast interview, and you were talking about this focus on cash generation and also how to use cash. Obviously, we've seen you announce this incremental buyback today, but you also talked about M&A. So I was wondering if you could give us some color on the M&A pipeline at the moment. Thanks.
Sure. Here's Nicola. Thank you for those questions. And hopefully, I'll get them all in order in terms of how you asked them. Firstly, in terms of GPN margins, I mean, your math is reasonable based on what I said. It is early. I mean, obviously, I said we've procured whey up until April. We do expect things to peak after half year, and normal cycles would expect that to come back down.
I think that will be our perspective at this point. And based on how we see that progression, we feel fairly comfortable giving you that view in terms of what next year's margins should look like. Clearly, there'll be a first half, second half view on that, but that's how we would think about it. In terms of the levers on that, clearly, we've got a number of things we can look to in terms of pricing, and we are looking at that right now as we head into next year, particularly in some of our markets. We obviously have ways to look at trade and promotional expense as well. We'd expect that to be more ameliorated, frankly, as we sort of have a different cost environment. We have some ability to work on marketing as well.
I mean, we have marketing right now at about double digits, actually, in terms of percentage of sales. And there is some flexibility in that as we sort of look at particularly working marketing that we can use. So we have a number of levers that we're comfortable that we can use to ensure that we're comfortable with that margin guide that we gave you. I'm going to let Hugh talk about the transformation, but I'll just come back to capital allocation. In terms of capital allocation, I would say, yes, very comfortable here in terms of our ability to do the buyback clearly, the board very much supporting us doing that. In terms of M&A, we clearly have capacity of $1.3 billion in terms of facilities, net debt EBITDA of one times at the end of this year.
We have flexibility to go up to three, three and a half times, so again, a lot of capacity here as we look to grow our businesses. That is clearly a focus, and as Hugh announced the changes, even in the segmentation today, you could imagine that sort of clearly shows the focus that we will have there too. From the M&A pipeline perspective, we continue to look at opportunities in our, I would say, GPN area as well as in our Health and Nutrition area, and we have a number of things we continue to look at. As you know, it depends how processes work out as to whether there will be a specific thing that happens, but clearly very much on our agenda, and we have the capacity to do that.
Yeah, actually, maybe just add to Mark one comment on whey protein as well.
The fundamental driver of pricing on these input costs is demand. We're obviously competing in strong categories with strong consumer demand and lots of competitive activity. So demand is what's fundamentally driving us. It'll take till kind of late 2025, early 2026 for supply to catch up. We have visibility on supply coming online, which that's one of the reasons it gives us comfort, particularly at the back end of the year and into 2026, that we'll see some of these prices alleviate. And Mark spoke to all the different levers that we've been working on to navigate our way through what are record prices for high-end whey protein.
I think the other thing just to say is, obviously, the benefit of the group is we'll see some of that positivity in the Dairy Nutrition side of the business with good volume and good pricing in the quarter as well as they meet the demand for increased protein. In terms of transformation, I suppose the simple answer, our major guidance will be back to you next year on that. We'll be working our way through the transformation project, the separation, obviously, a lot of work there. And we've committed to be back to you in H1 of next year with more mid-term guidance on what we see as the opportunity from that transformation project.
All right. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Karel Zoete from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I have a couple of questions. The first one is a follow-up on where you ended with regards to the remark on the ability to take price. In terms of price elasticity, as you see it, has anything changed compared to the previous upcycles in whey, or do you expect more or less the same responses by the consumer and competitors?
Then the other question is on Nutritional Solutions. Clearly, very good momentum here. What do you see in terms of costs here from the non-dairy side? Particularly, vitamins have gone up a lot. And then the third point, which we don't often discuss here, given the importance of whey prices, the other cost of goods sold elements here, I think particularly about freight, but also some others, have been quite inflationary. Is this going to be a source where you may have efficiencies ahead looking at the transformation program, or how's that generally looking? Thank you.
Yeah, good morning, Karel. Look, in terms of pricing, I think what we're evaluating at the moment is all of our levers across the P&L. So what I would say, actually, what's different to the price increases over 2021, 2022, where we put through more than 30% price increases on three brands, obviously significant. I think what's changed now is consumer and consumer affordability. So we're doing a lot of work on price architecture, revenue growth management. So our pricing will be a mixture of shelf price increase, reduction of trade, looking at our pack sizes as well, just in terms of dollar affordability or euro affordability. So there's a lot of work on that. I think at this point in time, we would have to assume if we price increase, we'll have similar elasticity in the past. I have no view to change my mind on that.
And the last point around competitors, I think the competitive environment continues to be strong. We've seen scale players come into the market as well. But we are starting to see price increases, particularly in international, but also starting in the US, given the scale of inflation of the protein raw material. I think in terms of I think your kind of question two and three, specific to Nutritional Solutions or our Nutritional Solutions and ultimately our Health and Nutrition businesses, potential increased costs. Look, we'll navigate that as we go through next year. We're currently in the budget process. We wouldn't be seeing anything of the scale that we're seeing in our dairy protein input cost increase. And freight, yeah, absolutely. I think that's where you will see opportunity.
I think that's the areas we'll be looking at in terms of synergies, whether it be global procurement, freight, etc., across the group, and how do we think about that maybe to drive synergies.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Cathal Kenny from Davy. Please go ahead.
Morning all. Thanks for taking my questions. A couple of quick ones. Firstly, any comment on inventory within GPN North America? That's my first question. Secondly, on NS, obviously exceptionally strong Q3, just how you're thinking of the Q4 volume picture in the context of that performance. And finally, Hugh, on transformation, is the goal here to reinvest any of the productivity or efficiency gains back into the business rather than letting it drop through to the bottom line? They're my three questions. Thank you.
Good morning, Cathal. I'll answer the second and third one.
I think in terms of, and Mark first, I think in terms of transformation, yes, that would be the goal. This is around funding growth, but also potentially funding opportunity in terms of across the P&L. So we'll be back to you in the new year with better clarity on what the goals and objectives are. But primarily, the goal of the transformation project is prioritizing our growth initiatives, getting the operating model, fit-for-purpose operating model, as I called it, to drive that growth supported by digital transformation and efficiency and synergy. So we would be looking, as part of that, to free up funds to be able to invest behind our growth opportunities. In terms of nutrition, yeah, very happy with quarter three, very strong, particularly in dairy, but also in our premix solutions business. In terms of quarter four, we're up against a strong comp last year.
That's the primary reason for a little bit of conservatism in quarter four. It's just comp from last year.
Yeah. Cathal, I would say from an inventory perspective, relatively normalized in North America right now. As you know, customer to customer can vary, but overall, we would say it's pretty normal.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Baumgartner from Mizuho Securities. Please go ahead, John.
Good morning. Thanks for the question. Maybe just to revisit the transformation program and specifically that reference to funding the next phase of growth. I think you've been comfortable with the existing investment levels in the business. I guess along those lines, how do we think about that incremental spending?
Are you at this point revisiting your assumptions about the appropriate spending to drive growth, or is this now a larger focus on R&D and maybe non-customer-facing expenses?
I would say, John, good morning. Look, it gives us an opportunity here because of the fact that we've just announced this reorganization that we could take a relook. Right now, we would be very comfortable. We've got the right investment across the board in terms of what we're doing from an R&D or from a marketing perspective, for example, in all businesses. However, I think by sort of focusing Dairy Nutrition the way we're sort of talking about it and focusing Nutritional Solutions, it allows us to push growth and allows us to see across group where there might be opportunities for us to, A, increase margin and, B, fund additional investment, which can further drive growth.
So that's how we're thinking about it. We will come back to you with more detail on this by the time we get to our results in February and just give you more flavor for it. But that is how we're thinking about it.
Thanks, Mark. And then just a follow-up. You highlighted the benefits in H2 from the distribution growth in FDM. And I'm curious, just given the nutrition categories expansion across that channel these last few years, across the product formats and the additional brands coming into the category, how do you think about the desire or the need for retailers at this point to sort of rationalize some of these lower-performing SKUs on the shelf? I mean, is there an expectation for any movement with rationalization that benefits your brands and the velocities as well as distribution going forward?
Yeah, it's a great question, John.
I think, first and foremost, I'd say there's probably different questions. It's different answers by different regions. I think you'd be specifically talking about the U.S. market, and we continue to see expansion of shelf space. But as you'll know yourself, when you go into your local grocery store or mass shop, it can be fairly chaotic. So I think there's an opportunity there, which we're working on as well, is how we think about that in terms of the broader category, how we think about how we present ourselves to customer. So I think there is an opportunity. I think it's not per se a land grab, but it's a competitive category because it's a growth category. So we've seen lots of new entrants. But I do think the category itself and some of the smaller brands, there is opportunity to consolidate across the category.
And I think so when you look at Europe per se as well, we're actually starting to see that as well. And in fact, some of our wins in grocery in Europe has been with a broad range of Optimum Nutrition products, kind of a fuller brand block. And that's the way we're moving as well. And we've got to call that a half year. But I think generally, you look at, it's a growth category. You've got lots of competition, and it'll be, it's like any category with lots of competition. There'll be winners and losers over the next number of years.
Thank you. Thanks, Mark.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Deirdre Mullaney from Deutsche Bank. Please ask your question, Deirdre.
Morning, all. Thanks for taking my questions. So the first one is on the 3% like-for-like for the healthy lifestyle brands.
I'm just wondering, can you comment on how the market shares are progressing for these brands? And then secondly, on the split of the GN side of the business, what are the category growth rates that we should be expecting for the Health and Nutrition business and then the Dairy Nutrition business as well? Thanks.
Yeah, good morning, Deirdre. I'll take the second question first. Sorry, first question first, 3% like-for-like. Very happy with the kind of acceleration in Healthy Lifestyle in quarter three and our like-for-like good shipments. And that's primarily driven by Isopure. So strong double-digit growth in Isopure. When you look at our consumption numbers in North America, they're back a little bit. That'll be primarily Amazing Grass, which we've called out a half year result. It just continues to see challenges within that category, significant competitor investment and spend.
But and then our think! brand within that would be flat year on year in terms of consumption, but good opportunities to go into the back end of the year. So in terms of, I think Mark kind of referenced, we didn't talk about growth rates. We probably have more clarity on that for you early next year when we break out Health and Nutrition and Dairy N utrition in more detail for you.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Once again, to ask a question, please press star one-one on your telephone. Next is a follow-up question from the line of Karel Zoete from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes, sir. Yes, good morning. I want to come back to the capital allocation and then, yeah, ability to do M&A.
Is the area of sports nutrition, performance nutrition still a priority given the strong momentum you have, particularly with the two big protein brands today? Are you still looking to do M&A here and potentially internationalize that business further? Thank you.
Yeah, good. The line for Karel is yes. Our priority businesses now for M&A would be our Health and Nutrition segment and our performance nutrition segment. And sports nutrition continues to be a growth category. Optimum Nutrition is our priority brand globally. Isopure has significant opportunity for us to use the market. But we continue to evaluate broader adjacencies and opportunities, whether it be format or product type in this space. And we would be ambitious for acquisitions across both of those segments within Glanbia.
Thank you.
Thank you. I'm showing no further question. I'll now turn the conference back to the CEO, Mr. Hugh McGuire, for his closing remarks.
Just to say thank you very much for your questions and look forward to chatting to you early next year for the results.
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.