All right. Good morning. It's still morning, actually. My name is Peter Galbo, from the food and beverage team here at BofA. This morning we're delighted to be joined at the conference by Hormel Foods, $12.5 billion in revenue, market leader in all things pork, turkey, snack nuts, peanut butter, as well as Mexican foods. Hormel recently reported its fiscal first quarter and has shifted to its go-forward operating model, which now aligns the business across three segments: Retail, Foodservice, and International. Company also offers a unique perspective in that it's a bit more balanced channel mix versus some of its peers, about 65% of sales through Retail and about 30% through Foodservice.
Please join me in welcoming to the stage Jacinth Smiley, Executive Vice President and CFO, Deanna Brady, EVP of Retail, and Scott Aakre, SVP of Brand Fuel, as well as David Dahlstrom from IR in the back. Thank you guys for being here today.
Thank you.
Thank you for having us.
Jacinth, maybe just to start off, was hoping you could give us a quick recap on the first quarter results, anything coming out of the call that you've been getting questions on before we kind of dive a little deeper.
Yes, certainly. You know, we came into the coming off of a pretty good year navigating the challenges of COVID and high demand for our products coming into Q1. That demand continues to be very strong for the company, so fundamentally really feeling good in terms of where we are. If you listened to the call, certainly one of the challenges that we've had is just the build of inventory coming in. As we saw demand coming off of the year, we really leaned in a big way and in some aspects. There are some areas of the business, and I'm sure the team will talk a little bit more about it, where we did see some of the softening of the demand.
That created some of the overbuild that we saw and talked about as we went through the quarter. We are focusing very heavily immediately on a couple of things to address those. You know, PLANTERS is one of those areas where we saw softness coming into the quarter. We're really heavily focused with the team on what we need to do strategically as we came out of a really strong year of PLANTERS delivering on what we said, from a valuation standpoint. We did deliver in 2022, but really seeing some challenges coming into the first quarter, and we're doing a lot of things around innovation and repositioning the brand to be successful coming out of what we saw this quarter.
The other piece we're doing is really focusing on inventory in a few different ways and really bleeding down that inventory to get us back to where we need to be. As we talked about in the fourth quarter, what we expected to see this quarter was really realizing the benefits from markets coming down. We haven't been able to do that because of this overbuild in inventory. If you think about it, where that's challenging us is in terms of double handling the inventory, the internal freight transfers that causes additional cost to us, the additional warehousing that it takes to store the inventory.
With markets coming down from a commodity standpoint, we haven't been able to realize that because we've built the inventory with additional costs or the higher costs in the markets, and we're not seeing the benefit as quickly as we expected. Certainly having the team focus on right-sizing the inventory, but also fixing PLANTERS to get it strategically back on track.
Terrific. Thanks. Thanks for the recap. Maybe just to move over to Deanna, you know, to start off on the consumer, at least at a high level, you've run a lot of different parts of the portfolio for Hormel. Just broadly, what are you seeing from the consumer at this point, you know, elasticities, maybe elasticities by channel, you know, across the different business units?
You know, in, at a high level, our brands are resonating exceptionally well with a few exceptions that Jacinth touched upon, and we'll probably talk more about those and should. There's good demand across our brands. Our consumers are staying engaged. You know, what we're seeing, though, is consumers moving within the portfolio or within categories. As we've talked about the benefit of having a diversified portfolio as well as diversified businesses across channels, specifically within Retail, but also having a really robust Foodservice business that is also diversified across portfolio and value price points is exceedingly important and today's environment is showcasing that. We are seeing, you know, demand in some cases exceed, I'll say elasticities and some consumers seeing a higher price, but reaching for the product anyways.
In other areas of the store, we're seeing some pull back. Really it's things that are either higher ring or maybe viewed as a bit more discretionary. You know, when you walk in the store with a certain amount of money to spend on a meal or on groceries, some consumers are making some trade-offs if they are up against a certain dollar amount. Think of anything over $20, we are seeing some a pull back if it's not maybe the center part of a meal. I don't know, Scott, if you and your expertise and your team, if you wanna add anything else there.
Yeah, I think there's still some consumers that are looking at shopping by channel. They may be moving between Grocery and Club or Grocery and Dollar. The good news for our portfolio is we have distribution across all of those channels. We think about it in terms of price pack architecture, variety, and selection in those channels to make sure that the consumer, regardless of where they're gonna shop, has access to our products.
You know, we feel like the coverage is good. To Deanna's point, the categories, you know, have some ebbs and flows, which isn't unusual in an inflationary time. We've seen that before.
Great. Maybe just to switch over, let's talk about go-forward. Obviously from the analyst side, you know, we see it as a re-segmentation of the business and our Excel models, but obviously there's a lot more that's happening. Maybe kind of as an open-ended question to anybody, just what are the benefits you see from go-forward now that you've, you know, combined the company and you're reducing kind of operating segments from four to three?
Yeah. Maybe I'll start, Peter, before we go there and dig into that piece, just to level set in terms of the why behind why we've done the re-segmentation and this change in operating model and what we have actually done. Fundamentally, what it does is really just invest, if we just say it simply, I mean, this was our investment in the company for the long term, not just in the company from a product and consumer standpoint and retail standpoint, but also when we think about our people. So this was an investment in our people to say, okay, we have over time made multiple acquisitions, continued to evolve the company from a protein-centric company to where we are today, to a globally branded food company.
It really required us to think differently about how do we go to market and set this company up for success in the long term. This is what this model does, harness the power of the brands that consumers love so much, the brands that play so well in so many different channels, but then also how do we get our people to another level where we can leverage their talent, build their talent, and continue to have them have a career for the long term with this company. Go-forward wasn't about taking cost out, and we see that so often when companies go through operating models and restructuring, it's about taking costs out. This was truly about investing in the company and investing in our people.
I'll hit it from the, maybe the sales side, and I'll have marketing and have Scott touch on his area of the business and really the value that the new Brand Fuel organization brings. When you think about, you know, all of the brands across Retail and in our former structure, we had refrigerated grocery, which could be Retailing, could be Foodservice. We had JENNIE-O, and then we had International. All of those four businesses had Retail business and Foodservice businesses embedded within them. What it does is it takes, you know, these four silos of Retail and brings them all under one umbrella and one go-to-market strategy, whether it's from a marketing, from a consumer perspective, from a customer perspective.
One selling organization representing all our brands at Retail, in my case, and in Foodservice, in Marcato's case, really allows our customers to look at us as a strategic partner and think about all the different options and solutions we have as a number one, number two brand category leader, both in Retail and Foodservice, and how we truly can help them achieve their strategic objectives. In the past, we might have walked in the door at different appointments throughout the week, throughout the month, if you can imagine someone coming in to talk about JENNIE-O, someone coming in to talk about our Hispanic portfolio, for example. But really we're there now to talk about the consumer needs, right? What are the consumer needs of that particular customer, and how does our portfolio help them achieve that?
You know, Scott, I'll let you talk about Brand Fuel, how that helps unlock the power that we have.
Yeah. Brand Fuel was a very intentional effort to make sure we had a collection of people with specialized skills. In Brand Fuel, the insights team, which is consumer, category, shopper, our innovation team, our digital team, brand design, integrated brand experience. It was really the sense that if we could organize them together and then take that aggregate and apply it against the new business structure and within Retail against the verticals, we would have all of the people at the table at one time to really understand all the diagnostics of the business. What are the critical issues? How do we make sure we have alignment against those? Then we can make decisions much more quickly and much more informed with the same data sets. We're quickly seeing that that's the case.
The ability to react, the agility, the flexibility has been significantly improved with the new structure. Within that aggregate, we have the ability to flex resources where we need to. If we see certain opportunities for growth in one area, we now can move those resources in that direction to make sure that we're taking the full advantage of where that opportunity might exist. You know, at the same time, looking for efficiencies, we now have control over with the way Deanna described one Retail, we can look at our media investments differently. We can look at it with the scale of one Retail unit versus business units. We have different scale then when we come to negotiations. We have different scale when we come to conversations with our agency partners. We look at data differently.
We have different data sources coming into the organization. There's some that may have overlap that we can eliminate and find efficiencies. At the same time, there's ones that maybe were underutilized. How do we push that information deeper into the organization to make sure we take full advantage? To Jacinth's point, we added staff. We wanted to make sure we were covered for the growth of the company that we had already gotten through, as well as the growth that we see in the future, and have the ability to, again, align resources correctly, incentivize teams against the same objectives, and then redeploy as needed if there was a flexibility that we wanted to take advantage of.
Great. Maybe we can flip over to segments, and Deanna, just starting with Retail, you know, had a particularly difficult 1Q around snack nuts, peanut butter, higher inventory levels, some of the things Jacinth already mentioned. Maybe you can just take us a little deeper on kinda what happened, you know, and how you see that playing out over, you know, the next couple of quarters, particularly as we think about the perishable side of your portfolio versus non-perishable, and how you think you move through some of that inventory.
Sure. I think there's probably three or four things embedded there, I'll just start with, you know, we had a lot going on in Q1. You know, we planned behind the scenes for the go-forward model most of last year. August of last year, we announced the new operating structure. On November 1, we flipped the lights on and we stood up the operating structure. In addition, we merged through that transition of go-forward, JENNIE-O became a part of the Retail and the Foodservice. We integrated JENNIE-O from a sales and marketing and supply chain aspect all in Q4 of last year as well. A lot behind the scenes from an IT perspective, a finance perspective, and recasting the business. There was just significant heavy lifting.
Biggest change in the company's history, frankly, outside of probably acquisitions, was standing up the new operating structure. That, you know, wanna give the team credit for some amazing work. We really are walking. I would say if I have to, we'll be walking faster, but really this transition will take us through the balance of the year. The team has done a lot of work and still more work to be done. Specifically as we think about Q1, I'll just talk about PLANTERS. You know, you think about we acquired PLANTERS midway through 2021, really 2021 and 2022 was about integrating the businesses. Integrating the business from a strategic standpoint, we also had to integrate the business and integrate it into the new operating structure.
2023 is about executing the business, starting to execute against related strategies as we understood it. A few things there as we look at Q1, our execution is not where we need it to be, so I wanna acknowledge that. A couple of factors that played into the quarter, though, that I think are important to see through, because and then I wanna talk about where we're heading, is last year, Q1, we transitioned, while we bought the business in 2021, the actual inventory and the TSA cutover happened in Q1 of last year. Any time you cut over inventory from an operating system or from one company to the next, the customers know what those experiences are typically like, and nine out of 10 would say they're not good.
You'll see a buy-in of inventory to make sure they're secure while we get that transition cut over. Secondly, we were up against a price increase that we took last year, seeing price elasticities come into the marketplace as well as into that category. Then, the third piece was, as we acquired the business, we did inherit some major distribution losses that are playing out in Q1. That's kind of what happened, if you will. Where we're headed, as Jacinth said, we felt good about our execution last year on the integration piece. We're off to a slower start, both because of what I described, as well as the consumer has shifted within the category because of, I'll say, the economic and inflationary factors.
We have seen a shift which did cause some buildup in inventory in some areas that we're working through. What the rest of the year continues to be about is gaining new distribution. We're feeling very optimistic about distribution gains. You know, when you think about shifting away from a branded player in a category like this, if you don't have a category leader and the consumer's making decisions, it's really hard to grow. We have a lot of excellent conversations happening around the PLANTERS brand, around the category and the category leadership position. We have turned on advertising and relative to peanuts in particular, which is where the consumer has shifted. If any of you watched Super Bowl, you might have seen or might be seeing the commercials of MR. PEANUT getting roasted.
We're talking about in a, in a fun, cheeky way, but really the value of our dry roasted peanuts as well as some of the flavors that we launched last year that are playing out this year. Execution against new distribution in turning on advertising as well as we're also pulsing a lot of promotions to make sure that we're at the right price point based on our Price-Pack Architecture work and studies. We also have innovation that we'll be introducing and already have acceptance on in the marketplace, so we'll be seeing that play out. It's a lot of blocking and tackling, not anything new to this group or what you've heard, but it really is about, you know, being a category leader, making sure you're gaining distribution, that you've got good promotions in the marketplace.
You're advertising not only for the product but for the category, and reminding consumers why, the PLANTERS brand is important and why it's valuable and what the products can do for their livelihood.
Yeah. As just maybe Scott can add from a strategic standpoint as well when we think about innovation, right? In addition to the tactical things we're doing at the moment to really get to where we need to be, from a margin and sales perspective this year, we also have a lot going on strategically.
Yeah, I think it goes back to our ability to flex resources. We have pushed a lot of resources in the direction of PLANTERS, in different areas. One is around the analytics that Deanna was talking about. What do we know about the category? How do we make sure that we're helping the category grow for our Retail customers? We look at that, you know, by different consumer segments, that we can go in and talk about the importance of the leading brand as well as private label as well as the third-tier brands. From an innovation standpoint, we've also pushed a lot of resources that way. When we purchased the brand, the pipeline was there, but it wasn't maybe as robust as we were hoping for.
We've really pushed a lot of energy into making sure we've got the innovation in terms of both packaging, new products, PLANTERS as well as CORN NUTS and across channels. We're looking at grocery innovation, and then how does that play out into club store and into convenience, where we have growing opportunities to elevate the brands there as well.
Maybe and before I forget, I just wanna applaud that Hormel has brought CORN NUTS and PLANTERS products that are over on the side tables. Please grab them on your way out. I know they're a personal favorite. I'm getting validation from the audience members as well. You know, Deanna, maybe one of the things, and Scott, this is something I've spoken about with David, but, you know, there was a bit of confusion, I think, coming out of the call around PLANTERS and the idea of adding capacity. Now that was my understanding was more on the packaging side. Just wanted to clarify that first and foremost. Specifically on packaging, what needs to be done? Like, what specifically, you know, a re you have too many canisters and not enough tubs? Is it not in club channel?
Like, what are we going to be seeing on shelf?
When you think of like 15% of the business was in c- store, which lives within our Foodservice business today, that's how we've chosen to approach that channel. In the tube, think about when you walk into a c- store and you see snacks hanging on pegs, that's where you're gonna find the PLANTERS products. We have added capacity this year for tube nuts. We've also done some things for CORN NUTS, and hopefully you'll enjoy some of those things in your bags. And so we continue to think about what additional packaging. For innovation in particular, we've got some flavored cashew products that are exceptional, and they're in a standup bag.
We've also approved some capital to continue to expand the capability to deliver the, you know, in the innovation space that is gonna require some different packaging. When you think about how consumers wanna approach product. They wanna feel it, they wanna touch it, they wanna open it, and then they wanna zip it shut, and they wanna put it in their pantry and then come back at it if they're not gonna consume it all in a single portion. Where we need to continue to make progress is continuing to look at our capacity, and I'll say reengineer it towards some of those growth spaces that we talked about, which is the work we're focused on now.
I would just add to that, one of the first things we launched was a new bottle, with the intention that it was more sustainable. We're taking some plastic out because we think that's important for the consumer, for our customers, and for the world, frankly. Just to build on some of Deanna's comments around entertaining. You know, we actually even look a little bit below that. What does entertaining look like for consumers today? We know that from COVID, a lot of that entertainment has shifted from out of home to in-home, and it shifted to, you know, what do I wanna do on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday night with a few people coming over to the house. When the consumer's in that mindset, what they want are solutions.
They want things that are still special that they can put out for their guests, but it's again, against a smaller profile than maybe a Super Bowl party or a March Madness party. That's where our portfolio really blends itself together between the Columbus, the PLANTERS, our Mexican foods, our chili, things that are easy-to-make recipes that we can now provide to the consumer and to our customers in a meaningful format. Collectively build them in stores in unified platforms, whether it's shippers or communication with our Retail, media formats, where we can start to communicate the idea that it isn't only about those big parties, it's about those weekends where people are gonna collect together, but in a different way than they maybe did before.
Really trying to match up what the consumer trends are with the way our portfolio can balance against that.
Great. Maybe we can see if there's just any questions in the audience. If not, I'll keep going. Maybe just to touch on the other big parts of the portfolio. You've seen some input cost relief on certain raw materials, it seems like. You know, pork bellies are down pretty significantly. It seems like trim is still kind of a stubborn headwind. Maybe you can just talk to us a little bit about what you're seeing on the input cost side, particularly around raw materials, how we should think about that flowing through the P&L, really around pork.
Yeah. I mean, you summed it up. You know, basically, we continue to see, you know, volatility in the commodity prices. Some have come down, like you've mentioned, but they're still at historical highs. When we think about, you know, trim and bellies, certainly we are also exposed on the turkey side significantly to grain costs. Think, you know, soybean meal, and corn. Those continue to be headwinds for us, and those haven't come down enough. We talked about the inventory, the elevated inventory that we have. That's actually causing us not to be able to realize some of these benefits and expand the margins the way we could if we had the inventory at the appropriate levels.
Certainly, you know, as the markets continue to abate and we get the inventory down, we will see the benefits from that. but i f there's continued volatility in the commodity markets, that becomes an area of difficulty for us to manage as we think about a margin perspective.
Maybe just to wrap up on Retail, I think MegaMex doesn't get enough love in the portfolio. It's been a lot of volatility in avocados, you know, just curious kind of what you're seeing there. Just a broader question is, you know, would you ever buy out the other half of the JV? You know, what would the conditions you would need to see to kind of make that, you know, a WHOLLY owned piece of the business?
I'm gonna actually turn it to Scott. Scott's been a part of the board, of the internal board of MegaMex and sits alongside the partners and has been a key part of that relationship for 20+ years. It is a very rewarding portfolio, very exciting, and a really solid relationship that we've had and continue to have. I'll let Scott talk about some of the strengths of the partnership and what they bring as well as what we bring, as well as how relevant the portfolio is for consumers today.
Yeah, thank you for asking that. I share the need more love. You know, it's a very important part of the portfolio. It's about 10% of our Retail business in sales. It's definitely part of our growth platform. When you think about Mexican food within the United States, it's one of, if not the fastest growing cuisine, both at home and away from home. We have the benefit of some very powerful brands in that space and the focus of a joint venture where that's what they do. It's not part of Hormel, it's a joint venture that stands alone. The HERDEZ brand is a brand that's, you know, the fastest growing salsa in the salsa category. It has the ability to stretch into new categories. We've recently launched guacamole under the HERDEZ brand.
It's one that, you know, has done a nice job of covering the gamut of consumers. It covers general market and it covers the Hispanic consumer at the same rate. That is important to us. The WHOLLY brand is the leader in refrigerated guacamole, and we've been able to expand that brand into more avocado solutions. The pipeline of innovation is really impressive. We have an internal competition, they've won the last three out of the four years in terms of real true innovation coming into the marketplace that's changed the way that consumers think about Mexican foods. The mantra of the company is reimagining Mexican flavors, that's why our partnership is so important. What we get from the partnership is state-of-the-art production facilities.
We have the ability then to understand the culture of the food and the culture of the Hispanic consumer. You know, I'll just go back to the origin of the HERDEZ guacamole. Our partners have a foundation where they've collected recipes from all over Mexico. We discovered this guacamole recipe in their archives, and that was the one that we used to launch HERDEZ guacamole, and it's now the fastest growing product in the category because it brings that level of authenticity into the market. Very important. Our partners benefit from Hormel in that we have a direct sales force. We've got the scale of an $8 billion portfolio that we bring forward. We have the order-to-cash system. We have all of the things that Brand Fuel does for the Hormel brands, it also does for the joint venture partnership.
Very important for us. There's no conversations around how do we buy out the partner. They're important, we're important, and it's set up in a way that we both benefit from each other, but we've also created some great friendships and relationships that are really important to the success of MegaMex as a joint venture.
I just tuck into the expansion of Foodservice and so our Foodservice expertise, and really there's a ton of upside potential within the Hispanic portfolio within the Foodservice industry, and we've seen that unfold over the course of the last few years, and we think there's additional runway there as well to benefit on our capabilities.
You'd asked about avocados and certainly that, you know, there's volatility in the avocados. We've done I think some really important work around how do we mitigate that volatility year to year. There is, you know, a growing cycle with avocados that we're much more aware of. There are mitigation efforts that are in place for us in terms of the way we manufacture, the way that we procure avocados. We're working really hard to try to blend that out over time and to take some of the volatility out. Again, it happens because you have a joint venture that's focused entirely on the Mexican food space and on those key important areas like salsas and avocados.
Great. I think Brian has questions, so.
Thanks. Question actually for all of you, is if you look at the stock price today, right? Let's forget about COVID, right? Just kind of look where it is versus where it was pre-COVID and where it's been historically. You know, it's at a depressed level, right? Valuation is compressed a bit. I think what the markets are questioning, right, is whether the value creation model at Hormel still creates value, right? There was a point in time where, you know, the stock traded at a real premium, right? I think part of that was the acumen the company has had in making acquisitions and integrating those acquisitions. Was also partly the, kind of the stability, if you will, of the cash flows and the profits.
Seems like the market is questioning, right, whether the model that sort of created so much value over time is still able to create value. Could you just maybe talk about, A, is that a question you ask yourselves internally, and B, you know, has the market changed in a way that Hormel has to shift? Maybe that's the reset, segmentation is part of that. You know, just really trying to understand, you know, where the disconnect is, right, between what's been such a great value-creating model over time and now kind of the market's questioning that.
I'll start, and I'll say there isn't any question or shouldn't be any question about whether or not the company creates value today and will continue to create value in the future. I can't imagine the company being any stronger than it is today. I mean, historically, the company definitely has been in a different place. It has evolved to where it is today, and it's right for the time that we're in and the dynamics that we're in, and that's exactly why the go-forward model makes sense today. Now, I think. Right? We still trade to a premium to the market, and that makes sense. I believe where the stock price is today is really a direct reaction to Q1. I mean, that's my perspective.
I think the market will adjust as we see 2023 play out, and I don't feel like it is a long-term reflection of what people are thinking about Hormel Foods because this is an absolutely solid company. We're investing for the long term, and I understand that the market reacts in a short-term manner to results on a quarterly basis, but that's not how we run this company, right?
I think the difference that we have here as Hormel Foods in terms of our structure, part of it being the fact that we're 47%, right, our biggest shareholder is a Hormel Foundation, it gives us this ability to not have a knee-jerk reaction to a stock price because of the short-term view that someone may have as a reaction to a quarterly result and what consensus was and how that played out in the market. Were we disappointed with where we came out and how we performed in the first quarter? Absolutely. I mean, there is no question about that.
We're also very committed and do not feel any differently about what the value is of Hormel Foods in the long term, the portfolio of, and the strength of our brands and where they play and how they play in the market and what the company has done to invest in the company and this cash flow that this company continues to throw off and where we sit is really, in my mind, still, right, second to none.
Yeah. Very well said. You know, for my time with the company, which has been a bit, the biggest transformation and change we're doing because we needed to reorganize the company for growth, it's extremely exciting and motivating for me despite, you know, where we're sitting today, where the quarter was, yet I can look at that quarter and we roll up our sleeves. Our team knows how to execute exceptionally well. It doesn't mean we shift gears and make sure we're blocking and tackling and, as I described, both on a Foodservice and a Retail perspective, thinking about, you know, where we got hit, but also thinking about where we have runway for growth.
We've not only invested in mergers and acquisitions, we've invested in our structure, we've invested in capital, and we continue to add capacity in areas where we see long runways for growth. We opened up Papillion down in Omaha, which we're already will be fully filled, if you will, from operating for additional Columbus capacity, additional pepperoni capacity for Retail and Foodservice, some flexible space there for plant-based pepperoni, and then additional bacon capacity, which we've added multiple lines both in our Retail pack, our BACON 1, and for Foodservice, and then microwave-ready. We've got capacity to grow with. We do have some areas that we need to address.
I feel really bullish about the structure, in particular the Brand Fuel team that we've embedded to help support the organization from a very, you know, specific areas of unlocking growth. Standing, you know, up our Foodservice as a standalone unit to demonstrate really the power of that. When you think about Foodservice, and I, you're probably gonna ask me a question about it, you know, we have a very different viewpoint on Foodservice than most companies do and it's something to really pay attention to.
Probably just a quick, to add as well in terms of level set, over the last couple years, we have grown this company by $3 billion. $1 billion of that was PLANTERS, right? Outside of PLANTERS, we grew $2 billion in this environment where our peers and others were pulling back, right? We still continue to invest over $300 million a year in CapEx spend, and we are growing and investing in so many different areas in our people and in our brands. The complexity and the dynamics of what we were doing, where we're doing all those things in parallel with integrating JENNIE-O, right, continuing to build out our portfolio, continuing to innovate.
I have no apologies, in terms of, you know, where I think we need to get to and where we are. The apology is okay, we missed the quarter. Absolutely feel good about our ability to continue to execute and grow this company for the long term.
Okay, we've got about 90 seconds, and I wanna hit on two topics. First being AI. Just what's the latest on Avian flu and what you're seeing? Secondly, China. You have a, you know, decent-sized International business. You just made an investment in Indonesia, just kinda what's the latest? I'll leave that in any order.
Yeah.
You wanna hit China first?
Well, we can hit China. I feel like China's almost like the avian influenza flu. I mean, it's anybody's guess as to what, you know, what happens with China. I mean, that's the biggest piece of our International portfolio. We've seen what's happening there, where it's almost kind of a start and stop. It really depends on if it continues to stay open. We feel good about where we are with that, with the International business. I mean, we continue to grow International. You would've seen the latest investment with Garudafood in Indonesia. That's a $400 million investment that we made.
Another comment that adds to what I was talking about as well, Peter, is we continue to invest to grow this company. I think, you know, depending on what happens with China will dictate how International really plays out for the rest of the year.
On high path avian influenza, you know, really anyone's guess. We're well prepared. We know how to manage through it. It's not easy. It's extremely difficult. Probably one of the hardest situations. You know, our employees who deal with the live production side of the business have had to deal with, you know, not once, not twice, but. Right now I'll say it's a bit quiet, but it's, you know, it's still out there in other parts of the world. It's possible it could be back at us this spring. You know, it's a different world with high path. It's not anywhere as predictable as it once was.
Really having a robust way of managing it, knowing how to hit it hard, fast, as well as how to think about then how do you react with your customers, your consumers, and the portfolio, with the meat that you have left. Honestly, our biggest, you know, our things we think about when it hits is obviously animal welfare and employee welfare, 'cause it is exceptionally difficult. We are so grateful for the leadership of that business as well as the teams who've had to manage through that because it is exceptionally difficult. We have the other part that's, I won't say easy, but figuring out then how to navigate that from a business perspective.
Great. Well, I think we're at time, and thank you all for being here.
Thank you.
With that, we're gonna take a break from the company presentations for lunch. Invite everybody to join us actually in this room, to hear from David Tinsley, who's Senior Economist from the Bank of America Institute, who's gonna be giving a presentation at lunch.
Thanks, Peter.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.