Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the 2023 Hormel Foods Investor Day. Great to be back, in New York and hosting this four years and two days from the last time we were able to, gather here and have an Investor Day. So really good to be back in person, and this is by far, I can tell, the largest group that we've had here before. My name is, David Dahlstrom. For those of you who don't know me, I'm the Director of Investor Relations at the company today. We have a fantastic lineup of speakers, and as I mentioned to most of you in the countless emails I sent to make sure that you had everything you need to get here today, come hungry. And so the breakfast, as you can see, that's just the start.
The bags that we put out there, that's just the start. Make sure you grab a bag and fill up. But we're gonna have multiple snacking items put out here on the first break. We're gonna showcase some of our food service items during our second break, and we're gonna conclude the day with some local New York pizza from one of our great customers here in the city. Fantastic day. Hope you came hungry. Don't overeat right now. It's gonna be a marathon. Couple housekeeping items before we get started today. You'll find on your table a card with the Wi-Fi information for the New York Stock Exchange. Everybody should be able to get on to the Wi-Fi. Slides are posted. We'll be posting momentarily on our Investor Day site, investorday.hormelfoods.com. You can also access them on our company's investor relations website.
If you have any questions throughout the day, make sure you find me. I'll be sitting up front here, and then Steve Borgerding, he's probably roaming around right now, but he can certainly help with any questions you have today. We also have a team of about 30 people here today. This takes a village to put on. It's truly a team effort. So thank you to the 30 individuals here today from Hormel, as well as our 20,000 inspired employees around the world. Full agenda, so we'll get started here in just a minute with Jim's opening remarks. So Jim and Jacinth will speak first today. They're gonna go about 50 minutes, and then we'll break for Q&A. So Q&A with Jim and Jacinth. We'll take that break and have some of our great snacking items.
The second part of the presentation will be all about One Retail. So our retail organization, which has now come together underneath our Go Forward structure. Deanna will be speaking, Scott will be speaking, and then we'll do another Q&A session, really focused on retail. And then the final presentation will be food service and some detail on One Supply Chain. And right before we get to that, again, we'll try those great food service items, blend with some, some great pizza. Last thing before we get started today is, as you'd expect, we'll be sharing some forward-looking information today, and results may differ materially from those that we imply today. You can see a detailed list of our risks in our 10-K, and our recently filed 10-Q, which is available at hormelfoods.com under the Investors section. Invest, Transform, Grow. That is what today is all about.
With that, it's my pleasure to introduce Jim Snee, Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Hormel Foods.
Well, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to be here with us this morning. We know it's a commitment, but I think we're gonna make it worth your while. You know, David made the opening comment about the food, and we heard your feedback. So for those of you who were with us here in 2019, some of the feedback we got was, "You're a food company. Focus on the food. Let's see more food." We took that to heart, and we've already started this morning. And so, to David's point, you will not leave here hungry because we are a food company.
The second thing before we jump into the presentation is that, you know, all of you know that we've been very open and very candid about how challenging 2023 has been for us as an organization. Been some things that we imposed on ourselves, there's been some headwinds in the business, but more than anything, you know, just know that we're wrapping up our year here in a couple of weeks, and that we'll be providing more clarity on the full year, the quarter and the full year in our fourth quarter earnings call. And the reason I say that is because we want today to be all about the future. The future and the opportunities in front of us, because these opportunities are real, and you're gonna hear that from the team today.
As you sit here and listen, and think, and process, and even after you leave here today, you know, there are several key messages that we want you to leave here with. The first is that we have made significant progress as an organization. We're stronger, we're more balanced, we're less volatile. The second thing is that you'll be hearing some updated priorities from us, really focused on retail and supply chain, and that we have made investments in our business. When we think about—sorry, we're here. When we think about how we are investing, transforming, and growing, there are several things to know. The first is that we do consider ourselves an uncommon global branded food company. That's really who we are, and we'll spend a little time walking through who we are.
The second part is we wanna update you on what we've been doing. We haven't been standing still, right? All the things that we have been doing to make us a stronger, more balanced, and less volatile company. And then what I wanna do is leave you with the path, the path for our three-year plan to grow earnings. And it's a path that will come from growing existing business, that'll extract value from transformation and modernization, but then also thinking about how we will continue to capture value across the businesses that we have. So let's start, for those of you who aren't as familiar with, with who we are. We're a 132-year-old company that is just over $12 billion in sales, and we're fueled by incredibly strong brands.
Over 40 brands that hold number one or number two share positions in the categories in which they compete. The performance of that business has allowed us to pay dividends for 57 consecutive years. A Dividend Aristocrat, if you will. We're now in a position where we have aligned our business structure with the strategy of our business going forward. When we call ourselves an uncommon global branded food company, it's important to think what that structure looks like today. We have a retail business that has incredibly strong brands that are relevant with today's consumer. We are a bit uncommon in that we have such a strong foodservice business. The foodservice business is almost a third of our business, and it operates from a very advantaged position.
You'll hear more about that from Mark Ourada later in the day. I do wanna be clear that we are operating and building from a position of strength. Whether it's the brands, whether it's the balance that we talk about so often in our business, the structure that we've now put in place, the experience of our team that you'll see and hear from today, right? The solidness, the stability of this organization, and then all with a penchant for making sure that we're doing the right thing, because we know that we can make a difference. We're also a company whose strategic focus is crystal clear. The strategic focus is crystal clear.
We have made, and we will continue to make investments in our business, investments in our people, our processes, the technologies, never losing sight of the fact that we have to make investments in our brands as well. The continued transformation of this business, knowing that we have to modernize processes, we have to modernize our portfolio, all so that we can continue to create value as an organization and ultimately grow this business. Grow net sales, grow net earnings, and as I said a little while ago, grow the impact that we can have by doing the right thing. You're gonna hear more about the strategic focus and our ability to execute on that from this talented team of leaders. Okay? This is the team that is executing against the strategic focus, talented and experienced. You'll see and hear that today.
Then, you know, we're also a company that wants to make sure that we do the right things and that we have a positive impact where we can. We have demonstrated that we're doing just that. The work that we're doing to positively impact the environment, the work that we're doing to help with hunger and food insecurity initiatives, the work that we're doing to elevate our team members and others through our education initiatives. We're doing a lot to have an impact, and I want to share with you a video that talks even a little bit more about what we're doing.
When we talk about our 20 By 30 Challenge, the philosophy we need to start with is this belief at Hormel Foods that creating economic value and social value are not competing interests. We can do both, and quite frankly, all of our stakeholders expect us to do both.
I think our team embraces this as a critically important part of their everyday work. I think there's also some really good benefits as we think about what we're trying to get accomplished in terms of cost, quality, service, and how that syncs up with our science-based goals and targets.
The food industry is dependent upon clean water. We're dependent on good, reliable energy and clean energy, and we live in these communities, and we work in these communities, so we need this to be an important piece of our operations, to have good environmental programs and efficient energy use and reduction of our water use for long-term operation and stability.... We set the bar high in our 20 By 30 Challenge , because we want to make meaningful improvement for the world that we live in. This is not about setting easy goals. This is about setting stretch goals so that we can make meaningful progress.
We don't do this for the recognition. We do it to have a positive impact, but we're certainly proud of the recognition that we have received from some of the most reputable organizations in the world. Again, a testament to the great work being done by our company and by our team. Now let's talk about what we have been doing to make our company stronger, more balanced, and less volatile, what we've been doing to really execute against our business. It's this vision of becoming an even more balanced and stronger global branded food company. When we think about our high watermark for operating income in 2016, you know, since that time, there have been a number of different macro issues facing the company. We've had the decline of our Jennie-O Turkey Store earnings.
We've all been through COVID, the pandemic. But I think what this chart really demonstrates is the resilience, the resilience of our business and our ability to get back to, in 2022, right, that high watermark. Now, as I mentioned, 2023 has been a challenging year, but I think the point here is that we have a business, we have a portfolio that is resilient. We also have the right long-term focus on our business, and, to make sure that we continue to focus on building this stronger, more balanced, less volatile business, there really have been three strategic initiatives that we've been working against. How do we restore the portfolio to, to become more profitable? How do we continue to modernize, our capabilities, facilities, and systems, and then always thinking about the right organization, structure, and initiatives to support it?
So let's take a deeper dive into each of those points. When we think about how do you improve the portfolio to restore profitability? Well, you know, we've been on this value-added march or this value-added journey for a really, really long time. And for those of you who have been with us on that journey, you've heard us talk about how we have incrementally increased the amount of value-added products or sales in our portfolio. And today, it stands at about 90% of our sales. That's an impressive number. And this isn't just going from pure commodity to a value-added product. This is increasing the value of an already value-added product, and our team does an amazing job in that regard. And then the other part I would highlight is how we've really focused on trying to create more balance in the key inputs.
It's not just a pork and turkey business. When you think about the percentage of inputs now tied to non-meat inputs, this is a significant shift that we've seen over time. We've also made a number of dilutive, volatile divestitures. We've countered that with a number of stable, more accretive businesses. The numbers, the swap, if you will, of divesting over $1 billion in sales with operating margins less than 10% and replacing it with sales of almost $2 billion with operating margins greater than 10%, right, meaningful impact on our business. When we think about how do we modernize our business, modernize our capabilities and our facilities? Well, the first is a capability and the work that we've done to put in place our Digital Experience Group.
We did that at the right time as e-commerce was on the horizon, but then it came over the horizon in a hurry during COVID. And so we were positioned well to take advantage of that, and our sales now, we have almost over 10% of our sales coming from e-commerce. And then the other part was really a step up in our Revenue Growth Management capabilities. It's not a scale that was brand new to us, but it is a scale that we were able to modernize and enhance. And then we've also made significant investments in our facilities, and this is an important part to think about because we've essentially doubled our CapEx spending from the period of 2012-2016 to 2017-2022.
Now, yes, some of it's scale, size, the acquisitions that we've added, but a lot of it, a lot of it is making sure that we have the capacity, the value-added capacity, to grow the business the way that we want to. A lot of it is also cost savings, extracting cost from our system, and then also focusing on automation. As labor becomes more and more difficult to acquire over time, making sure that we're doing everything we can to automate our processes. And so really good efforts in terms of how we think about our ability to modernize our processes and facilities and systems. Then our third action really is, how do we organize this business? How do we organize it to make sure that it's set up properly for long-term, sustainable growth?...
And most recently, we did that with our integration of our Jennie-O Turkey Store business. We announced that project, and that is something that's been in process, making sure that we could bring in Jennie-O Turkey Store and create a more demand-oriented portfolio. With that, we expect to that capture value of $20 million-$30 million, and that project continues to be in process. And then the other thing that we've done is we've been able to rightsize our pork supply chain. Through a number of different strategic actions, we've been able to reduce volatility, guarantee supply, and redirect about $150 million of capital to other strategic priorities. And then, of course, in 2023, we announced our Go Forward initiative, you know, the biggest restructure we probably had in our, in our company's history.
But it's a structure that was necessary to make sure that we had our strategies and our structure aligned, making sure that we could capitalize on all of our strategic priorities. And so, a lot of work that's been done in this organization, but all of it, very thoughtful, very intentional, very strategic, leading us to our three-year plan to be able to deliver strong earnings growth. And it's going to come from three areas. We need to be able to continue to grow our business, we need to be able to extract value from this transformation and modernization, and then continuing the strategic value capture that we've always been able to do. And so as we dig into this area, you know, it's fair to say that we see ourselves as entering this next era of growth.
You know, when we think about our past, you know, there's a time when we were meat-centric, focused more on a commodity business. And then we've seen the evolution in our business, in our portfolio. As we've talked to so many about, as we've talked to so many of you over time, about how we wanna increase our value-added portfolio, how we want to become more balanced, how we want to be less volatile, and we've done a lot of that work. And so now, as we think about our future, what is this next era of growth for our company? What does it look like? And it really is about accelerating the growth of our organization through this transformation. And we believe that we can generate over $250 million in operating income growth by the end of fiscal 2026.
And so we see the path to get there. We see the path to get there. We have our goals, we have our objectives, we have our priorities, the platforms, enablers, and we're going to take a second and walk through all of them because it all starts with our culture. It starts with our uncommon culture of corporate and personal accountability. A formula for success that we've had for years, knowing that we have to build brands, we have to make creative acquisitions, and maintain the balance across the portfolio, and a culture that we live and breathe every day, a culture of accountability, making sure that we're holding each other accountable. And then making sure that we're competing in the right platforms, the right categories, with the right brands. And we believe we've set ourselves up to do that, right?
Platforms where we have earned the right to compete and to win. These aren't new categories or new platforms, things that we've been doing for a long time and doing them successfully. So the right culture, the right platforms, the right priorities. And so again, we've updated our strategic priorities. Not overhauled, not revolutionized. We've updated our strategic priorities to make sure that these priorities align with where our business is today. So our last set of strategic priorities talked about our retail business like this: We need to protect and grow our core brands. Today, we're saying, "No, we need to drive focus and growth in our retail business." This retail enterprise is a significant engine for this organization. Expanding leadership and food service is not anything new, something we've been doing for a really long time.
And then the third thing for our segment priorities is our desire to aggressively develop our global presence. And while we don't have our international team presenting here today, we do have a brief video that gives you an update on some of the great work that they're doing.
We have a clear, stated strategic objective of really expanding our international presence aggressively. When you think about the size of our international business today, we certainly see it as being a much bigger contributor in the future with faster growth as we expand in the markets that we're in today and continue to develop new markets. We break our business down into three key pillars, our multinational, our exports, and our partnerships. When we think about the opportunity in the multinational space, our operations in China... We've been in China for 29 years, and it's the second biggest consumer economy in the world. There's still tremendous growth opportunity there, and that team that we have, the infrastructure that we have, is really just now even hitting its stride.
China is definitely a growth engine for HFIC. Hormel in China and in Asia Pacific, we really focus on multiple brand, multiple category in omnichannels. So we truly play four major segments: refrigerated meat, canned food for our SPAM, Skippy for the condiment categories and snacking categories. So innovation is very critical in our business.
We invested in a new Asia Pacific R&D center in China, and that organization has company-leading innovation growth, and we just announced an additional factory to support that growth.
That is a commitment for Hormel, for the innovations. And, of course, it's not only for China markets, we also want to leverage this facility to support, other market in the region.
Then there's Indonesia, which is our latest entry into multinational space via both joint ventures and a great new partnership with Garudaf ood. Garudaf ood really is the global execution of our snacking platform. They are a market leader in the snacking space with unparalleled distribution, an amazing portfolio of brands, and a great infrastructure to support long-term growth. We're only at an infancy in our long-term growth opportunity. These platforms are now getting scaled, and we see the opportunity to really leverage that into accelerated growth.
When we think about the long-term opportunity, when we think about being present in China with a relevant and a growing platform in the second biggest consumer economy in the world, when we think about what we're building in Indonesia, the fourth biggest population in the world, we're really poised for fantastic long-term growth and delivering against our strategic priority of expanding our international presence aggressively.
So we've made some great investments in our international business. Swen mentioned the most recent one in Garudafood , and so we believe, again, that we've, we've got the right investments and the right structure in our international business to be able to develop that in a more aggressive way. And so those are the segment strategies. Next thing is, we want to think about what are the strategies across the entire enterprise. And so we've talked a lot about entertaining and snacking, and entertaining and snacking covers all parts of our business and making sure that we're executing against that because we've made significant investments there as well. Making sure that we have future fit our One Supply Chain.
You'll hear more from Mark Coffey at the end of the day, but there is work to be done in our supply chain, but there's also a willingness and a plan to make sure we're making those investments to extract that value as well. Then a strategy that's not new is our desire to continue to transform and modernize our company. Never, ever, ever losing sight of that. The right culture, the right platforms, the right priorities. Now, we've got to make sure that we've got the right objectives to be able to deliver on this over $250 million in operating income growth by 2026.
I want to spend a little bit of time here because the way we've set up this slide is rather intentional, that there's a sense or a level of dependence as we think about these objectives, but at the same time, they're also very independent, meaning that we will be executing against each one of them independently. The first one being that we have to restore sustainable and dependable bottom line growth from our current business, right? And we know that we can do that across the entire organization. And what gives us that confidence? Well, I've talked several times already about the number of relevant, reputable brands that we have, and a lot of them have emerged stronger post-pandemic. The work that we're able to get back to on the innovation front, that's really, really important, and we're seeing a rejuvenated innovation pipeline.
We've talked about the capacity that we've invested in. We're set up to take on this new value-added growth and still maintaining a focus on a more balanced, less volatile portfolio. We know how to grow the business, and we're set up to do that. The next part is our ability to drive savings by minimizing complexity and reducing costs. Again, Mark Coffey will be here to get you into some more of the details and how we're specifically going to do that. What gives us the confidence that we're going to be able to do it is that we have identified those savings opportunities in all facets of how we operate our business, whether it's the way we plan, the way we buy, the way we make, or the way we move it. We have realistic and achievable goals in all of those areas.
This isn't just an inside view. We have partnered and gotten an external view with Accenture, and they've done a great job, and they have the expertise to support this initiative. And then the third thing is, we are going to be able to execute against this because we are seeing a normalization of our industry-wide supply chain. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than it's been. And so we'll be spending less time on having to just react in our supply chain and more time on being strategic in our supply chain and across the entire business. And then this third part is our ability to capture strategic value. Again, this isn't new to us, but it is something that we need to be able to execute and deliver against.
Again, there are specific opportunities for us to be able to do this. We've still got value to capture on the synergy front from Planters, the integration of our Jennie-O Turkey Store business. There are benefits that are yet to be realized from our Go Forward initiative, the restructuring of our retail business, the continuous improvement programs across our supply chain. So these opportunities, again, nothing new to us, but they're identified, they're realistic, and they're achievable. We have this path, and when we bring growing the business, transforming and modernizing this supply chain across the enterprise, and continuing our strategic value capture, this is our opportunity, this is our future, to be able to do what we say we're going to do. So what does that mean for us?
Well, it means that we will be able to return this business to its historical earnings trajectory, and that's important because we need to get back on that track. The second thing is, we need and want the fuel for incremental investment in branded, value-added growth. I mean, our advertising budgets, our investments in our brands haven't suffered. They've continued to increase. This is the incremental piece above and beyond, where we can really drive our business. And then, of course, the increased cash flow just supports so many other things that we want to do for dividends, capital, and of course, we have some debt paid out. But the impact of achieving this plan is real. And you'll hear more from the rest of the day on how we're going to do that with more specificity in each of the areas.
So in summary, we are a stronger company today because of the strategic actions that we have taken since 2016. Not accidental actions, thoughtful, strategic actions that we've taken. We do expect this three-year plan, this three-year vision, to deliver meaningful earnings improvement to our organization, and most importantly, return us to our historical earnings trajectory. And we do this because we have the right strategy, the right people, and the right culture to make this happen. So I'll be around throughout the day. As David mentioned, I'll be participating in all the Q&A sections for continued conversation. But at this point, it is my pleasure to introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Jacinth Smiley.
Hello, and good morning, everybody. I am super excited to be here for my first Investor Day as part of this wonderful company, and to share this platform with such an incredibly talented leadership team, and to share the journey that we're on to truly transform and grow this company. Jim talked about the $250 million+ that we're going to drive in operating income over the next three years. I will hone in on the largest portion of that, which is $200 million or more from transforming and modernizing. We think about these in four buckets, and that's how we're focusing the work that we're going to do over the next three years.
First and foremost, in our mind, and in my mind, as I've gone through and led multiple transformations and been part of multiple transformations, is what's critical to form the pillar that a successful transformation is built on is around our people and processes. Hormel Foods has been the hallmark of ensuring that people comes first. People and processes are the fabric of what forms this company. If you think about where we were through the pandemic, if we didn't know it then, we knew it after we came through the pandemic and saw how our people showed up and knew that they were really the backbone of this company.
So our HR team has done an amazing job thinking through what's that employee proposition, and what are the skill sets we need to upskill our talent to truly compete in this environment, but also to enable and support the growth of where this company is going and where we are today, needing to modernize? The other component is around processes, because if you have great people and want them to do good work, they can't do that if the processes aren't what they need to work with.
Jim talked about the evolution the company has gone through, and what I can tell you is that our processes have not kept up with that evolution, and so that's the work we're undertaking to ensure that we're streamlined, automated, where necessary, to ensure our team is doing value-added work, but so that we can also foster an environment that they feel good about the work they're doing every day and contributing to grow the company. The second area of focus is around data and technology. We started this journey pre-COVID when we started with Project Orion, and Jim touched on that a bit. We have done the work on the finance side of the house, the HR side of the house, and the intent was supply chain.
We paused it for good reasons as we integrated Planters and also integrated Jennie-O into the business, and now we are continuing that journey to modernize our supply chain, build the underlying infrastructure for technology to support the company, but also accelerate and enhance our capabilities around data and analytics so that we can make data-driven decisions in a faster manner with the right insights, externally and internally for the business. The third area is around supply chain efficiency, and Mark will spend a lot more time going through here, but it's around thinking through from an end-to-end standpoint. You think about demand planning all the way to getting it to the customer. How can we become more efficient, and how do we take waste out of the process inside our plants, streamlining that?
I mean, this company has had a history of continuous improvement, and that's a culture that we live every day. I mean, the team is there on the floor, always thinking through: How do we get better yields? How do we automate? How do we recognize where there's bottleneck throughout the process? However, again, with the evolution, with our culture of really thinking about doing everything we can for the customer, there's been waste that's entered into the supply chain, and so we're going to do the work to get that out, not just for us to be able to expand margins, that's great, but it also makes us a better supplier to our customers and to our consumers and really, truly enhance value. The last area is around portfolio optimization. We have a very complex portfolio.
You can see a lot of those, right, sitting here on your, on your tables and outside in terms of the lovely products that we offer. And again, our culture of really wanting to be uncommon and focusing on delivering what the customer wants and what the consumer wants, it has really morphed into a really complex portfolio, different pack sizes or in different channels, and so it has also created complexity for the supply chain. So we're going to spend time segmenting the portfolio, understanding how we drive strategic value, having targets, and investing in the SKUs that we believe we need to focus on to really get it to the profitability as we expect it to, and then also weeding out the ones that don't, that we have spent the time understanding that that's not driving the right value.
Ultimately, what that will do, it will get us to a right-sized portfolio that drives the margins that we expect and ultimately, overall, enhance the growth and value of, of the brands. We will go into just listening to what our teammates that are closest to this really think about where we are, and so you can hear that from them in this video.
... You know, business is changing faster today than it ever has, and it'll never change this slow again. In order to keep up with that change and think about all of that as the scope, scale has increased so much, the tools that we need in order to manage that have changed.
One thing we learned as a result of the pandemic is the need to improve our end-to-end planning process. You know, we had historically very stable, predictable demand. Was the demand, you know, shifted dramatically overnight, and our systems, our people, our processes weren't designed to handle major shifts in demand. We have to have better data, we have to have better work processes, and we need better systems to allow us to better plan our business. So Project Orion was our effort to modernize those systems with an enterprise-wide ERP system that was cloud-based.
One of the great advantages, and we've already seen that through the acquisition of Planters, is the ability to integrate. And what that really, in my mind, kind of spells out is, one of the capabilities that these modernization efforts are bringing is better agility to the company.
Ultimately, One Supply Chain and Project Orion are really one and the same. You know, Project Orion is focused very specifically on our systems, digitization of what we do. One Supply Chain is our team in total, and it really is about the best ways of working, bringing together the power of all of the different supply chain team members in the enterprise.
The next few years are gonna be all about improving the efficiency of the supply chain, finding waste and inefficiency across the Plan, the Buy, the Make, and the Move.
I would say supply chain ultimately can be a catalyst for growth. So essentially, if you think about everything that we need to do to effectively, sustainably grow our business, supply chain can be the fuel for that fire and kind of unlock the growth and, and push us forward even faster than we are going today.
We've also looked differently at the way we think about portfolio optimization and understanding that we really want to make sure that we're thinking about the portfolio in a way that it's optimized for the supply chain. How do we take complexity out of the system while not reducing the interest from our consumers and our shoppers and our customers?
This portfolio optimization work we're doing will cover the entire portfolio. We will look across all 9,000 finished good SKUs and make decisions about every product family and every item within that product category.
Financially, I think there's a huge benefit to the organization taking costs out of the system. It can be done in a way, based on all of the information we have, all of the data that we have, that doesn't interrupt our sales and allows us to continue to serve the consumer and continue to serve the customer without interruption to our business.
I mean, this really puts us in a position where we can be proactive with our planning, planning our networks, planning our manufacturing strategies, planning our move strategies. By being out front of our innovation, out front of our portfolio offering, this allows us to better serve those businesses. Being out front of it allows us to ensure success.
I think there's an unbelievable amount of opportunity. There's a lot of work to be done, and I think that's what we need to be mindful of, is there's a process, and it takes some time, but we're already seeing progress, we're already seeing the benefits of it, and I think those benefits are just going to continue to accelerate over the next few years.
We do technology to enable our global branded food company to be just that, a best-in-class global branded food company.
Can you hear me? Hopefully you heard the pride and passion there from our teammates about their belief and commitment to the work that's absolutely necessary for us to undertake here. We will drive more than that $200 million of benefit from focusing on those areas and get us back to our... There's no food. Not seeing it there. Get us back to achieving our long-term algorithm of... Did I skip a slide? No. Get us back to our long-term algorithm. As we think about, you know, what does that look like in the near term here, it's our 2-3, our 5-7, and 15, back to the foundations of which this company is built on, which is innovation.
That's not something we talk about a lot, but it's certainly a focus for the company and continues to be so. What does that look like in the near term here? You know, as we think about 2024, 2024 is going to be a year of significant investment as we think about what's necessary to enable the transformation and modernization work that we're undertaking. 2025 is when we will start to see some of those initiatives being completed and starting to see the value fall through to the bottom line, and then accelerating into 2026 and beyond. We talk about 2026 as being a point in time for this, but, I mean, the intention and expectation is that we'll have continued growth into the future beyond 2026.
So I'll, I'll close by saying this is incredibly exciting to really be part of this journey with this company... And we continue to be focused in areas of managing the portfolio, and capital allocation is one of those questions that I get asked very often by a lot of you. You know, Jacinth, you just started with the company: What's your approach in capital allocation? And what have I said? Nothing's changed. The approach the company has taken historically has served it well. I believe it's the right one. I'm very much aligned. We're focused in these areas, first, required, then strategic, then opportunistic, with a big focus, of course, on the dividends. That's a priority for the company, and it continues to be, and I endorse that.
Jim talked about us paying our 57th consecutive year of dividend increases and the fact that we're a proud Dividend Aristocrat. I like to use the bigger number. We paid our 380th dividend last quarter. 380. And so that's a trend we want to continue, in addition to ensuring that we have a very strong balance sheet. We maintain a very strong discipline around how we manage our financials. Part of what drew me to this company, quite frankly, as a CFO, you want to know that you're with a company that's very disciplined about their financials, and I feel we're in a very enviable position here.
To a lot of our peer sets, you look at where we sit relative to our EBITDA from a debt perspective. This gives us optionality to do things as we think about the steady cash flow that we continue to generate, and then again, on top of it, ensuring that we're very disciplined about capital allocation. So I am super excited to just continue on this journey with the company, knowing that the company is very resilient. Part of the reason I came here, seeing for over 130 years+ , this company have been able to navigate all the cycles, continuing to stay relevant to the market, to consumers, but also ensuring that they're thinking through, you know, what's ahead and how do we see around corners.
And so to be part of that journey and knowing that I will have a hand in our path to the next chapter of this company is really, really exciting. So with that, I'll turn it over to David.
So we have about 15, 20 minutes for Q&A right now. We have three microphones around the room, and I know it's, it's not ideal, but we do want to make sure that everybody speaks in the microphone as everything is being webcast today. So find a microphone, and then we'll go. Michael, we're going to start with you.
Thank you. Michael Lavery from Piper Sandler. Just wanted to walk through the math a little bit for the next three years and make sure I know how to put the pieces together. You called out the $200 million transformational savings and the $25 million, strategic synergy and investments, you know, savings. That obviously gets you very close to the $250 million already. How do we think about either the cadence, you know, is the 5%-7% just coming towards the end and putting in that last little bit? Does it overlap? Like, can you just maybe walk through a little bit, kind of, excuse me, unpack slide 51 a little bit more, perhaps that's got the kind of the calendar arch, I mean, arc?
Yeah, I'll just start, Michael. I mean, I think the key takeaway is, you know, 2024 is, you know, Jacinth mentioned, it's, it's a year of investment. I would say it's a year of continued investment, probably accelerated investment in the business, because we're not starting this project today. It's something that we have been working on, and it. The key thing for me is this acceleration of this, of this transformation as we get into 2024, 2025, and 2026. And then maybe, Jacinth, I'll have you elaborate a little bit on that, on that cadence over that three-year window.
Yeah. I'll say, I'll put it this way. I mean, we have those three, right, three circles because there is overlap in terms of what's going on. At the back end of it, the $250 million, in our mind, gets us to the higher end of that algorithm, but there is going to be work going on. At the same time, we're continuing to grow the business, the focus on the 5-7, doing the transformation while we're doing the value capture.
If I could just maybe follow up, I, I'm sure you don't want to be too specific about 2024 just yet, but when you talk about the accelerating investments, it's clear that that's the front-loaded bit of the three-year trajectory. But would we take that to mean that 2024 might be flatter down from an EBITDA perspective, and then, you know, it really kicks in in kind of the 2025 and 2026, you know, more towards the end?
... Yeah, I would say 2024, you know, TBD, but as we think about 2025 and 2026, that's absolutely how we need, how this will play out so that we ultimately get to that number. And I think you saw that on the chart. And so, 2025 will show, obviously, growth, and then 2026 will get us to where we need to be.
Rupesh, we'll go to you next.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. So again, going back to the algorithm, 2024 to 2026, any guidance you can give or just thoughts in terms of how to think about the top line? Would you expect the top line to be below trend in, I guess, especially 2024 and 2025? And then as we look at the current business, it implies very minimal operating income growth. Is that simply because of all the investments, is that just weighing on that bucket in terms of why we don't see much operating income growth in the current business part?
I'm sorry, I missed that last part.
Yeah. So, if you look at the current business bucket, it doesn't imply much operating income growth in the coming years because all your growth is coming from the $200 million and the other, the other two buckets. So is that mainly weighed down by all the investment?
What we're saying is, over time, that existing business will grow at our historical levels of 5%-7%. Clearly, as we think about the bottom line performance for the overall business, 2024 will be impacted by investment, and then we'll expect to have the returns on that as we accelerate into 2025 and 2026. From a top-line perspective, I mean, we're gonna be running the business. This isn't a, you know, take your eye off the ball on what we need to get done from a retail segment, from a foodservice segment, from an international segment. I mean, we expect our top line to perform. It's the investments that obviously will impact some of the bottom line performance.
Yeah. I just, just to add, this isn't we're going to do this instead of growing the business. This is and we right, we're going to continue to run hard with our operating businesses, and we're going to also add on top of it, the value that we're going to capture from doing the transformation modernization. So I want that to be clear.
And that's just to reiterate what I was trying to say is they're both dependent-
Yeah.
And then, you know, then they're dependent and independent at the same time, because we're gonna be continuing to focus on all of them, but it's when you bring them together that we really are able to achieve that number.
Tom, why don't you go ahead since you're right there?
Perfect. Hi, Tom Palmer, JP Morgan. Wanted to ask maybe just on the, on the costs to realize some of these initiatives. Should we think about... I mean, you guys traditionally report more of a, a GAAP earnings. I mean, could we be heading towards more of an adjusted type earnings to exclude some of these costs? How do we think about some of the capital costs that might be elevated in terms of capturing the savings over the next year or two?
Yeah, no, that's a good question. And so we are thinking through how we report that and segregate it in a way that's visible. And so that is, in my mind, as I sit here today, the expectation that you will, we'll reflect it in that manner.
To say, what you're saying, Tom, is correct.
Yes.
We're expecting that we'll have those adjustments to reflect the cost to capture across the board.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Peter, let's go to you next.
Thanks. Pete Galbo from JP, from JP Morgan, from BofA. I was listening to Tom. Just for pure clarification purposes, so the $250 million is growing off a base from fiscal 2023, correct? I've just gotten a question from a few people.
Yeah.
Okay. And then the actual, I guess, question back to Michael's first question, I mean, clearly, based on that slide, the majority of the capture comes in 2026, but I mean, can we put a finer point around it? Is it 2/3 of the $250 million capture comes in 2026? Is it 3/4? Just anything more to help kind of dimension where that dollar kind of flow through is.
Yeah. I mean, to give you a specific point in 2025 is difficult, but one of the things that I do want to mention, so we've talked a lot about this and understanding what we're putting out there is new for us. And, you know, to look at the slope of that line is, it's not something that we're gonna say today and then come back to you in three years. The way we're thinking about this is, you know, we're gonna have a specific, we'll call it a webcast, whatever we want to call it, a year from now, so that we can sit down with the group. Won't be a formal Investor Day, but something that says, as part of this initiative, we're gonna tell you how we're doing. And so, you know, are we delivering?
You know, as we can narrow some of those timelines for you, we, we certainly, we certainly will. So it's not this blind trust us. We want to make sure that you understand we're, we're gonna make sure you're hearing from us that we're doing what we say we're gonna do. But I, I think the, the biggest takeaway right now is, you know, we are gonna see the result in 2025, but we're, we don't have a specific point in time for you.
Yeah.
Steve, we'll go to Rob.
Thanks. Just then, can you explain a little bit why the investment timing is lumpy? Like, you mentioned, it's gonna accelerate investment in people, process, data, tech, modernization. But you've been working on these things for several years now. So what makes it accelerate in fiscal 2024 that requires kind of a, you know, profit to be impacted?
... So we have been, that's absolutely right. We have been working on this for some time. We invested for Project Orion. We did the investment and implemented the HR finance piece. We stopped and hadn't done much work on the supply chain piece, and so that's now being restarted in earnest here, and so that's why that initial year is going to be a lot as we think about the software that we're implementing for the supply chain, the fact that we've brought on now Accenture to help us do some of this work.
So there are pieces that needs to be put in place to now start to do the work, and so that initial, there is going to be definitely investment throughout the whole three years, but that, there is just that initial piece that we have to then put in place to then start some of the work that's going to be necessary to, to capture the value.
Just as a follow-up, you're bringing on Accenture. That's the first I'd heard of it. Is that a recent decision? Is it something you realized you kind of had to do, or was it part of the plan all along?
Yeah. So, Rob, I would say, it's not new. I mean, they've been part and been a partner as we worked, as we worked through this whole transformation and modernization piece. We always had a plan to make sure that it wasn't just us looking at it so that we didn't have a completely biased internal view. It's easy for us to sit there and say, "Oh, our supply chain's, you know, just enduring some macro headwinds, and we'll get better." It's really helpful to have somebody who has a broader purview. So they've been, they've been part of the process for a while. It's not anything that's new.
I think the key thing in all of this is, you know, when—if we would have laid out a timeline for all of you back to 2016, 2017, and you could see that really this, this journey that we've been on, right? And we, we started with, you know, One Supply Chain, bringing all of our independent siloed supply chains together, with a vision of getting to this point, but a lot of work along the way, knowing that, you know, we had our Hormel supply chains that were independent and siloed, but we also had this Jennie-O business that was out there that we knew had to be integrated. And so there has been, this has been a journey, a vision that we've been on to get us to this point.
But then even Project Orion, as Jacinth said, I mean, we would have been much further along had we not had to pause for the pandemic, the acquisition of Planters, and intentionally, the integration of Jennie-O Turkey Store, right? All of that is added burden to what had to get done. So, you know, this isn't something that we woke up one day and said, "Hey, here's an idea." This has been our vision for some time. We're now in a position because so many of those things have happened. We're seeing the normalization of our supply chain, not perfect, but pretty darn good, that now we can put our foot on the accelerator and get back to where we want to be.
Yeah. No, I was just going to add that, you know, that this just accelerates. You know, certainly, we could have just carried on, on the pace that we're on to say, "We'll get this done on our own." What Accenture does is just bring that level of expertise that just accelerates this for us the way we know we need to make it happen faster with really best-in-class knowledge for us to be able to leverage.
If I have-- sorry, I know if there's more questions, but the one thing, Rob, I think is important, too, is, you know, probably an added piece is the data and technology part. That was always part of it, but has become an even bigger part of it since we first put supply chain together, what was that? 5 years, 6 years ago. And so that obviously is a significant part of the spend as well.
Ben, go to you next.
Thank you. Ben Theurer from Barclays. Just a combined question. So obviously, that will require some CapEx, and you've talked about this investment in that, and we've seen over the last couple of years, more like a run rate, call it $250 million-$80 million. What's that kind of the magnitude you have to elevate CapEx to invest in 2024, maybe 2025, to get to the 2026 target? And how are you going to balance that with what now is of your earnings per share, a very high dividend payout in order to keep that dividend balance growth maintained given the CapEx needs?
Yeah. So we'll obviously give you some better visibility here in a few weeks, but I would say the one thing to consider, Ben, is, you know, when I talked about that ramp-up in CapEx, a big part of that was the CapEx that we've invested for value-added capacity, for our ability to grow the business. And, I mean, we'll continue to make those investments, but we've already made, along the way, some pretty significant investments, and we now have that capacity to support the business. The maintenance piece of the CapEx, that's going to be an every year number. How much we have to spend on the value-added piece or the growth piece?
You know, because we've got the capacity based on the investments that we've made, you know, it may not have to be, you know, one on top of another, on top of another, on top of another, because we are in a really good place with our value-added CapEx investments.
With the dividend?
What's that?
How is that going to be balanced with the dividend growth? What should we expect there?
... I would expect that we would continue, if I can sit here today and say that we're in a position to continue to increase the dividends next year. There is no doubt in our mind.
Yeah.
So no concern there at all. And as Jim said, with not having to invest in the capacity that we've already put CapEx into, you think about that trade-out, that then potentially offset this additional investment in transformation and modernization.
Adam, we'll go to you next.
Thanks. Adam Samuelson, Goldman Sachs. So, Jim, maybe I'll look back a little bit, right? So 2022 operating profit in line with 2016. We're down this year, and it's gonna take a couple of years to start building back up based on the way that this has been laid out. The investments in the company in terms of value-added capacity, in terms of M&A, have been sizable over the last 6 years, 7 years. So where in that, where has the bigger shortfall been, in your view? Has it been pricing across different parts of the business? Is it truly the supply chain cost, just you didn't have the control or the visibility into your operating kind of cost base?
Help us unpack where the business has not delivered the returns on invested capital in the last 5 years-7 years that is gonna take more investment to get back to.
Yeah, I think, you know, if you just even go look back at the beginning of 2023, you know, and we talked about in Q1, you know, some of our inventory levels that we had. And clearly, that's had an impact on this year. But then, you know, how that ties back to the work that we need to be able to do in supply chain on the front end of the business from a demand planning perspective. And so, you know, I do think, Adam, there's been this kind of culmination of things that have built up, and as we're looking at this, we're saying: We can't muscle our way through this like we have in the past.
So we don't want to find ourselves in a position, nor do we expect to, where we say we don't have the right end-to-end planning, so as a result, we have too much inventory. Making sure that we have the right systems and processes along the way will allow us to make sure we have all those right levels, but then extract that cost that we need to. And Jacinth said it. We've said it several times: you know, over the last three years, for example, this has been a supply at any cost business. And so, you know, we haven't taken the time. When we think about the buy pillar and what we buy, we spend a lot of money, and it hasn't been about focusing our time and effort there.
It has been, "Give us the supply." And so it is, it's a culmination of all those things. It's the planning, it's the buying, it's the making, and it's the moving, where we, we have costs that have crept into the system. Jacinth talked about portfolio optimization. So again, our desire to be all things to all people leads to that proliferation, and now, now it's time for us to look at that in a different way, not in a slash-and-burn mentality, but in a thoughtful way that says: Where, where are we extracting value, and where aren't we extracting value? And so it has been, you know, it's gradually and then suddenly where we've seen some of these costs creep into the system.
If I could just ask a quick follow-up to that, is there part of the plan that does involve some material SKU rationalization that will more visibly impact the top line over the next couple of years, or is that not really contemplated at this point?
Yeah, it's why we're calling it portfolio optimization, right? It's making sure that we responsibly go through the portfolio and say: Well, what are the pack sizes that we have in play that are adding meaningful value? And having conversations with customers, right? Or in some cases, maybe we're not pricing appropriately for what the cost is, the true cost is across the enterprise. And so we're looking at all of that, but our goal is not... And we've actually, in the organization, say, we're not gonna use the phrase that you used. I can't even say it anymore. It's been our. We can't say SKU rationalization. It's portfolio optimization, doing it in a responsible way so that we look at it with our best interest and the customer's best interest at heart.
While hard to believe, we are at 20 minutes, and we have 2 more Q&A sessions, and so, Ben, we'll get to you first, and we'll just work our way throughout the room. So this first break is gonna be 20 minutes. We'll open up the doors here, and you'll get an opportunity to really sample all of our wonderful snacking, entertaining items. So that'll happen now. We'll take a 20-minute break. We'll be back at 10:05 A.M., and we'll talk about the retail business. Thank you. Great job. Well done.
Thank you. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be starting our presentation again in 4 minutes. Please take your seats. Thank you.
Well, good morning. You know, Jacinth started by talking about being her first Investor Day, and it's actually pretty hard to believe that this is my fifth Investor Day, so 10 years in the making here, and each time I think I've spoken to you about something different. I guarantee that 10 years ago, when we were in Minneapolis, we didn't serve you a bento box full of crafted and curated charcuterie and fine bites of snacking and entertaining. And in fact, we likely didn't have most of the brands that are in this box 10 years ago. So when we talk about transformation of the company, you're seeing it, tasting it, and feeling it in action. And then another piece I wanted to point to is you might have seen our Culinary ollective, Mark Ourada and the Foodservice team has stood up.
We've had chefs embedded in the business, but as we went through the Go Forward transformation, we set up a Culinary Collective that supports our total business. You're saying, "Okay, so what?" It really does inspire us each and every day, and they show us how our food shows up. Not shows up in the package, but shows up in how we're going to eat the products and enjoy them, how our consumers are going to enjoy them, how our shareholders may buy them and bring them home to their houses. I wanted to just talk you through that, as well as thank our C ulinary Collective, because they truly inspire us, whether we're working with foodservice, we're working with international or retail. It shows up in our customers, and we'll talk through some examples of that here. Don't want to get hungry.
All right. So I want to start by talking about our new organization and the power of the brands that we've brought together. So when you think about the retail organization in the past, it lived in a variety of different businesses, and today we're one business with all retail brands. We brought together sales, marketing, and Brand Fuel, all of those assets under one roof, and we're going to talk to you today about the power of that. Can you move forward, please? Thank you. So for the course of the next section, I want to take you through the benefits of our new retail business unit, which brought all of our sales, marketing, and Brand Fuel assets under one roof. I also want to review the important role our brands play across retail and how we're thinking about growth and profitability.
Today, I'm thrilled to talk to you about our integrated retail business, an $8 billion powerhouse of brands, exceptional talent, and best-in-class capabilities. My message to you is simple: we're bigger and we're better resourced to deliver growth with our brands and to build better margins by leveraging our capabilities and our talent. To bring the structure together, we aligned under six verticals based on how consumers think about our brands, our manufacturing capabilities, our customer synergies.... For example, convenient meals and protein is focused on meeting the consumer's need to put dinner on the table every night, while snacking and entertaining leverages insights and innovation to follow the consumer around the store in search of snacks and indulgence. And value-added meats, well, they're aligned to the retailer's meat case.
By aligning our brands in this way, we can leverage shared resources, production assets, innovation processes, and we can do this all within a vertical. So bacon is a great example of this, where we now leverage insights and innovation ideas across all our bacon brands to determine which brand is best aligned to the innovation, the consumer, or the customer. The same applies to snacking and entertaining, and when we think of snack nuts, nut snacking now has truly left the aisle, and nuts can be found all over the store, both physical and virtual. We can leverage our brands, Planters, Columbus, Justin's, depending on the insight and the need state. This past year, we've been busy standing up the new structure, building our long-term strategic plans, and establishing our culture as one integrated retail team.
While at the same time, we were fighting inflation, consumer spending shifts, and demand dynamics. As you can imagine, this was grueling but necessary, and we're starting to see the benefits from tighter alignment, resource optimization, and added agility to adjust to a shifting economy. The new structure benefits from the best of seven sales and marketing teams and is augmented by Brand Fuel in financial planning and analytics. A strong structure needs strong brands, and our new structure is designed to unlock the power of our brands. Brands that deliver choice for our consumers, like Skippy and SPAM as pantry staples, and Black Label, Natural Choice as weekday favorites, or Jennie-O and Applegate for health-minded consumers. There were many lessons during the pandemic, but one of the most important ones is that retail brands remain a mainstay in consumers' lives.
This really hasn't changed, but what has changed is how, when, and where consumers interact with our brands. The consumer is no longer following food up and down the aisle. They are simply following food in store and online. We are fortunate that our portfolio allows us to intersect with consumers on their food journey, and we can take a holistic approach when setting long-range goals with our customers. The portfolio also resonates across various channels, which is exceptionally important in today's environment, where consumers are shopping across several segments, and we continue to benefit from our earlier focus on e-commerce through our Digital Experience Group. The brands shown here are purely representation of some of the brands that we sell across channels. Our $8 billion retail portfolio has many brands in varying size, growth, and profitability.
Some brands drive the category, like Planters, Jennie-O, SPAM, and Hormel Pepperoni, while others are challenger brands going after market share. Think Skippy and Black Label. Our emerging brands are responsible for growth that outpaces the categories and delivers innovation. Think Applegate, Herdez and Columbus. These brands are supplemented by a variety of other brands that play an important role in our consumers' lives and our customers' businesses. It's important to look at our brand performance holistically, and we are encouraged by the performance of many of our brands to last year and against a 4-year snapshot shown here. Our brands remain relevant with our consumers, and our new structure allows us to leverage our brands and capabilities and talent to go further than we've ever gone before. Having an $8 billion powerhouse of brands is only the first part of my story.
The other part of the story is how we're thinking differently as one retail organization to drive growth and profitability. The retail channel has emerged from the pandemic, with 86% of meal occasions being sourced from retail. But how, when, and where this happens has evolved, and it was important that we evolve to ensure that we're meeting the needs of our consumers and customers. The retail leadership team has designed three strategic anchors that will unlock long-term growth, winning with the consumer and customer, strategic resource allocation, and improving our margins. Easy to say, a little bit harder to do, especially in our old structure. As a consumer packaged goods company, it's imperative that we start by winning with the consumer, as this is the oxygen we need to win with our customers. The current and future operating environment really was the catalyst for evolving our operating model.
Said differently, we had to change to align to a more dynamic consumer who's facing economic uncertainty, a consumer who's younger and more diverse, a consumer who's concerned about the environment and their wellness. And finally, a consumer who follows food, not the aisle. Today, we have a portfolio that is well-balanced and positioned against the current consumer considerations, and Scott, our new Chief Marketing Officer, will talk to you soon about what he's doing to ensure our portfolio continues to evolve to meet consumer needs. But we can't win with our consumers without our customers. Our new structure allows us to harness our $8 billion scale as we approach our customers with the ambition to be an indispensable strategic partner.
We do this by activating leading insights in everything we do, and creating an empowered team who leverages resources to exceed our customers' needs, and by creating food-forward experiences for our customers like you experienced this morning. I want to share a few proof points that our changes are exceeding customer expectations and driving growth through innovation and leveraging insights-based selling. I want to start with SPAM, but we have an excellent video coming up, so I don't want to steal the team's thunder. But the piece that I'll add to the video is they're going to talk about some really rich insights. Those insights led our sales team into action and our production team, because insights told us that we needed to reactivate 7-ounce SPAM for a consumer who's worried about money in their pockets.
They also led us to relaunching our SPAM Singles as the economic environment's changed, and it led us to the insight to launch SPAM Maple because it's attractive to different cultures and different demographics from a younger consumer perspective. I'll move to Planters, and we're going to talk about channel expansion. I want to highlight the Planters insight, because when we acquired Planters, there was not a lot of channel expansion in club. And when you think about the Planters brand and the Corn Nuts brand joining the Hormel Foods portfolio, we saw a consistent opportunity for sustained growth by penetrating channels, in particular, club. Now, why we're attracted to club is the customers continue to skew younger, think Millennials and Gen X.
We married this up with where our new flavored cashews, which I hope you enjoyed, and the holistic performance of the Corn Nuts brand from a consumer demographic perspective. In doing so, we were able to articulate that we're meeting the right consumer at the right time with the right products. Flavor continues to be king within snack nuts, and you'll continue to see us evolve with flavors in the snack nuts portfolio. It'll be a bedrock of our innovation strategy. These insights, coupled with direct feedback from our club customers and our customer teams, allowed us to launch this past year, cinnamon brown sugar flavored cashews, specific for the club channel, and a multipack of grape-flavored Corn Nuts, all in one box. There's four flavors.
This step into channel expansion will act as a springboard of innovation initiatives as we penetrate this underdeveloped business, as one example. Next, I'd like to point to significant new distribution on our Herdez brand, specifically Herdez Habanero Hot Sauce and Herdez Avocado Dips. By leveraging the consumer insights around snacking and avocado consumption, as well as category growth within hot sauce, we secured a projected 6,800 points of distribution between Herdez Habanero Hot Sauce and Herdez Avocado Dips. The Herdez brand growing at double that of the total Mexican category, reinforced the power of the brand that consumers trust. The team demonstrated that the Herdez brand vision of bringing authentic Mexican experiences to every American table and occasion, and they did this by a food-forward experience like you experienced this morning.
They conducted a full portfolio food-forward experience for the particular customer, and this happened in April of this last year. These new points of distribution are proof in our approach in bringing food to life for our customers and how it, how it resonates with their consumers. Our second strategic anchor is resource allocation, and at the heart of the strategy is our modernized brand segmentation, which aligns our brands as flagship, think big and material. Rising, small, differentiated, and high growth. And foundational, our steady Eddies. Our flagship brands are larger and more profitable, profitable, and as a result, deserve consistent advertising, experienced marketing teams, heavy R&D resources to drive innovation, and dedicated supply chain assets. Meet our rising brands. While smaller, they pack a one-two punch, and they're mighty because they deliver both growth and margin.
These brands are thirsty for investments to fuel the growth, and they're attractive to younger and more diverse consumers, and who, by the way, our customers are, are following these same consumers as well. These brands can be high maintenance, and this is where the resources within Brand Fuel, and you'll hear about this, shortly in a video, we bring those assets to bear against these, these brands. Our foundational brands, well, they pay the bills, and they help us turn on the lights every day. The focus here is to protect market share and cost containment, and this requires experienced product management teams who understand our operating network to drive efficiencies. Now, our final strategic anchor is to evolve our margin structure towards our CPG peer set while remaining rooted in protein.
As we've already shared, our brands are relevant with our consumers, and we're looking forward to continuing to target additional consumers. These brands deserve our fuel, and expanding our margins for these brands allows for increased advertising, innovation, and CapEx to fuel growth. While we have good balance across our portfolio, we have clear opportunity, appetite, and a path to improve our margin structure. This is our formula for success and why I'm comfortable declaring our ambition of 30% gross margins across our strategic brands and an improvement in our segment profit of greater than 10% over our long-range plans. The formula starts with brand stewardship, which optimizes price, mix, innovation, and Brand Fuel and our brand teams and our Revenue Growth Management teams are the catalysts here.
Next is our portfolio optimization, which we've already heard about, which focuses on reducing costs and complexity and is directed by our financial planning and analytics partners. Our supply chain team plays a big role in reducing our costs, and we have a path to improve our SG&A as well. As stewards of this new $8 billion powerhouse of brands, we're responsible for generating the returns needed to continue to transform our business as a global branded food company. And I can't leave our third strategic anchor without touching on the elephant, or maybe the big peanut in the room, Planters. Our journey with Planters has evolved. The first year was purely focused on integrating the business, and the second year was about running the business, and we accomplished those two things.
This year has been more dynamic, and we needed to adjust our approach from renovation to transformation. Earlier this year, we created a tiger team of experts, cross-functional experts, focused on transforming Planters. The team is focused in four key areas: brand stewardship, portfolio optimization, supply chain gains, and SG&A savings. The team is making progress. The brand is being repositioned with our advertising strategy, and we've shifted advertising to an always on as opposed to a more seasonal approach, which is driving better ROI and having everyday impact on the brand. The portfolio is being optimized and modernized to align with the consumer and growth, and you've experienced some of those products that we've launched here recently. Supply chain is working hard on optimizing our plant assets to align with growth and innovation. While we've made progress, the transformation of Planters remains a top enterprise priority.
In summary, we're consumer focused to drive growth across our businesses, and we're better allocating resources to optimize performance with our consumers and our customers. We are committed to improving our margin structure for better support and long-term sustainable growth. In order to do this, we recognize the need for a Chief Marketing Officer through our Go Forward transformation. It's my pleasure to introduce Scott Aakre, the first Chief Marketing Officer for Hormel Foods. Take it away.
Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here today. It's great to have a chance to talk about our consumer journey and how we are winning with the consumer today and how we're going to continue to win with the consumer tomorrow. There's a few things I hope that you walk away from this part of the presentation with. The first is that our portfolio is complicated, but it's built for growth, and we consider the complication of our portfolio to be a competitive advantage. The second is, the way that we're going to win is built through insights, analytics, and innovation. And third, the creation of One Retail is what has enabled this go path, this Go Forward path. I hope, again, those are things that we hear as we go through this.
Jim described our company as an uncommon global branded food company, but what does that look like for the retail side of our business? It starts with our collective branded portfolio being in 85% of all households across the US and covering all generational groups. We think that's important for our customers. We think that's important for our shareholders. The more households we're in, the more opportunity we have to learn about that household, and the greater chance we have to introduce one household that's with one of our brands to other brands in the portfolio, and to grow by making each of those households more productive. So the complicated or the complex portfolio really enables us to think about household productivity in a new way.... We're also growing demand by extending the portfolio and our footprint into younger, more ethnically diverse consumer groups.
We're thoughtfully watching the changing demographics in America, and we know that Millennials and Gen Z are having an impact on the food agenda. Younger consumers wanna try new cuisines. They want variety, they want choice, and oftentimes, that choice is around a shared experience or the snacking or entertaining space that we look at. So being forward-looking and watching those demographic shifts have had an important part in the way that we've shaped and constructed the portfolio that Jim and Deanna and Jacinth talked about. An important part of our One Retail was to stand up this thing called Brand Fuel. What we did was we built a center of excellence that was allowing team members with specialized skills to create solutions across the enterprise. The Brand Fuel team focused on consumer and shopper insights, data analytics, product innovation, media strategy, creating an omni experience for the consumers.
The other thing we did was, we have an uncommon person on our team, Dr. Tanya, Tanya Rodriguez is part of the Brand Fuel team. Tania is a social worker, but she's also a cultural anthropologist, and she's on the team to help us coax out the why things are happening, not just the what things are happening. And if you can imagine, it's not surprising when we talk to consumers, and we go to their home, and they say, "All I do is eat really good foods, organic, natural, whatever." And then when Tania digs through the garbage can, she finds bags of donuts or empty cartons of cookies. So we know that the consumer says one thing, but really, the behavior is different. We want her to help us understand that.
Finally, the Brand Fuel team and the creation of One Retail have enabled us to scale an $8 billion retail business, which gives us leverage in the way we negotiate with our agencies, the flexibility to ship resources from one opportunity to another to find those greatest opportunities for return to the company. I want to bring the Brand Fuel team to life through a quick story and then a video. So SPAM is an 86-year-old brand, but wherever we go as a company, and whenever we say, "We work on SPAM," the reaction from people is, "Oh, my God, do I have a story for you!" And we know that that's important for this brand and for all of our brands.
They're built on stories, and we know that there's common threads in those stories that bring out the emotional part of the brand, to move it from being a product to being a brand. So when we listen to those stories, what we find is that we can embrace things, we can find those common threads, and we can completely imagine new opportunities to keep a brand relevant and to find new consumer targets. So through those stories, we can segment consumers, we can geo-target the message, we can innovate new products or new recipes, and that's why brands are important. That's why brands matter. If you think about SPAM as a product, it's canned meat, but that's not what we sell. We sell a brand, and we are out to the consumer, talking about a brand that, as canned meat, has had eight consecutive years of record sales.
That's what Jim talks about when he says, "We are a branded global food company." And when we're done today, if you're still hungry, you can find SPAM on the Michelin-recognized Noreetuh restaurant in the East Village. That's how important this brand is. Hopefully, the video and the next few seconds here will help show you, Brand Fuel and bring even the SPAM brand to life in a bigger way.
Brand Fuel really functions as the heart of this business because it's pumping the lifeblood of the business to other parts of the company, and that lifeblood is all about consumers, it's about customers, it's about the future of food.
Everything we do is gonna be consumer-centric, and everything we're doing is trying to understand them and understand their behaviors so that we can then pour that into building brands that help consumers more.
So we know over time that we have been growing with this younger, multicultural consumer, and at the surface level, that sounds awesome. That sounds like what every single brand is hoping to accomplish. Our Brand Fuel team members, they developed a robust research plan to really get at the heart of why the SPAM brand is growing with multicultural, younger consumers.
My job is really to know the consumer and to be able to relate the things that are important to them back to our brand teams, to drive insights and innovation and to really prophesize the future of food. So I'm in their houses, I'm cooking with them, I'm shopping with them, learning about, you know, all the things that fascinate them about food and all the challenges that they have around food. So I would say what I learned in, in a nutshell, and it was a consumer who gave me this, and he says, "SPAM was born in America but raised around the world.
What came from this was super, super rich insights that are action-oriented. I know now as the brand strategist, that I can take these insights that my Brand Fuel team has provided, and I can act on them. So this is impacting everything that I do on the SPAM brand now. It's impacting my media strategy, my creative strategy, how we're going to market with our customers, and even how we're talking to our consumers.
It is already starting to create efficiencies, where we're bringing different viewpoints in, which then creates less blind spots as we build insights to drive the business.
I believe now we have an opportunity at Hormel Foods to latch on to a very similar experience that we've created on the SPAM brand and make sure that everything that we do on our brands is rooted in insights, real data, and it's done through the lens of our consumers.
What I love about Brand Fuel is that it has formulated a collective consciousness. We are now bigger than the sum of our parts. And so tactically, all these great subject matter teams were doing fantastic jobs, but we've been united to synergize all of our energy.
Born in America, raised around the world. We're a food company. Food is at the center of our culture, and brands are at the center of the emotion that brings out the value to that consumer. When Jim talked about transformation, he talked about investing in our brands. We continue to invest in our brands, but we look at it differently. It's not just do we add more money? Do we think about the way we're investing in a different way? We use marketing mix analytics to scale and improve the way that we are increasing ROI with consumers. Deanna mentioned Project Roast. When we bought Planters, one of the things that we knew about the brand is it had a commitment to Super Bowl.
We looked at that from an analytics standpoint, and we realized that if we took that one time, that two-week flash, and moved it into an all-on strategy, we could increase the ROI by 4x. That's the kind of work that we wanna do across, not just Planters, but the portfolio, to make sure that we continue to invest, but we invest in a different and smarter way. Jim highlighted the strategic platforms within our company. I'm gonna cover three specific areas right now: global flavors, entertaining and snacking, and natural and organic. All of these are important pieces to our winning strategy and winning with the consumer. Our global flavors pillar is anchored by the joint venture agreement that we have with our Mexican partner, Herdez Del Fuerte, in Mexico. Through the partnership, we created MegaMex.
It's a standalone company with the singular focus of reimagining the Mexican food experience in the U.S. Mexican food is the top ethnic cuisine with millennials and aligns perfectly with the spicy food demands of Gen Z. We see MegaMex as a significant platform for our retail business growth. The portfolio is anchored by two power brands, Herdez and Wholly. The Herdez brand brings authenticity to the salsa and sauce category, with products and flavors that have been developed over generations by the Hernandez family. The Herdez brand stretches equally between general market and Hispanic consumers, and the brand has effectively extended into refrigerated salsa and refrigerated guacamole, which is important for our customers and consumers by providing a brand solution for the retail deli that complements the Wholly brand, which is the brand leader in the produce set.
Wholly is the brand leader in retail guacamole and has extended to provide convenient avocado solutions and is really the one that is providing convenience, versatility to consumers, along with a rich success record of innovation. Beyond being on trend, we see growth in the transition of households from fresh avocados to prepared guacamole. Household penetration for avocados is 70%. Household penetration for refrigerated guacamole is 25%, and we know that 95% of the people that buy avocados are making guacamole. So this two-brand strategy that we have, the deli and the produce set, really gives us a chance to surround that consumer and that shopping experience with solutions that make sense in this Mexican food space. Reimagining Mexican food required a strong innovation pipeline, and it's really the cornerstone of the MegaMex success formula and goes beyond the national brands.
We also have brands like Chi-Chi's, La Victoria, Doña María, all are in this innovation pipeline. Our work delivers new ideas for both the retail and food service, bringing authenticity, convenience together to serve both consumers as well as our operators. We're committed to the Mexican food space, and we believe that the strong partnership through MegaMex is the ideal business model to create absolute focus in this space. With the work of Brand Fuel, we also identified that there was an additional opportunity to take the Herdez brand and provide convenient and authentic heat and serve meats. Leveraging our One Supply Chain, we could use our network, existing assets, our refrigerated distribution system, and the power of the brand.
These products are jointly developed between our side and Mexico to make sure that they're authentic and that we have the partnership of MegaMex in terms of the branding and the communication that we put out to the consumer. We're gaining important distribution across key customers that not only complements our dinner strategy, but helps to bring in new households into the Herdez franchise as well. Another area for us is snacking and entertaining, which is an important pillar within our portfolio and a behavior that matters for nearly all households in the country. Half of all Americans snack three or more times a day, and that percentage is highest with younger consumers. In addition, 85% of households engage in something called home entertaining, and from the insights work that we've done, we call it casual gatherings.
That could be a Friday night where maybe some friends stop over, or maybe it's a Friday where you're just tired of frozen pizza, you want something else. We look at that and think, "Okay, here's a big opportunity for our portfolio." Connecting those insights with some analytics work, we understood that 15 – that the average household has this casual gathering 15x a year. So Super Bowl is important. We still promoted Super Bowl, but now we know that 130 million households have an activity called casual gatherings 15x a year that we can participate in. That's 1 billion occasions a year, and we have a portfolio designed to fill that space. Our portfolio is built for consumer choice and to serve a variety of occasions and need states. We provide coverage across income, income groups, generational groups.
We have access to all retail channels and formats. We provide solutions that matter for both winning with the consumer and winning with our customers. We're using innovation with our legacy brands to extend these franchises to more younger and ethnically diverse consumers. We're addressing the demands for new flavors, new textures, like our pepperoni crisps, and licensing partners like on your table today, where we've connected Skippy to the Girl Scout cookie franchise, which is, again, a younger consumer that brings into that franchise. We're seeing some early wins with the Planters flavored cashews. We're bringing in new consumers to the category, to the brand, as well as to the aisle in that center store, which is so important to our customers. And some of the early work that we've done would suggest that we've doubled the index with Gen Z by bringing out these flavored cashews.
So we know we're on the right path with the portfolio of work that we're doing. Innovation matters here, and we're leading with innovation in this category. We also know that many consumers make food choices based on the demand for natural or for organic, and that many also choose brands based on their social interests in areas like sustainability and animal welfare. While these interests are important to all of Hormel, they are the focus in the work that we do with the Applegate brand. Applegate has a leading position in natural and organic, in categories that are important to consumers, and that makes them important to our customers. The brand team continues to provide thought leadership in areas like regenerative farming and other environmental practices, all while providing convenient, flavorful meal and food solutions.
Well, with the scale of One Supply Chain, we've been able to add manufacturing efficiencies, and through One Retail, we've been able to significantly increase the consumer access to this brand across all retail channels. The breadth of the Applegate portfolio is purposefully and uniquely designed to address all day parts, food at home, food away from home, and a variety of taste expectations. We've partnered with customers to make sure that we're aligned with their key initiatives, and we've done all this while staying committed to the purpose-driven agenda of that brand. We're committed to winning with the consumer. We've built a portfolio for growth. The complication and complexity of our portfolio is important to us. It's a point of difference.
Our winning formula is built on insights, analytics, and innovation, and Go Forward, as we've described it today, is really the catalyst that enables us to Go Forward in the future. So with that, I think I'll turn it over to Dave, and we'll go through some Q&A.
Great job. Hold it. All right, Ben, we're going to start with you, as promised, and we'll, we'll continue to work our way around the room.
Yep. Thanks, Ben Bienvenu with Stephens. Deanna, you started your comments talking about all the brands that you've acquired over the last 10 years. When we think about that strategy as it fits into this maybe accelerated CapEx budget over the next several years and sort of the organizational bandwidth being focused on the opportunities inside the companies today-
Mm-hmm.
Where does M&A fit into sort of your calculus for how you think about growth for the business?
Well, right now, our top priority is Planters, the most recently and the largest acquisition in the company history. We still have amazing run rate with the Columbus acquisition, as you experienced and saw today. We've got our hands full with the current portfolio, as well as the investments that the company's made. In addition to M&A, I would just lean into, you know, we've added a lot of capacity for growth for the retail organization over the course of the last two years. So think bacon, think pepperoni, those flagship brands that I put up. We are leaning our investments, both capital, people, as well as, when we think about trade and advertising into those bigger, biggest and most profitable bets that we've already made.
Michael, back here.
Thank you. Michael Lavery from Piper Sandler. Just, Deanna and Scott, one for each of you. On the side with the flagship brands, they're the highest margin. Your growth outlook has about seemingly 50/50 volume and price. Just would love to understand how you think about pricing there, just given, you know, a couple of those that have, like, sort of bacon as some pass-through component. Planters has, you know, pretty meaningful private label competition. What's the thinking in terms of how you generate that consistently? And then just on, Scott's slide, talking about the, the growth in advertising spending, how do you see that going forward?
I'm going to let you go first.
Well, let me, I guess, address both of them a little bit. We look at pricing with a variety of different variables, and not each brand is looked at in the same way. We definitely look at the competitive position of the brand. We look at the cost profile that we have for that business. And then we do the analytics with our Revenue Growth Management team and our brand team to see where we think we have the opportunity, if there's a need to take price. I think that's, you know, different from what we've had before.
We've been much more analytic in the way that we've been looking at those brands, and then we consider things like, what are we doing with the innovation portfolio, and how does that enable us to think about pricing for the mix differently than just by item by item? In terms of the advertising, we continue to expect that we'll spend more and more in terms of the total budget, and then the mix of that budget is going to look different over time. You know, we've seen more money that's going into digital versus the broadcast. I expect that would continue. But again, it balances differently between the brands and what the brand needs are, as well as what the total portfolio makeup is.
Did you want to comment, Deanna?
I'd just comment on bacon. You know, we've done a lot of great work over the last two years building the Black Label bacon brand, as well as, I'll say, our expertise in the category. And so our pricing strategies are evolving, frankly, as we continue to gain market share, as we continue to bring innovation. We've got a very robust innovation pipeline that will be unique and different in the bacon area from a convenience standpoint. And so that allows us to kind of lean away from trade and promotion and price, and invest those dollars into advertising and into introductory and into getting those markets or those items into the marketplace. So it's really an evolution.
You know, when you think back to refrigerated foods, the evolution of that margin structure, I feel like bacon is on that same trajectory and path.
I think the other part, Michael, is the visibility and the ability to look across the entire portfolio. And you have, you know, you may allocate at the beginning of the year, but then to be able to adjust as you go. Historically, those dollars lived in business silos, and it was almost more of an entitlement program, if you will. So now that the team has total visibility and can react as they progress throughout the year.
Tom?
Thanks, Tom Palmer, JP Morgan. Just wanted to ask on the margin bridge to 10%+. I mean, you gave four buckets, and each one was a point of gross margin, and you're running at around 8% operating margin in the business lately, so that would suggest maybe 12%+. And then, it sounded like, I forget the exact wording, but SG&A, it didn't sound like it was gonna be a major offset. So, maybe just why is 10%+ the right number? And then just what's kind of the time frame to getting to that 10%+, does it align with this $250 million operating margin expansion plan?
So to get to the 10,% you know, I think back to refrigerated foods, and there was a day when we were below 8% , so the first goal line in the sand, and that had food service in it as well, so there was a higher margin on that part of the business. So we've had the experience of going from sub 8% to 8%, to 8% to 10%, to 10% to 12%. So we've got the experience, we've got the discipline, and we understand the path, and the work that needs to be done within the retail side of the business to get there. But I mentioned investing in our brands, and that's gonna take some of those dollars, because we're gonna need to continue to invest in advertising and innovation. We've got plenty of trade dollars. Sorry, PJ.
You know, we will want to need to continue to build our brands, as I mentioned, so that we become less reliant on price up or down, and that we continue to build the brands, especially those foundational brands that we talked about.
And Tom, into the total number, yeah, I mean, that's part of this picture here, is that when we say we're gonna have more historical earnings growth, that it is increasing the margins on the retail business. And I think what I really like about the approach the team is taking is it's not linked to any one area, right? It's that broad base, four different pillars, where they know that there are opportunities for improvement.
And thank you. And just to clarify, that timeline for that 10% aligns with the 2026 time frame or something different?
It does.
Okay. Thank you.
Adam?
So as you look at the totality of the retail brands, the company plays in a number of different categories in a number of parts of the store, and you're talking about kind of transforming the supply chain. Is there any thought, or how has potential divestitures played into the thinking in that you're spread pretty thin across a number of different categories and product types and manufacturing capabilities that you might not have the scale to either produce efficiently or get category captaincy to gain share with retailers? And just unrelated question, the foundation, rising flagship brands, there's a pie chart on each of those slides. Is that percentage of total company sales or percentage of retail?
Because it didn't add to 100, so I wanted to be sure that are we talking % of the total company, or is that there a bucket of retail that just isn't being discussed here?
Do you have that?
Yeah. And so we... I'll actually let Deanna answer. So that's just retail. And I think Deanna can maybe answer the first part of your question, and we'll circle back on some of the sustaining brands, Deanna, that weren't brought up today.
Yeah. So we had three of the four buckets. The fourth bucket would be sustaining brands, which would be those other brands in the portfolio. And to your question, those are brands that we are always thinking about evaluating from, you know, productivity as well as profitability, and do they add value or do they do anything for us, either with the consumer or the customer? So those would be areas that we would continue to evaluate. But that would be that kind of get you to your total number, would be the other brands.
I would just add to that, you know, Creating One Retail has made us actually more important with retailers, because now we go in with one voice and the scale where we are invited to a different group of conversations. So that's important, not just the, again,
... we have a complex portfolio, but it's scaled to a point where it gives us a different audience. And then, you know, we, there was a video earlier that talked about the importance of portfolio optimization. That's really in the wheelhouse, I think, of what you're describing. We need to go through and make sure that we have the right items on the right shelf at the right time, in the right store, in the right channel. There is some complication in the supply chain that we can extract without having significant impact on our sales, because we know that there's consumers who are buying this, but if they didn't have access to it, they'd buy the item next to it in our brand, and so the long tail can start to be taken care of in a different way.
So, there's a lot of work that is gonna be described when Mark talks, that was described in the video, that all links together for our ability to hit the profit margins that we want to grow to, while keeping the business whole and running it the way we want.
One other thing I wanted to add. We've had several [top to tops since] last year within the new structure, and I can't tell you how many times the teams have come back and played back that the senior leadership of these customers said, "I didn't know that that was Hormel Foods. I didn't know that that was Hormel Foods." And when they bring all of our brands together across the categories and then departments that you described, they are shocked and playing back to us that they didn't know, in some cases, that we were a top 10 or a top 25 customer to the retailer. And that's really powerful, and as well, is really changing the conversations and the type of long-term growth strategies when they can see how much impact that we can have.
In today's environment, retailers are looking for partners to help them grow. And so the timing for us has been very fruitful, and I think it's gonna be one of those additional contributors to helping us achieve the margin structure that we spoke about.
Rupesh, last question for this round.
Thanks for taking my question. So maybe, Scott, just on retail media, a number of retailers, Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, all them talking about growing their retail media business. So curious what Hormel is doing in that area, and whether you expect retail media to be a bigger part of your advertising mix going forward?
Yeah, we've talked to all of them. Yeah, I think there's a place for retail media, along with the balance of the other media types that we use. There's benefits, certainly, in that you can get real-time information back on how it's working, and you can test and learn there. It may be easier than you can in some other formats, but it's not one or the other. For us, it's a mix over time, and we need to make sure that we're balancing that mix across our portfolio. Some brands may lean in harder, some might not. But it is definitely, you know, a new part of the landscape that we're considering.
Great. Thank you.
We will take our second break, and this break is really focused on our Foodservice portfolio. So we want to try to do a couple things with this break. One, obviously showcase the great items and how operators are using them in their establishments, but also show you how operators receive the items, because I think that is some of the ways that we add value as a company, is how we actually deliver these products to our operators. So we'll open up the doors here, give everybody a break. We'll reconvene at 11:15 A.M. for the conclusion, which will be Foodservice, One Supply Chain, and closing comments from Jim. Thank you.
All right. Well, welcome back, everybody. Hopefully, you had an opportunity on this break to enjoy some of the food service items that I'll be referring to in the next few minutes here. And really, what we wanted to show you there was not only how those products are packaged going into the restaurant, but to see what comes out the other end with minimal labor, minimal time, minimal prep. And as we look at the industry today and some of the challenges, it's clear why we have had success with those type of products with our customers. So our next session here this morning is gonna be to really provide an update on the food service industry. And I'm gonna provide some insights on, you know, what really differentiates us from our competition.
You know, we've had a track record of success, and there's a reason for that, and talk about what differentiates us from the competitors. Also, I'll spend a few minutes and talk about what we're focused on from a strategic standpoint moving forward, a few of the key areas. And then, really, how do we bring all of that together, you know, to deliver on the goal of continuing to expand our leadership in food service? So as we look at our business today, it really continues to be driven by several key factors, okay? Leading food service brands. We have been successful over the years developing brands that our customers need and want because of the challenges they're facing in the industry. So we continue to develop those leading brands.
Secondly, those brands make up categories, so our focus has been what categories in particular drive the best value for our operators as well as our company. It's a balance there, and, and we continue to focus on doing that. And then finally, what are the differentiated capabilities that do set us apart? Because it is a competitive industry out there, and it's an industry that I'll talk about later, that hasn't shown robust growth over the last couple of decades. But how do we win? And that's where the differentiated capabilities really come into place. And I'll say leveraging these capabilities is what really gives us the advantage. So we talk about strong brands and developing the brands that are going to deliver the value to our operators, as well as what we need to the bottom line.
These are brands that offer a great mix of products, and we offer great variety, and they hit all day parts. So you think breakfast, lunch, dinner, and how the landscape has changed over time to snacking. Now, people literally eat 24 hours a day. So how do we deliver that? And also value tiers. Over the years, we've expanded and gone deeper in our different tiers, so that as things shift in the economy, different areas of the business want different things, we've been able to provide that. We're also very well-balanced, not only in our product portfolio, but in how diversified we are in the market. So when you think about the commercial market, restaurants, lodging, very important, very huge part of the industry.
There's also the non-commercial segments, college, university, healthcare, and those are the segments that we really got into, I'll say, during the 2008-2009 recession, when we realized that the commercial business was really struggling, and the leadership team at that time recognized the opportunity, and we started leaning in there. Most recently, it's been leaning more into convenience stores, okay? Commissaries, manufacturers. As we've come through COVID, there's been these different, different parts of the business that have come forward, and we've got a very well-balanced portfolio moving into that. Finally, from a distribution standpoint, if you look across the nation, we're very well-balanced, not only in the big distributors, think of, you know, the big ones you know about, but also the thousand independent distributors out there.
We're very well-balanced in the markets with our direct sales team to be calling on all of these different folks with all of these different products to offer us that balanced portfolio. Now, as with retail, we did have a Go Forward initiative in 2023, and from our perspective, what we did in food service is we had the legacy food service you're all familiar with. But our company also had affiliated businesses in Sadler's, Dan's Prize, that made up Heritage Premium Meats and Hormel Health Labs. And what these affiliated businesses do is they specialize in different areas, whether it's Sadler's Barbecue, you enjoyed that wonderful brisket out there, okay? That's authentically smoked barbecue. And those different businesses are very unique, and we recognize that they all had unique capabilities to help us differentiate ourself.
So our plan going in to Go Forward was to really have as little disruption as possible, bring those businesses over under one umbrella, and spend the last nine or 10 months really analyzing that business, finding those synergies, finding those areas where we could really create value. And I think what we did is we found out there were, there were ways to do that. So as we head into 2024, we're beginning to refine that and do certain things with that business. So as we head into 2024, we're gonna find new ways to unlock value with the strength of those additional businesses. As a result of bringing these together, you know, we really do feel like we are a powerhouse of solutions for our operators.
So if you think of our branded portfolio, Hormel and Jennie-O, supported by our direct sales team, that is the bread and butter of how we stay close to the operators and understand what we need to be doing. If you look under the customized solutions, so that's some of our affiliated businesses there, Burke, Dan's Prize, Sadler's, they have the flexibility and the ability to really react quickly for customers. So when you start talking about large chain customers, and they have an idea, and they wanna do a limited time offer, how quickly can we respond, get samples to them, commercialize those products? That's what these businesses offer us, and we find that as a huge advantage. And then finally, distributor label. Okay, these businesses, Dan's Prize, Burke, are affiliated.
They've been doing distributor label for a long time, and they've been doing it very well. By bringing that under one umbrella now, I think we're gonna have much better focus and strategic alignment when we decide how do we balance that between the branded and the distributor label? Because now we've got an opportunity to really take share in the market versus our competitors doing that. So we're very excited about what that opportunity offers us from just a really powerhouse of solutions standpoint. And each of these businesses, like I said, they offer versatile, high-quality products. And you see some of our brands up there, Café H, Bacon 1, Flash 180, I'll talk about. Having this arsenal of companies really allows us the flexibility to go back and forth and produce exactly what we need to address the needs of our operators.
So now I just wanna take a step back for a minute and give you some insight on how this division was developed and how we've come to be where we are at today, because it didn't happen overnight. It's actually been happening for 30 years, and I have been with the company long enough that I was part of that original group that started this division, and I've seen it progress and evolve over the years, and it's really been amazing. And as we go back to the 1990s, I'll call that Foodservice 1.0, that was really the time when we set the foundation, and our leaders at the time made some key decisions around key strategies, many of which are in place today. So that's when we made the decision, we're gonna be a direct sales organization.
We're gonna be a branded food company, and we're gonna be focused on the operator. Those three key foundational decisions at that time remain in play today, and it's served us very, very well. Now we jump to 2000, 2020, I'll say 2.0 for food service. This is really as we got our legs under us and the industry was growing, you know, pretty rapidly, you know, things changing, I'll say. This is when product innovation started. That's when, as we began to get really good partnerships with the operators, what do they need? Austin Blues Barbecue that you tried today, Café H , all the value-added products and categories that we expanded during that time, Bacon 1. That was how we started to take share and outpace our competitors by innovating in those spaces.
Segment Resources in 2000, that's when we really stood up our national account department. We started getting those relationships. You know, there was a time when I was a sales rep out there, when we'd drive past the national account and say, "We don't do business with them. You know, we're, we're just a small branded company. We're going to the restaurants." Well, that changed, and it's been great for us. And then beyond that, as I said, in 2008, 2009, we got into college, university, healthcare. We started getting into these other segments and standing up business development teams around that, and most recently, convenience. So we've seen over time, how do we expand into those needed segments, put resources where we need them, and be able to pivot when things adjust slightly, and we've been able to do that.
Then that brings us to Foodservice 3.0, I'll say, starting here in 2021 and moving forward. A couple of key things. Number one, innovation is accelerating, and we've got to accelerate with it. People's palates are just much more diverse now, and when they travel abroad and they come back, they want to experience those global flavors, not only at their local restaurant, but maybe on their college campus, right? So as we think about the products we're developing and how we can help, that's very important. And then certainly, data-driven strategies. You know, foodservice, unlike retail, we haven't had a lot of data over the years coming to us.
We don't have the scan data like retail, but I'll say in the last five or six years, it's become much more prevalent that we are getting data now through NPD, and we're starting to invest in that. So we're going to be, you know, really utilizing that more closely with more resources so we can make the right data-driven decisions moving forward. And it's worked. It's worked pretty well. So as I talked about those three decades of adjustments and doing things the right way, we have done fairly well in our results. So if you look at this here, the orange line represents our net sales over the last 30 years, and the gray line represents basically the net sales of the industry over that same time frame. So the industry itself has been relatively flat.
What we've been able to do is take share and make adjustments to our strategy and our approach so that we can outpace that industry growth. And as we look at the industry today, even coming through COVID, the industry itself, from a traffic perspective, is still not back to pre-COVID levels. Now, with inflation, you know, sales have gotten back up there, but they have not gotten back up there on traffic, and we have been able to get back ahead of those numbers and stay focused. So kind of double-clicking in and taking a little bit closer look, you know, since COVID, over the last three years, our volume, our segment profit, and segment profit margin have all increased and are ahead of 2019 numbers.
So again, at a time when the industry was really struggling, I think having our direct team staying very, very close to their customers, finding out what they needed, helped us to bring them through the pandemic, and it has continued to show some nice results. So now I'd like to spend a few minutes on some of the strategies that we're going to be implementing moving forward. These strategies include accelerated growth in some key categories, and I'll talk about that in a little bit more depth. Really establishing a leadership position when it comes to bringing all of this stuff together. You know, how do we take everything we've done and bundle it together and move it forward? Then finally, expanding our presence in c- store.
That's a, that's a real, real big category for us in a segment of the industry, that we're very bullish on, and I'll explain why as we move forward. So on the last break, you did have the opportunity to try products from a few of our key product categories: bacon, premium prepared proteins, and I hope you, you really saw how good those are and how easy they are for our operators to prepare. Then, after we finish today, you're going to have the opportunity to try several of our pizza toppings as well. But these three categories, they provide just a, a great amount of value-added, nicely tiered category products for our customers so that they can continue to deliver a great mix of products for their operators or their, their patrons.
It's about variety in foodservice, and we've been able to expand those categories so that customers can really move and, and change things on their menu with minimal disruption and again, minimal labor. We continue to be a leader in bacon, providing not only the premium raw products out there, but Bacon 1, which has been the number one innovative product in foodservice. That's taking a category that everybody just about has on their menu and identifying the key pain points that operators have and let them deliver the experience for their customers that they need with the highest quality product they have. Regarding pizza toppings, okay, we've had the Hormel pizza toppings for many years. We acquired Fontanini back in 2017, which really elevated our game with the highest quality toppings.
And then we've got the Burke organization, one of the affiliated businesses I talked about, who's a great producer of pizza toppings. So with that one, two, three punch, we feel that we can really dominate in that industry, and we all know the pizza industry is very resilient. You know, regardless of what's going on in the economy, usually pizza does very, very well. And with our direct team out calling on the operators with that, you know, array of products, it's been very, very successful for us, so we're very bullish on pizza toppings. And then finally, our premium prepared proteins, including brands like you see, you know, Austin Blues, Fire Braised, Café H. When we develop these, we, we talk to our customers, we have focus groups, we have summits with them, and we find out what is really the biggest impact.
We all know that labor is an impact. It was, it was a struggle before COVID. COVID made it huge, and now coming out of it, it's still, it's still an issue. These products not only, you know, take the labor out of it, the prep time out of it, but quite frankly, they offer high, high-quality products. 10 years ago, a precooked product kind of had a bad stigma to it. Well, right now, a fully prepared product in one of these categories gives them a fantastic item to share with their customers. Our fourth category that we're really focused on right now, obviously, with the integration of Jennie-O, is turkey. We've identified there's some really good ways that we can, you know, we can bring value add to the turkey business. Number one, you know, more profitable mix, okay?
We've got a direct sales team out there that's calling on all the segments I talked about, and we've already seen that we can sell a little bit higher mix of the more profitable products, so we're focusing on that. K-12 channel expansion, so kindergarten through twelfth grade, that was an area that Jennie-O has owned, okay? They have a majority of the turkey business in that K through twelve. Hormel, we didn't really have that. We didn't have a presence in that segment. Well, bringing the K-12 team on now with ours, we've trained them on key Hormel items that fit in that K-12 space, and we're starting to see a value add get unlocked as they're out talking to their customers, adding Hormel items to that portfolio. Certainly, cross-functional opportunities from a national account perspective. Again, Jennie-O had some great opportunities. We had great opportunities.
We've come together and have started to work cross-functionally and collaboratively to, to expand our business there. And then, really, the overall goal is really to have, have, turkey become more of a, a demand-driven business versus supply-driven. We want our operators to demand it and produce to what they need and make that a more profitable business for us. So moving to the second key strategy is digital. So as I mentioned, digital wasn't always big or analytics in food service, but today, over 75% of all operator restaurants out there are ordering online. So they're not sitting down necessarily with their distributor sales rep, placing an order. They're going online. Now, this could be at any time of day or night, so it could be 2:00 A.M. when a chef finally gets done with that, that, that grind, right?
He thinks of something he needs, or she thinks of something that'll work really well. They need to be able to go online, find that product, order it, and have it on their next order. So we have got to make sure that we're showing up well when that happens. So our third key strategy or key strategy is around convenience and really expanding our presence in the convenience. So as you look at the size of that, 150,000+ c- stores that's the landscape out there. Two-thirds of those are actually more of the independent variety, believe it or not, of chains of 10 or less. So there's a huge amount of opportunity out there from the c- store landscape. It's a $900 billion industry, a third of which comes from inside the store.
So it's not the gas, but it's the food. It's the stuff that you're trying to sell. What's great to see is the key categories in there. Number one is prepared foods. It's the number one sales contributor and margin contributor. When you walk in and you see the pizza, you see the hot case, that's number one. That's a wheelhouse for us. That's where our direct team has been selling for years into the convenience stores. That's really great. Salty snacks is number five in revenue and sales, and obviously, our acquisition of Planters has put us front and center in that part of the store. By bringing Planters on board, now we look across the store, and it has offered a huge unlock of value for two different things. Number one, our retail brands within c- stores.
So think of SPAM, Dinty Moore, those type of things. In the refrigerated case, you saw the Columbus snack trays this morning, even retail bacon, and then the, the prepared food category. So across the store, we really have presence everywhere. And what it's allowed us to do with Planters is get us into many more c- stores who are doing business with Planters and unlock the opportunity for our team to sell into these other categories. So, so we see some very, very nice runway, with the convenience channel as we move forward. The final area I would like to talk about is really how do we bring this all together to achieve that leadership position that we're striving to do? And our vision is really simple. It's continuing to outpace industry growth, as we have done, with our great product portfolio and our direct sales team.
It's not overcomplicated, but it's not always easy to execute, but that's where our team comes in. So that's our vision. It's gonna take collaboration, increased collaboration, as we've gone through the Go Forward process. It's gonna take investment in our people and processes, as you heard about today, and continuing to lean heavily into innovation. So as you think about what does collaboration look like to our customers, that's what it looks like. That's our booth at the National Restaurant Show. So when they come up to us now, they come in, we can bring them across the booth, different, different portfolios. If they have an interest in something else, whether it's MegaMex, Hormel, Jennie-O, we have one-stop shop for them. And I can tell you, this is extremely powerful at the NRA in May, and we're gonna continue to evolve this each year as we move forward.
Then really, Deanna mentioned the Culinary Collective. You've had an opportunity to experience that today. We stood that up this year, and I can tell you, they have had such an impact, not only on our customer interactions and the experiences they've gotten, but also internally from a training perspective. We have a world-class sales team that is now really world-class trained in culinary, and that gives us such a great advantage as we go out. The last thing I'll talk about is innovation. We have a robust pipeline of innovative products, and I can tell you that's key for us. If you look up there on the pizza toppings, that's two items we've launched in the last couple of years, a cup and char pepperoni, and now we've launched a sausage.
It brings a different texture to the pizza, a different flavor to the pizza, and you're gonna be able to try that here after the meeting today. And then our newest is Flash 180, and this is really exciting for us. Similar to bacon, you wonder how you can innovate in bacon? Well, we found a way to innovate in chicken, and everybody has a chicken sandwich. But we've combined the sous vide cooking method with a batter-in-the-bag process that allows basically any operator to cook and prepare an extremely high-quality breaded chicken breast product in half the time that they have to do it today. And when you talk about expensive real estate in the kitchen, it's that fryer. And if we can cut down prep time, that is gold to those operators. So that's what we keep focusing on from an innovative perspective....
In summary, the Foodservice division has had a track record of success over the last three decades. We believe the strategies in place today have set us up to continue that and continue to expand our leadership in the Foodservice division. Thank you for your time this morning, and I'll now invite Mark Coffey, our Group Vice President of Supply Chain, to the stage. Thank you.
Thank you, Mark Ourada. Well, good morning, everyone. Well, I'm excited to be here. Supply chain, bringing it home! Well, this has been really fun for me. My first live Investor Day, this historic building, and then yesterday, our team had a chance to participate in the closing bell ceremony, which is a bucket list. But more importantly, to be here with you now and share more details on the transformational work we're doing to future fit our supply chain. We have a long and proud history of controlling our cost structure and operating an efficient supply chain. Our legacy cost-saving programs, our culture, and our investments in automation and technology have served us well through the years. But throughout the pandemic, as our nation's supply chains were stressed, we were focused on supply assurance and taking care of our customers.
Our mantra was, if we could produce it, we could sell it, procure supplies at any cost, add incremental capacity, both internally and through third-party co-mans, all at a higher cost structure. As we were focused on supply assurance, waste and inefficiencies crept into our supply chain. Earlier this year, as our supply chain stabilized, we were able to recover our inventory position and improve customer service levels back to first quartile performance. With that recovery, we immediately shifted our focus from supply assurance back to cost control and began removing those waste and inefficiencies that had crept in. Beyond the legacy cost savings programs and culture, we identified transformational initiatives and investments that would future fit our supply chain.
As Jim mentioned, we didn't let our own bias guide us, but we partnered with Accenture and took a thoughtful and thorough approach by benchmarking our current state against our peers and what best-in-class looks like. We identified initiatives to realize our supply chain vision and close those gaps. We developed an integrated roadmap and timeline across six distinct pillars, and we created a holistic value case for each of those initiatives that would roll up to a total value unlock opportunity. Of course, as we future fit our supply chain, we know that on the demand side, our consumer and our customer have ever-changing expectations, while on the supply side, we continue to fight inflation. Although down from pre-pandemic highs, inflation is still above historical levels, primarily driven by wage inflation as the war for talent continues.
As Jim and Jacinth have mentioned, we will unlock $200 million in operating profit by 2026 by optimizing our portfolio, investing in people, process, data, and technology, which will drive efficiencies across the end-to-end supply chain. Let's take a closer look at the value case for the plan, buy, make, and move work streams. The plan encompasses demand planning, supply planning, and deployment. The best plan starts with the most accurate demand signal. If we can improve the accuracy of our demand signal, we can build an optimized supply and deployment response. The value we unlock with an optimized plan is we have the right product at the right place at the right time. With the right product at the right place and the right time, we improve customer service and top-line sales while reducing transportation and manufacturing costs.
So let me dive deeper, give you a little more detail on the plan. It truly will require investments in people, process, data, and technology, and is the longest runway of value to capture, our 3-year runway. People, we have stood up centralized supply planning, demand planning, and deployment embedded in our supply chain function. Process. Along with our Go Forward initiative in 2023, we launched a new Integrated Business Planning process. Others in the industry might refer to that as the S&OP process. We call it Integrated Business Planning. It's a monthly review of our portfolio with a 4-step cycle every month by product family. Step one is a portfolio review. Do we have the right innovation coming in? Are there items that should go out to meet our goals and objectives? A demand review. What is demand for the next 18 months-24 months? A supply review.
Do we have the supply to meet that demand? And finally, a financial review. This new process aligns all the functional areas of this company around one number. What's the financial number that's going to be generated with this demand plan and this response? Let's move on to the buy. At Hormel Foods, we source and procure $9 billion of goods and services annually. Raw materials, packages, ingredients, supplies, and the various services we need to run this business. Throughout the pandemic, as we were focused on supply assurance, we weren't in a position to competitively bid our business.... As supply chains have stabilized, we now are leveraging the buying power of this enterprise to ensure we get the best combination of price, quality, and service. The value we unlock is year-over-year productivity by getting more out of every dollar we spend. Let me repeat that.
The value we unlock by better executing the buy is we get more out of every dollar we spend. I'll give you an example. For the last four months, we've been running a formal sourcing initiative around our freight. To put that in perspective, we had never ran an enterprise freight RFP. 6,800 lanes are serviced annually, over 100 million mi, 100 million mi of freight. By leveraging the scale of the enterprise with best practice sourcing initiatives, we are able to lower our freight rates, reduce our fuel surcharge, and consolidate the number of carriers we use to more strategic, fewer, but more strategic carriers, which will improve on-time customer service. We've completed the first wave of the buy, the second wave is in flight, and waves three and four are already planned.
We will have a constant wave of sourcing initiatives into the future, addressing all addressable spend across the categories I mentioned. We'll move to the make. Our manufacturing footprint includes 40 manufacturing plants and over 100 co-manufacturing partners. We unlock value by improving the efficiency and throughput of our manufacturing plants. As we produce more within our four walls, we better leverage our fixed costs while delaying the need for future capital capacity expansions. We have developed a Hormel production system playbook, which details new ways of working and the lean manufacturing tools we will use to drive improved efficiencies. We're piloting this in Beloit, Wisconsin, and I'll bring this one to life with a little more detail. The manufacturing plant is all about uptime and throughput, process control, equipment uptime. If we can improve the uptime of our equipment, we can get more volume through our manufacturing plants.
As we get more value volume through our plants, we can lessen our dependency on third-party co-manufacturers, which always come at a higher cost than our internal capacity. We'll move to the move pillar. Move to the move pillar. Optimizing our distribution network will unlock value by reducing total food miles while improving customer service as we position our inventory closer to the customer. We're in a great position in our shelf-stable network, but we know we need to add additional capacity to support our refrigeration, our refrigerated network. Over the last five years, we've added four new DCs, three in shelf stable, one in refrigerated. This will be a constant evaluation. Every acquisition changes our footprint. Every acquisition changes our manufacturing footprint and potentially our customer distribution footprint. Moving on to portfolio optimization. As you've heard today, we have a complex offering of items with a very long tail.
A small percentage of our items deliver 80% of our gross profit. Reducing complexity in our offering will reduce cost and unlock value. We are taking a very thoughtful approach to portfolio optimization, not SKU rationalization, portfolio optimization, by reviewing every item in terms of its strategic value and its profitability. Items with low strategic value and low profitability will be fixed or rationalized. And this is the yin and the yang, right? We have to have innovation, a point of difference, stay relevant to our customer, as Scott spoke about. That's the yin. But the yang is we have items in the portfolio that aren't performing that need to be weeded out. The yin and the yang. So we've developed a three-year transformational plan with initiatives and work streams in progress against all six pillars.
One thing I would like to emphasize is that these are not one-and-done initiatives. We are building capability for the future as we upskill our people, implement new processes that are best in class, create data governance, and all enabled by new technology solutions. So in summary, we are future-fitting our supply chain by investing for growth, minimizing complexity, and reducing cost. Successful execution against our supply chain initiatives will unlock the $200 million in operating profit we've discussed with you today. So with that, I would invite David and Jim and Mark back up, so we could answer any questions you may have.
Good job. All right, 15 minutes left for the last round of questions. Peter, saw your hand first. We'll start with you.
Thanks. I promise, promise I'll get it right this time. Peter Galbo from BofA. I have a question for each Mark. Mark Ourada, just maybe to start, you had some CAGRs on some of the bigger parts, I think, of the foodservice platform, at least over the next three years, that were between kind of high single digit, low double digit. Just curious, how does that kind of factor in as you roll up to a total company level, right, of 2%-3% sales growth over the next, you know, longer term, 'cause that would imply foodservice is going to grow a lot faster, but even potentially put you above that CAGR? Just want to understand.
... Yeah, I think as I talked about, traditionally with our go-to-market strategy, with the, you know, diverse portfolio, the direct sales team and everything, we do tend to outpace industry growth. And I would say, accretive growth to maybe the company numbers is something that we continue to strive to do. So I don't see that really changing as we move forward, as we've now brought in through the Go Forward the other businesses as well. I think, you know, we're bullish that we'll continue to see solid growth.
Peter, maybe I'll just add, you know, Jim talked earlier about investments, and I think, Mark, you know, you talked about it, too. This is some of the areas in the company where we've invested the highest, right? In bacon, pizza toppings, and premium prepared. So it really is the opportunity and the place to grow is within food service and retail in those key categories.
Got it. For Mark Coffey. Mark, on the buy part of the bucket that you had there, the procurement, I guess, you know, one of the things is you guys buy a lot of pork, right? And we saw the slide. It's your biggest input, you know, across kind of all the raw materials. There's been a lot of news about, you know, the deteriorating fundamentals, I guess, for some of the hog producers. So how are you managing that? You know, how is that flowing into your plan as a lot of the farmers or producers you're buying from are having a more difficult time?
So we harvest 5 million pigs annually in our Austin, Minnesota plant, and 95% of that harvest is contracted with farmer producers in the form of long-term contracts. We buy very few on what we're gonna call the open or spot market. So the first part of your question is, we manage that, the cost of that procurement through a variety of long-term contracts. The second part is real, is that the financial fundamentals, we don't have a lot of new industry capacity coming online. Farmers are getting pressured by availability of labor and all input costs. Some relief as grains have came down, but there is financial stress in the hog industry from a producer standpoint.
But I think the other part is, as we're thinking about the sourcing initiatives, really less about the hog side of the business, more about the packaging and the ingredients and the equipment and all the services that a good procurement strategy can affect.
Okay, all the hands went up at once. Ben, we'll start with you.
Hey, thanks. So you, you talked about the opportunity within the convenience store industry. That's kind of very much a world of haves and have-nots, with, in relation to, to growth and square footage, to kind of go after the products that you can supply to them. So when you think about the opportunity you have with the bigger box stores who are taking lots of market share from the smaller independent operators, who maybe just don't have the space or capabilities in their stores to offer the products that you all have, how are you thinking about aligning your, your sales targeting to the winners versus maybe the losers?
In c-store specifics. So again, I think it's where we see the real value add, so for instance, Planters. You know, Planters and c-store, you know, our store penetration is in the high 90%. I mean, we're everywhere. I think where we see the real value add, though, is what we can bring along with that now in the ingredients as well as the retail products. So, we're putting resources against not only the big chains, okay, we, you know, we certainly have people there, but we're also expanding, and we're getting coverage on those smaller ones. So I think, you know, it's a balance of if a place really specializes in the ingredients and pieces, you know, that's a great place for us to play right there.
So I think it'll depend where we go, but we've got the variety and the different places where we can lean in, where they need the most help, and that could vary by different location.
I think the other opportunity the portfolio has and has always have is it allows some operators to get into businesses that they haven't been in, because they're not going to invest in a full kitchen or all of the back of the house equipment. Having a fully prepared protein may require more of just a heating approach, and so it allows them to get into business with far less expense or capital. And we've seen that on our core food service business, so we know that's real, and as they're out there talking to some of those smaller convenience operators, that opportunity is there as well.
Michael?
Thank you. Michael Lavery from Piper Sandler. Can you just give a little more perspective on the magnitude of the impact from something like portfolio optimization? And I realize some of the planning may be still underway, but, you know, Mondelēz, for example, I think, had maybe something like 25% of its SKUs were 2% of sales. So really trying to think of it in terms of what a sales impact might be, and then how quickly... You know, if those are unprofitable or barely profitable, how quickly would you see the margin benefit from that? You know, just partly keeping in mind, you've talked about 2024 as an investment year, yet but that's where some of the cuts come. Do the benefits flow in in 2025?
Yeah, I mean, there's a—just to be clear, there is a bias for action, right? The reviews have already started. You know, as we go through brand by brand, family, different business segments, that work is happening. I mean, we, you know, we don't recognize for sure the exact number, but we have a probably a similar type scenario that we know is clogging up the arteries. I think there's certainly that margin piece, but as Mark described in his conversation, we also want to accelerate our innovation. If you've got something that's a blocker, it needs to go sooner rather than later. It is clearly one of the top priorities in the organization, bias for action. Historically, you know, Adam's phrase earlier, SKU rationalization...
It's not new, but there's always been a reluctance to do it. And a lot of times, because it hasn't been a true enterprise initiative, it's been left to a business, perhaps to a brand manager. This case is much different, right? This isn't an option. You don't get to opt in. There is a very well-defined review process that we'll take action on right out of the gate.
Thank you.
We'll go Adam, Rupesh, and Tom.
So I guess as we think about implementing these plans, how are the incentive structures inside the company changing? I mean, today, the plan is kind of framed in this context of $250 million of operating income, which, if I recall, I've never heard the company actually talk about operating income. It's always been the guidance every year is sales and EPS, and operating income itself has never been a specific, especially dollar profits, has never been a specific KPI that you speak often to. So what are you changing to align the organization to actually achieve these, these end goals? Because certainly, there can be top-line impacts in the short term, depending on how you choose to manage different product lines, and different businesses.
Yeah, and so there is an element of income that does cover incentives at a lot of the organization. So there's really two things that we're working on: one, to contextualize these dollars, right? And what that means to an existing incentive. And so making sure that somebody understands why this is so important to the organization, but the what's in it for me is meaningful over that time frame. And then the other part is, you know, the players who are having the most impact, to make sure that there is ample incentive to deliver on these goals. And so, I mean, we are thinking about it two ways. We know perfectly well how incentives drive behavior, and so that is part of this project as well.
But it is making sure that there's clear understanding of what the dollars mean, but then also for the people who are having the biggest impact, to make sure that their incentives are perfectly aligned with this project.
We'll go Rupesh. Adam, do you still have a question?
Yeah.
Okay. Okay.
Rupesh Parikh, Oppenheimer. So in our investor conversations and in the market, a lot of concerns out there about GLP-1 drugs and the impact on the food industry. So just curious how your—you know, whether your team is studying this area right now, and just any thoughts on how that could impact your portfolio? And I know it's very early, but just any thoughts.
I mean, it is, right? And so, I mean, we obviously, we, we've heard the narrative that's out there, and we've got that. We are thinking about it, you know, when we think about all every year, our risks and opportunities, that's one that's clearly on there. But, you know, really to understand the, the long-term effects of, of what they may or may not have, is TBD. And so it is a bit early to be making any rash decisions or really any-- to, to think we know. But we're, we're certainly watching it, and we're listening. You know, but we also know, the caution of chasing the new shiny toy, right? And, and overreacting. So, yeah, but, but we're-- we don't have anything to talk about today.
Maybe follow up on the $200 million in supply chain savings. A lot of times when companies introduce these types of programs, they'll also introduce some sort of cost expected to be associated with it over a several-year period. I don't think you guys have really laid that out today. Is the plan to, at some point, be much clearer on, hey, these are the buckets of costs that we expect over a several-year period? And I guess if we're not going to get that today, is there some way maybe you can frame kind of the minimum return expectation that would, you know, it would allow you to greenlight a project like this?
Like, do we need to think of, hey, you would target a 20% return, and therefore, we're looking closer to $1 billion in costs over a several-year period. Just anything to help frame kind of the outlay that we should be thinking about.
Yeah. I think the biggest thing is, you know, we're gonna, when we get together for our Q4 earnings call, obviously, we'll be able to provide you a lot more visibility on what that cost to obtain is going to be. And while we're not gonna say, "Hey, this is the return," but, you know, obviously, you know how disciplined we are with the way we manage capital, how we, you know, ask our team members to make sure we're getting those returns, that there is the return here that we need. And, most importantly, you know, in addition to that financial return, is that return to get to our more normalized growth algorithm.
And that's a really key driver for us here, is we have to make sure that we extract the costs on the supply chain, that we get the portfolio optimized. And it, this is for the long term. There's a three-year window that we've laid out here today, for sure, but this has... This is a much longer game that we're talking about.
Thank you.
Ben, you're last.
... Thank you very much. Ben Theurer. Just last question here. One of the things that's been spoken around a little bit in the markets in general is obviously the impact from GLP-1 drugs on consumption for food, beverage, et cetera. So wanted to get maybe your take as it relates to where you potentially see impacts, where you see maybe opportunities, and if that's something you consider within the whole portfolio rationalization to maybe get a skew towards a healthier cuisine, healthier exposure within the portfolio. Anything you can talk about that topic, that would be much appreciated.
Yeah. So Rupesh asked that question, and, I mean, clearly, we're watching it. It's so early. You know, what we do know is if we go over, what is it? 25-year timeframe, and we track, you know, the caloric intake, and that's with a lot of different things happening, whether it's a diet fad or, you know, anything that's the shiny toy, it hasn't changed that much. And that's not to say that past performance is any 100% guarantee of the future, but it certainly informs that. And so, you know, we're watching that closely. We know that protein tends to have a higher profile and a more positive view for people who are trying to lose weight.
Too early to know the exact impact, but like I said a little while ago, having it on our risks and opportunities will be something that becomes a very regular part of our long-range planning.
Great. Well, I want to thank everybody for being here today. It's been so wonderful to host. Jim has a few closing comments before we go, but again, I'll be available for questions out in the lobby, next week as well, so please feel free to reach out if there's anything you need a little bit more clarification. But again, thank you, thank you, thank you for being with us today. Jim?
Yep. Thank you. Again, thanks to all of you for being here, and thanks for your great questions. You know, just as we wrap up, you know, you heard from our team today that, you know, we have a realistic and achievable path to this $250 million+ goal, right? And each of them talked about it in a different way. So, you know, Jacinth, from a financial perspective, but I think very importantly, her comment around that she has been through transformations like this, and so having that purview and that expertise, very, very important.
Hearing about the power of One Retail from Deanna Brady and Scott Aakre, our ability to better allocate resources across our retail business, but clearly never losing sight of the benefit of our portfolio and how we have to win with the customer and the consumer. You know, Mark Ourada, talking about this incredibly advantaged business that we have, that is foodservice, and how we're gonna continue to invest, how we're gonna continue to grow, and how we're gonna continue to be a solutions-based provider for foodservice operators. And then Mark Coffey, right? On the front line of what we need to get done for the supply chain portion of this initiative, the passion and the commitment, but the vision, right? The ability to get this done, and not just hoping or wishing, a clearly articulated, well-developed plan that shows where the dollars will come.
But again, the long game, the long game that we have to future fit our supply chain. And so that is the team that will be driving this strategic focus, the investments that we make, the transformation that we need, and the growth that we absolutely need to deliver. Leading to all of these three areas, right? Again, not losing sight of our core business. This isn't an or, this is an and. We will be driving business in retail, in food service, and in the, in international, very strong businesses. We will continue to focus on capturing strategic value, projects that are in motion today and ones yet to come. And then, this transformation and modernization across all of those pillars, it has to happen for us to be able-- to be able to, to deliver on these long-term key results.
But the path is there, the team is there. It's laid out in a way that it's very, very achievable. And so back to where we started today, the key messages that we want you to take away is that we have made significant progress, and this is a stronger, more balanced, less volatile company since 2016. And we do that because we continually update our strategic priorities, right? We don't overhaul them, we update them because we're doing so many right things, and we are investing for growth. We're investing with our brands, but we're also investing in the business in a way to transform this company. Said a different way, we need to finish the job, right? That's what this is all about. This is about us finishing the job, completing the journey that we've been on. So it's not new, but we need to complete it.
We need to finish it. And we'll do it because we know that our inspired people who are creating inspired food each and every day, they're at the center of everything that we do, creating that food for our customers and our operators, who depend on us each and every day. So again, I thank you for your attendance. Thank you for attending, and as has been mentioned several times, we've got some incredible pizza, a great Hormel customer for you to enjoy, either here or to take with you. Thanks again for your time.
Staging the pizza right now, so we'll just have everybody hold for 1 minute. Grab your stuff. I'll let you know in about 5 minutes that we're ready to go. Thank you.