Okay, good morning. If everyone can just take their seats. We're gonna kick off day two of our conference, and we're very happy to welcome back, I should say, Colgate-Palmolive's CEO, Noel Wallace. Over the past four years, Colgate has consistently executed on its investment in innovation, digital, data, and ESG. I'm gonna turn the stage over to Noel for a small presentation, and at the end, I'm gonna come up, and we'll do some Q&A together. Thanks.
Well, thanks, Lauren, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you getting up so early to come and learn about our business a bit. Yeah, it's great to be back in Boston. I trust everyone had a restful and relaxing Labor Day weekend. And for those of you that had kids going back to school, I hope that was a successful launch to the new school year. Speaking of back to school, I'd like to run a new equity spot that we just launched in the U.S. on our Colgate brand.
We think was a very strong quarter for the business and collected a lot of, lot more flexibility to the income statement, and certainly a lot more capability to our income statement. Importantly, our two-year stack was up on organic volume and pricing for the quarter, as well as organic sales. Our gross margins were up 80 basis points, but if you exclude the impact of private label, which came through the Red Collar acquisition that we're still working through, our gross profit was up 150 basis points. And remember, our logistics is in SG&A, and we don't include that in our gross profit calculation. If you include logistics, it would be up another 100 to 150 basis points. So terrific performance on gross margin. That allowed us to continue to accelerate our advertising in the quarter.
Our advertising was up 20%, and importantly, despite the 20% increase in advertising, we delivered double-digit operating profit growth and EPS in line or slightly ahead of consensus, which was terrific for the business. The improved cash income coming through the P&L allowed us to improve cash profits. We've done a lot of work on working capital as well, which I'll talk to a little bit later. So cash flow was up 59%, free cash flow was up, actually 81%. And as you'll see in just a moment, we continue to have nice momentum on our global market shares, particularly in the toothpaste category. The strength of the quarter allowed us to raise our outlook for the year. This is what we discussed in the Q2 call.
We expected our sales now to be at 5%-8%, organic in the 5%-7% range. Gross margin will be up on the year. Likewise, we'll continue to invest in building brand health and market shares, and executing our pricing strategies and volume for the balance of the year, so advertising will be up on both the dollar and a percent of sales basis. Base business EPS expected to be at the high end of mid-single digits now, and grow net income and obviously improved working capital to continue to accelerate cash flow and our capital structure, which will allow us to continue to pay down debt and buy shares back. The strategy is quite consistent with what we've discussed for the last couple of years.
We've continued to really sharpen the execution against the strategy, and that's really gonna be my focus for today. The strategy is driving consistent top-line growth for us. We're leveraging improved capabilities across the organization. I'll talk about the fact that we've been building those capabilities for the better part of about a year and a half. Now we're really in the process of scaling those across the organization. Funding the advertising continues to accelerate the top-line growth of the company. We're very pleased with the execution of our advertising and, more importantly, the capabilities that we're building in that space. Reaccelerating cash flows, I just mentioned, and ultimately, deeply focused on driving TSR for the balance of this year and into 2024. So let me talk about the strategy and why it's working for us.
Consistent top-line growth is what we set out to do in 2019, when we embarked on a new strategy for the company. You've seen 18 straight quarters of growth, at or above our long-term guidance of 3%-5%. Importantly, the quality of that growth has been across all categories in which we currently operate in and across all divisions. Now, if I have growth across all divisions, I wanted to take a moment to highlight Latin America, which is our largest division in terms of sales and in terms of profit. You see the continued acceleration in a very difficult region, where we have very strong brands and our ability to execute pricing in that P&L. Importantly, in the second quarter, we returned to volume growth in Latin America as well, which was terrific to see.
Winning on the ground in Latin America is a lot of things in terms of the capabilities that we bring to the table, but ultimately it's about executing on the ground and doing things that really drive market shares and ultimately volume growth in that business. You can see some of the execution, that we're back to really getting focused behind in terms of driving and accelerating some of our innovation and some of our, our brand equities across that division. We're confident in our growth as we look towards the back half of this year, and that growth will continue. A couple reasons for that: It's really the composition of our portfolio. Our portfolio is everyday-usage products by and large. People buy them every single day. We offer a very flexible portfolio across multiple price tiers.
We'll see our opportunity continue to grow in the premium segment, but we also have strong businesses in the mid-price and the value segment, which allow us to capture the economic needs of consumers all over the world. Low private label penetration by and large in most of our categories, particularly oral care. And obviously, we're supporting our, all of our brands with increased advertising and robust innovation through the back half of this year and into 2024. And importantly, we continue in some of the categories to drive that high brand loyalty with some of the science-based innovation that we bring to the market, which allows us to earn the respect of our professional partners and drive endorsement and recommendations there. Let me talk about leveraging our capabilities.
As I mentioned earlier, we've talked about for the last year and a half, building capabilities, new capabilities for the company moving forward. We're now really scaling these capabilities across the organization. I talked about five in the past. I'll focus today on three, which is our science-led core innovation, getting some of our core businesses back to growth and the opportunities that we see in the premium segment, how we're taking advertising and truly driving efficiency through the P&L, and selecting how we buy our media very differently than we have in the past. And very importantly, through the inflationary period that we've had, our revenue growth management principles have certainly allowed us to deliver consistent pricing.
But more importantly, I think this revenue growth management discipline that we've scaled across the organization is going to allow us to continue to find pricing opportunities as we move forward throughout this year and next. So let's talk about our innovation process. It really starts at Colgate with science. It's a cultural aspect to how we think about our business, and how we plan to the breakthrough in the transformational innovation. It really is a discipline and a rigor that's required across the organization. It's not just hiring a lot of scientists, it's really thinking through the insights required to ensure that our scientists are focused on the opportunities that we see for growth across the world.
You can see some of the great process that we put in place in terms of patents and ultimately delivering more publications in the market that garner us the respect and credibility that we have, and give us the proof points that we use in our advertising. But more importantly is how do we take that science and transfer it into real people-centric innovation? And I think the real difference is that we've reorganized the organization much more around breakthrough and transformational innovation. We were very reliant on line extensions in the past. That wasn't giving our scientists the ability to develop breakthrough ideas, wasn't giving our marketers the ideas to transform and disrupt categories. And we've redesigned the organization around breakthrough and transformational. Likewise, to ensure that we embed that across the organization, we've redesigned our incentive structures as well.
So teams are focused on only not the amount of innovation, which is the scale of it, but the incrementality of the innovation at the same time. So that drives incremental value for us and our retail partners. And you can see some of the success we're having with increased breakthrough and transformational, which we define as H2 and H3 innovation, set up for 2024 and 2025 versus where we were in 2021. A depiction of that is the U.S. Here's our chair to sink strategy, so to speak, which takes the early entry price points in the whitening segment, where we bring consumers into the whitening segment with some of our superior technologies. You see that on the left with our toothpaste and toothbrush at the $4-$10 price points.
Then we're gradually trading them up based on efficacy as they move through on the continuum to the right there. You see our whitening pens that we've launched, which are incremental consumption opportunities for us as we've expanded into that segment, both at the $20-$25 price point. Moving to the right, you see the price points get higher and higher as we deliver more efficacy into the segment, and ultimately, with a take-home product that we sell through our professional partners for $350. Lots of markets we can't use hydrogen peroxide, which is the novel ingredient that we have pioneered over the las five to six years in the whitening segment. It's not allowed in certain percentages, in certain markets around the world, or not even allowed to be used.
So we've developed new technology that continue to provide superior whitening and efficacy in those markets. And since 2022, we've now launched it in 52 markets, which is our MPS Technology, and clearly, that's driving great success for us in the whitening segment around the world. Let me run a spot on some of our whitening advertising that's going on around the world. When people stare at me, I smile out loud. When people stare at my skin, I smile out loud. When people stare at my teeth, I smile out loud. An all-new teeth whitening revolution is here. Visible White O2, supercharged with millions of oxygen bubbles to whiten teeth in just three days. Colgate Visible White O2. They're in a very rapidly growing segment.
You can see some of the great performance we've had here in the top eight markets, where we've basically executed the full spectrum of that innovation. And ultimately, this is driving our global market share. You can see our global market share with quite a nice inflection point relative to where we've been historically, now back up into the 41, approaching the 42% range, which is just terrific for the franchise. It's not just whitening that we've targeted in driving that share, it's ultimately other segments. We're really leveraging our portfolio differently over the last two years.
Where we historically have been very focused on the Colgate equity, we have found that some of our high-end therapeutic brands, particularly European brands like Elmex here on the screen, afford us unique opportunities to dive into new segments and new channels that we weren't otherwise competing as effectively. Great example of that is the pharmacy launch of Elmex in Brazil. You can see the graph there in the middle, that our business is up 75% in the last couple years, year to date, but we've obviously launched it a couple of years ago, where the sensitivity segment is at 14%, and we're the fastest growing brand in the pharmacy segment of sensitivity in Brazil which again, is a terrific accomplishment, given some of the entrenched competitors and the challenge of launching a new brand in a market like that.
But it's been a great success for us. Others are partnerships that we're thinking about very differently. We're trying to drive category growth in new segments, and our partnership with Philips is a great example of that. We partnered with them in Brazil and Mexico, and developing the category very much in the embryonic stages, where the penetration is very low, and working with our trade partners to accelerate category growth and get the market to convert over ultimately to more of an electric toothbrush market and in partnership with Philips. You can see some of the great success we've had there with some of the points on the chart.
Likewise, moving into adjacent segments. In our sunscreen segment, EltaMD, as you know, is the number one brand recommended for dermatologists, by dermatologists here in North America. We've expanded into new forms, sprays, and sticks, and you can see some of the great ratings and reviews that we're getting. Just one of them there at the bottom, which is a five-star review. Again, the uniqueness of this product is the cosmetic elegance it brings to the sunscreen market. It's a very, very unique formulation, which is really the heritage of Elta and why they were so successful getting derm recommendations, because the efficacy was tremendous, in addition to the cosmetic elegance in terms of application, and that's delivered through two new forms that we've introduced in the market as well.
And our best anti-aging sunscreen, excuse me, anti-aging serum, that you see here on the chart, our Pro-Max launch, which has been terrific so far out the door. And for those of you that are into the anti-aging, it's a wonderful product to try. I'm not sure it's in the basket this year, is it? Not in the basket. It's a $250 retail, so it's probably one of the reasons why we didn't include it. But it's a terrific product, and I encourage you all to give it a shot. Moving on to a more mainstream product is Sanex, a big brand for us in Europe, where we've launched a prebiotic concept into the market there, with our advanced skincare technology.
Let me run the ad, 'cause I think the ad brings it to life in a special way, and K/D w hich was the initial Prescription Diet formula that came into the market, launched by Dr. Morris over 55 years ago. We've continued to upgrade that, obviously, with some of our recent launches. Recently, obviously, improving gut health with our microbiome technology. And likewise, for kidney performance, improving kidney performance and reducing urea metabolic toxins in pets' kidneys. We've launched a terrific breakthrough formula here that we think is going to continue to accelerate our Prescription Diet business. In 2021, we announced a significant capital strategy change for Hill's relative to our ability to grow our small pets.
Small pets is the fastest growing part of the pet nutrition segment and the pet market in terms of ownership, and we wanted to ensure that we had technology in place for the foreseeable future to deliver on where we see consumer trends going. One of the first launches we're going to have in the market as a result of that is our Small Oral Care Small and Mini. We had significant oral care benefits in our current technology in terms of dry pet food, but it wasn't significant enough in terms of efficacy for small pets. So we redesigned the kibble completely for small pets in order to allow it to work like a toothbrush effectively and remove unnecessary plaque in dogs and cats' mouths.
You see some of the benefits of that demonstrated here in the package and how we will execute that in market. We're excited about some of the executions there. Moving on to Home Care. We'll be disrupting fabric softener category in our number one market, France, where we have the number one market position with Soupline. This is a solid or a unit dose technology. So moving away from liquid, transporting liquid across country and obviously the significant costing that comes with that. We have finally delivered real efficacy through a soft solid. This has been a challenge for us for many, many years, and we now have something that we think is going to be a terrific breakthrough for that market, and off to a pretty good start already in a very competitive market like France.
And here in the U.S., moving more in the sustainability field, making sure that we can continue to deliver enhanced efficacy while improving the environmental footprint of this product. We're concentrating on Fabuloso, which allows us to use far less plastic, but deliver enhanced efficacy as we move with that product moving forward. Off to a great start so far. And an extraordinarily successful equity in terms of how we've managed it very, very consistently for over 15-20 years, and we brought that into the Fabuloso into the U.S., I think probably about 10-15 years ago, and it's continued to grow year in, year out. Obviously, a strong Hispanic heritage, but now we're growing very much across the general market, and you can see the consistency of execution in terms of the freedom and the fun nature of the brand, and certainly well executed in the advertising that we're using.
Okay, let me move on to advertising. You've clearly seen that we've elevated our focus on advertising in terms of driving brand health, obviously delivering the pricing that we have in the market, and ultimately accelerating sequential volume growth as we move forward through the back half of this year. You can see, obviously, the acceleration of the advertising. Just not getting advertising the sales up, we need to improve the quality of our advertising and ultimately how we buy. We've embarked on a lot of work. Yves talked about it back at CAGNY, in terms of Marketing Mix Modeling, which is how we buy our media and what we decide to spend our media on. We historically were only using marketing mix in some of our key core markets around the world.
We're now up to about 60% of our media spend captured through marketing mix, which allows us to be much more intelligent about where we spend our money, and you can see the ROI that we tend to be getting from that, which is terrific. Then it's ultimately about how we buy our media around the world. With the significant digital transformation occurring in our company and around the world, we've really elevated our focus on digital techniques to make sure that we're securing and buying more efficiently around the world, and then ultimately scaling that efficiency in a more effective way. You can see that we're now in 63 markets with programmatic media, which allows us to be much more targeted and efficient in how we buy our media.
And ultimately, the more we do in programmatic, the more we can scale some of the learnings of that benefit around the world. It's not just how we buy and where we buy, but it's ultimately the content and how we deliver great insights into the market to capture consumers' attention. You talked about that a little bit back in CAGNY as well, but over the last year, we have spent considerable amount of time and investment in training and developing our people to develop better insights in terms of what they're getting from behaviors in the market, and translating those into concepts in advertising that can be executed more effectively around the world.
You see some of the work that we've done there. Ultimately, we're getting much more analytical and programmatic in how we think about the media, and ability to iterate as we see the effectiveness of that spot. On air, we can change live in live time, ultimately, how we think about updating claims and opportunities to create more persuasive advertising, which has been terrific. Ultimately, that leads to brand health, and part of our reflection of brand health is ultimately your brand penetration. As you know, Colgate, according to Kantar, is the number one most penetrated brand in the world. We're in 700 million households, which is the highest penetration of any brand in the world.
We're also the number one most chosen brand in the global health and beauty, and the number three most valuable brand in personal care. So all of that advertising work and innovation, clearly looking to demonstrate improved brand health and ultimately improved usage of our products around the world. Coming back to Latin America, obviously a brand, excuse me, a market where consumers have a lot of choice and disposable income is precious to consumers, and ultimately what brands they choose is a reflection of their loyalty and commitment to the franchise. You can see in Latin America, amongst all brands that compete in CPG there, we're the number two most chosen brand, which again is something that we're very, very proud of. Okay, moving on to Revenue Growth Management.
Obviously, an important point, given the inflationary pressures that we saw over the last year, and likewise will be an important point as we look to continue to find pricing opportunities in the foreseeable future. We spent a lot of time not only about embedding the discipline across the organization and the techniques, but now really automating it and finding tools and technologies to make sure that we drive the efficiency throughout the system, and allow our teams on the ground to make more educated decisions and find pockets of opportunities within their P&Ls to drive more pricing and category growth for their customers.
And you can see across the, across the points here, a lot of really interesting ways that we're looking to embed and scale this, unique technology that we have in terms of proprietary RGM analytics around the world, and making sure that our teams are effectively trained and developed against that. That's allowed us to continue to develop consistent, strong pricing. The second quarter, again, 11%, comping 8.5% last year. Again, I think a reflection of the revenue growth management principles that we have in place. It's not just taking list pricing. You have to get very creative these days to think about opportunities to drive real value to consumers and to our retailers in terms of your ability to take pricing in the category. Okay, moving on to, I think, an important inflection point for the company, which is: How do we drive more leverage to the P&L? We've done a terrific job getting organic sales growth.
We've done a terrific job getting net sales accelerating through the P&L. Now we need to find ways to drive more leverage and monetize that more effectively. And so I wanna talk a little bit about how we're driving driving leverage through the P&L. Part of that was our GPI, which we announced in early 2022. We saw the savings start to come through in the back half of 2022, and we'll see that continue to unfold as we move through the balance of this year. More operating leverage to the P&L. Our overheads continue to come down, so we're really focused on cost containment within the P&L. This obviously includes logistics, as I mentioned earlier, which is in our SG&A line, in our overhead line.
And you can see the great progress we made in that area to drive more leverage through the P&L. Okay, so free cash flow, ultimately, how we look at our capital structure and ultimately the opportunities to invest for future growth and return shareholder value. Cash flow was at 59%, as I mentioned earlier, in the second quarter. This is a big focus for us, and the exciting part of it was it was just not only cash income coming through the P&L, but it was also great discipline behind working capital. Stan Sutula, our new CFO, has done a tremendous job reorienting the organization and finding new ways to continue to reduce working capital. Our free cash flow, as I mentioned earlier, was up 81%. Part of this money investing back in the business. We've obviously accelerated growth opportunities in terms of our capital expenditures.
About half of that 3.9 is against clear growth opportunities that we see in terms of building capacity for our plants around the world. Part of that was obviously the Hill's business and some of the capacity expansion that we've had in that over the last couple of years. Here's the Tonganoxie, speaking of Hill's. This will open up at the end of this quarter. It will be our most advanced and automated plant in the world for Hill's. This will be a wet pet food plant. This is a segment that continues to grow around the world and an index in a segment that we are under-indexed in because we didn't have the capacity. This will unlock further growth for us to continue to innovate in a very important new segment, which is wet food. Ultimately, as we invest behind the business, we also return money to our shareholders.
We're very proud of the fact that we've paid a dividend for 128 years. For 60 years, we've obviously increased that dividend, and we've returned over $28 billion to our shareholders over the last 10 years. So in summary, well, I think what the key message I'd like to leave you with is, obviously, the quality of our P&L is in the shape that's giving us a lot more flexibility to how we think about the business. Consistent top line growth, moving through the P&L, got gross margins and operating margins moving in the right direction, while we're continuing to invest behind the business to drive growth and brand health, supported innovation, and return to sequential volume growth as we look in the back half of this year.
And ultimately, that's going to allow us to continue to deliver on an earnings per share projections that we've provided to you, and ultimately leveraging our balance sheet on the way to continue to invest for growth for the business in the long term. So with that, I'll turn it over to you, Lauren.
We have a little bit less than 10 minutes.
Okay.
I'm gonna consolidate my questions a bit. So the market's obviously focused on the return to volume growth for the entire industry. So aside from easier comparisons, I know you spent a lot of time talking about the increase in advertising, you talked about innovation. So kind of how should we think about the progression of volume performance in aggregate to the company, and when can we expect to see volumes in month out?
Yeah, I think if you go back and look at the second quarter, which I think demonstrated our confidence in where the business is headed. Two divisions I'd first point out would be Latin America and Africa, Eurasia. We took aggressive pricing in both those divisions over the last couple of years, and both those divisions returned to a volume growth in the second quarter. And what that clearly indicates is that over time, the elasticity lessens. As consumers get adjusted to new pricing, as competitors catch up to your pricing that you've demonstrated in the marketplace, the market kind of levels out, and consumers get back to looking at how they want to buy more effectively, and hopefully, perhaps, restocking their pantries, which historically is the reason we see volumes come down in the categories.
We've seen a little bit of trade down, but ultimately, as we bring more innovation and more advertising into the market, that allows you to consistently build your brands and protect them for further trade down moving forward, and ultimately allows you to drive volume in the long term. Getting our promotional cadence right, obviously in some of the markets will be key for that as well. We talked about North America on the call, and we may have overcorrected a bit in terms of that, that opportunity. As we see that cadence come back over the next six months, we'll see volumes start to come back sequentially, nicely in that market. That will be an important part.
Ultimately, as we see our ability to continue to optimize our supply chain, and make sure that we have the ability to put products where they need or are needed most, and do that in an efficient way, we'll see volume come back through that as well. We have a multitude of different mechanisms in the P&L right now in order to generate that volume, but we want to be constructive with that. I mentioned very clearly on the call that getting gross margin and profit back into the P&L and getting that leverage through the P&L, so we can continue to sustain the advertising, is critically important, but we fully are focused on getting volume back where we see the possible opportunity to do that.
Okay, great. I'm gonna focus further on North America because it's obviously been a topic, and you've been very clear, you know, pulled back a little bit too far in promotions this summer. You maybe went too far in some spots, but definitely direction of travel is to want to take promotion out of the market. I guess maybe if you could talk through oral care versus the other parts of the business in North America in particular, because I think we all sort of talk about North America, but at the same time, we're only really talking about oral care.
Right.
As you think about promotional cadence and sort of course-correcting a bit in North America, how that differs across the categories a bit?
Sure. Let me talk to your home care and personal care category. You know, those are categories that we have, you know, strong brands, but lower margin positions than we have in oral care. And if you take the inflationary environment that we experienced in 2022, it was far more acute in our home care and personal care brands. So the need to get margins back on those businesses were critically important, so we can reinvest in terms of some of the innovation that we saw. So there, we took a more sharper approach to where we were pulling back promotions because they were just getting more unprofitable, given the inflationary costs that we saw moving through the P&L last year. And those businesses suffered quite a bit in terms of the promotional allocation and our ability to get the features and displays.
So as we look at that increased advertising that we're putting back into North America, that will allow us to get more feature and display as we move through the back half of this year, and we'll get our price point sharper to ensure we get that. Part of the problem on those home care businesses and personal care businesses is we did lead some pricing in some of those categories, and it took time for our competitors to follow. We've seen those competitors now follow. That will improve elasticity as we move through the year. We feel good about that. Oral care, obviously, we have a lot more flexibility in our P&L. We're really trying to drive that category with innovation and pricing, and we've successfully done that. Our non-promoted business continues to really perform exceptionally well, and that demonstrates that the advertising is working.
We did pull away from some very aggressive couponing that was occurring in the market that we decided not to pursue and not to follow. Our competition has not pulled back on that couponing. We're now making sure that the back half, that we remain competitive, and we'll get the promotion application right.
Okay, great. On the oral care business, in particular, in North America, I was actually curious. You talked about the sharp promotions. Is it or has it historically been different between, like, the base business versus the more premium areas and, you know, whitening, as you were highlighting? Is that also another area of adjustment, maybe on premium versus base business?
You know, historically, we've underinvested on the premium side of North America, and that's been a big focus of our whitening strategy, and that share continues to perform very well. We had more promotions within some of our base premium brands, like Colgate Total, and we pulled back on some of those. The base business actually continues to perform pretty well, and we've got a strong base business where we've executed the promotional price points pretty well. But it was really our Colgate Total that had the biggest hit in terms of where we were in terms of promotional allocation, and we'll make sure that we adjust that in the back half and feel pretty good about where we see the volume progressing.
Great. Let's switch gears maybe and talk a bit more about pet. So just curious how you're feeling about the pet category broadly, you know, and, and I think, is there a difference in terms of category performance, in terms of what we can all see in the FDM retail channels and where the Hill's business participates?
Yeah. Overall, it's still a wonderful category, growing both in volume and in dollars as a category. Although the volume has come back down a little bit, as I mentioned on the call, but it clearly continues to be a key growth driver for pet specialty. If you hear some of the retailers announce, I mean, obviously, some of the discretionary categories that moves to pet specialty will come down, but nutrition continues to be a real differentiator for our pet specialty partners, and Hill's plays an incredible important role in that regard. Where we see the business evolving over time is we will continue to upgrade, obviously, our performance in new segments, with vet being a clear opportunity for growth. We've seen some conversion in pet specialty from wet to dry.
As you've heard Chewy talk a little bit about that on their call. Obviously, that bodes well for us, given our strength in wet, but we continue to have a real upside opportunity to drive penetration in the wet segment, where we have very low shares, and high amounts will allow us to unlock some of that. And I think what's interesting now is that the amount of advertising that we're putting behind this business, and again, remember, in most of our markets around the world, we're low- to mid-single-digit market shares. Even in North America, which is our strongest market, we're mid-single-digit market share. So we still have a significant upside to drive penetration on that front. And the last thing I would say, pet specialty is a little more insulated than we would have in food, drug, and mass.
I mean, people who are buying in pet specialty are looking for high-end, premium, efficacious health brands, and where Hill's clearly plays a role. And the brand, as you saw, clearly distinguishes itself with its incredible vet endorsement and our need to make sure we have a strong prescription diet business, which when the vet recommends prescription diet use, tend to be very brand loyal to making sure you get the compliance and the efficacy of those formulas. And that tends to buffer you a bit from the price trade down that you see going on in food, drug, mass.
Okay. And also in terms of pet adoption, is that, like, the tailwinds that are specific to the Hill's brand and your business kind of separate you from really worrying too much about pet adoption or you, how, what do you call it?
Yeah. I mean, there was so much pet adoption over the last couple of years that will continue to pay out in perpetuity, right?
Yeah.
I mean, those pets necessarily aren't going away, and they need to be fed. And we continue to grow market share, specifically in pet specialty, which is obviously an important aspect and important KPI for us to look at where we are today.
Okay, great.
As you know, we do not compete in Food, Drug, and Mass, and so that's a very selective distribution strategy for the brand, and it's the right that comes out of the price promotions that go on there.
Great. Okay. So we're gonna end there, and we'll go to breakout, but please join me in thanking Noel and John for being here today.