PepsiCo, Inc. (PEP) Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) Conference (Transcript)

PepsiCo, Inc. (NASDAQ:PEP) Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) Conference February 21, 2024 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Ramon Laguarta – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Jamie Caulfield – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Dara Mohsenian – Morgan Stanley

Andrea Teixeira – JPMorgan

Filippo Falorni – Citi

Unidentified Analyst

So, please join me in thanking PepsiCo for fortifying us with snacks and drinks today. I did a check a little bit earlier and based on the traffic it’s likely to be while it lasts. So, thanks Pepsi.

I’m pleased to introduce PepsiCo, one of the world’s largest convenient food and beverage companies with more than $90 billion in revenue. Joining us today are CEO, Ramon Laguarta; and CFO, Jamie Caulfield. Together Ramon and Jamie have nearly 60 years combined experience at PepsiCo with a range of experiences from sales and marketing to operations to finance. Since, Ramon, took over as CEO in 2018, the company embraced a strategy to increase investment and accelerate growth. The result has been strong performance in the most recent years.

Ramon, I’m going to turn it to you, so we can have a discussion on Pepsi.

Ramon Laguarta

Great. Thank you, Bryan for the kind words, and good morning everybody. It’s always fun to be in Florida when you live in the Northeast in the month of February, so it’s great. And hopefully you guys can have fun with our products as well. I saw they were flying off the shelf, so it’s great.

We’re going to double team with Jamie, in the presentation and we’re basically going to focus on how have we been executing against the strategic framework that we shared with you five years ago. Before I go into the presentation, I’d like to thank our very experienced leaders in every country around the world, and our frontline for the work they’ve been doing over the last five years which has been tough, and they’ve been performing as you will see with outstanding levels.

And also, before I move to the presentation, I’d like for you to take note of the cautionary statement. Okay. So, four chapters that we’ll cover. I’ll spend a little bit of time on, who we are. Probably most of you know about our company, but just to make sure that we all have the same level of information. Then we’ll spend the majority of the presentation on the last five years performance against the strategic framework and then where we’re going to take the company over the next three, four years as well within that same strategic framework. And then, we’ll talk obviously about capital allocation and financial targets, and Jamie will do this part.

So, as Bryan was saying, we’re one of the largest food and beverage companies, convenient food and beverage companies around the world. We sell $91 billion. Last year we sold $91 billion. Operating profits of $14 billion. And, we have a broad set of brands, iconic brands, love brands that people love and trust, and we sell them over 200 countries around the world. The business is about 60% convenient foods and about 40% beverages. We operate in those two very large categories. I’ll talk about them later. They’re complementary categories from many dimensions consumer, customers, occasions, infrastructure. So, that’s how we get the benefit.

In snacks, we are mainly leaders in savory snacks, but opening up to many new occasions in convenient meals, convenient foods in home and away from home. And in beverages, we play in mostly all the LRB categories and we’re expanding beyond our current footprint into new occasions as you will see later.

We operate through seven sectors or operating units. All of them have obviously a lot of MUs or marketing units that are reporting to them and that allows us to be very locally relevant and downplay our strategies to the local level. As you will see, as you see there 60% of our business is in the U.S., almost 40% of our business is international. But, look at the size of our international business $36 billion clearly much larger than most of the companies in our sector globally.

If you go down to one level in North America beverages business is about $28 billion and you see the brands that we operate Pepsi, Gatorade, Mountain Dew, Starbucks, Lipton, Bubly and many others. We play across most of the categories in LRB. Frito-Lay North America already $25 billion and with brands that you probably all recognize Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, but also smaller brands like PopCorners, SunChips, Tostitos, etcetera. And, then Quaker foods smaller division $3 billion plain and breakfast but also in different meal occasions throughout the day. We feel very good about the fact that for the 8th consecutive year our customers are recognizing us as the number one manufacturer and that gives us a lot of pride and is a great recognition to the teams that operate every day in the U.S.

Internationally, we have four large sectors. As I said, a lot of market units are reporting to those sectors. Europe and Latin America are the two largest ones. AMESA and APAC growing faster and we expect that as we think about the future given demographics and our scale already in those markets, those sectors will continue to increase in relevance. One thing to note, our food business we operate it end-to-end, so we recognize much more net revenue. Our beverage business is mostly a franchise business. So, when you compare the size of the beverage business, it gets smaller, full system revenue is still very large.

Now, we operate as a company in this framework that we shared with you multiple times where we have a mission to create smiles with every sip and every bite across the world. We have an empowered culture, high-performing culture with the objective with the goal of becoming the global leader in convenient foods and beverages. And we’re putting pep+ at the center of our strategy and make sure that we’ll have long-term returns by being sustainable, by being a company that cares for the planet and for people.

Okay, so that’s who we are. Now let me tell you about the last five years, how have we done against the strategic framework that we shared with you about five years ago. That framework we said we want to pivotal growth, we want to pivot, we want to take this company from being a good company to being a great company. We will invest in accelerating growth with investments in our brands, investments in our infrastructure. We’re trying to modernize our infrastructure, de-bottle our supply chain, de-bottle our go-to-market, modernizing our systems, modernizing our technologies, creating a culture of empowerment, and as I said earlier, elevating the better part of our company to make sure that we have sustainable long-term returns.

It all started with making sure that the investments in our brands and the investments in our operations went up to elevate our performance. So, we went from investing $4.2 billion in our A&M in 2018 to almost $6 billion in 2023, that’s a large growth. That marketing went against our large brands but also against a lot of our smaller brands that are competing in niches within our categories. And of course we’re investing in capabilities to maximize the ROI of those investments across the world.

The other thing is we took our CapEx from about $3 billion to $5 billion investing against de-bottling our infrastructure, our go-to-market, modernizing our operations, modernizing our technology and investing as well in productivity. And, I will go a little bit into the details. Not only did we invest in our brands, but also we elevated innovation and a central capability to the company very consumer centric innovation and a few areas of focus that I mentioned here.

In beverages functionality and hydration were big pillars of this strategy, and you see here we’ve created meaningful platforms in energy and in hydration. These are global retail sales. So, these are consumer value. So, both in energy you see through multiple brands we’re already selling $6 billion our Gatorade, our Propel, our Muscle Milk all that part of the portfolio is already $11 billion. We invested a lot in developing our positive choices in snacks especially but also in beverages, no longer reduce in sugar, reduce in sodium whilst keeping a great taste, but also adding whole grain, changing the cooking methods to baking and popping and some other choices that we call positive choice in the company. And you see also the size of our platforms already $9 billion in non-sugar colas, $2 billion in whole grains or baked snacks, meaningful.

We also invested in given the consumer optionality for portion control, optionality for portability and you see some of the innovation around packaging, be it canisters, be it multi packs or variety packs which are already a big part of our business $3 billion in the U.S. And of course, we continue to innovate in flavors and experiences given it’s one of our core capabilities and you probably will enjoy some of them outside, but we keep innovating with local flavors, global flavors and new trends.

Okay. The result of this has been, I mean we’re feeling proud of it. The business was growing 2% in beverages in the ‘16, ‘18 timeframe now is a 7% for the last five years. The same with convenient foods went from a 5% to a 10%. And, it’s been quite broad against all our large brands. So, you see Gatorade, Pepsi and Mountain Dew growing almost double-digits and the same for our large snack brands.

So, good growth translation of the investments into faster growth across multiple parts of the business. And also, geographically the growth has been in the U.S. and internationally. So, the U.S. went from a say a 2% growth to a 7% growth and the international business went from a 6% to a double-digit growth over the last five years. And, look at the scale of our business again, the U.S. business being at $55 billion and the international business $36 billion which gives us a lot of resources, a lot of opportunities to reinvest to continue to gain market share and per capita development.

The U.S. I won’t go too much in detail, but Frito-Lay has added $8 billion since ‘18. The Frito-Lay business has been gaining share consistently for the last four years, year-after-year and continues this year both by expanding packaging optionality, also introducing as I said innovation, extending permissible offerings and through a combination of better execution and innovation the Frito-Lay business continues to thrive above the category and above food. And the beverage business in North America also expanded its presence across LRB with increasing in zero sugar, increasing energy.

And we started this new part of our business which we call Beyond the Bottle. You’ve seen some of that examples there with SodaStream, but also powders and tablets. I saw that powders and tablets for Gatorade were gone in one minute. So, clearly a consumer opportunity that we are increasing in capacity and we’re going to give even more priority because it is at the center of a consumer trend, but also a positive choice as we eliminate plastic, we eliminate a lot of the emissions that come from moving liquids around.

So, this is the performance and one thing for all of you for the last four consecutive years, our PepsiCo business, the combination of our food and our beverage business has been the number one growth contributor in U.S. retail. So, clearly there’s a correlation between the role we play as a growth contributor and recognition that our customers give us through the Kantor report.

Internationally, we also feel very proud about the growth in the last five years. We’ve gone from a $25 billion business to a $36 billion business. And, we’re building scale in many, many countries around the world developing and developed markets around the world, where focus is in developing markets. And look at the scale of some of our businesses in developing markets. And I chose here a few Mexico, China and Brazil already very sizable markets and that scale gives us the opportunity to continue to gain market share consistently as we have more resources to invest in our brands, we can attract better people, we can build better go-to-market models. And also it helps us invest in what is the critical opportunity which is the per capita development of our categories internationally.

Now, not only did we invest in growth, but also we elevated productivity. Productivity was elevated over the last five years culturally mindset, but also capability wise. And here you see some of the results. We focus on driving excellence at the basics that we call. So, we try to become better at all the critical things that we do in the company from sourcing, to moving, to making, to selling. Those are the critical cost elements of our P&L. And, you have here some examples of how we’ve elevated transportation productivity, making packaging productivity and some of the other elements of the productivity journey.

Now, as I said for us we believe that elevating pep+ to the center of the strategy will give us sustained long-term performance over time. So, if we’re better at the way we farm, or we work with the farmers to source our products that will give us sustainable performance. If we eliminate the amount of water or reduce the amount of water, reduce emissions in our supply chain that will give us a legitimacy to continue to participate in many communities around the world. And obviously, by moving the portfolio to positive choices that will be recognized by consumers as a positive way to stay connected to our brand.

So, this is central. We’ve made a lot of progress. You see some of the numbers there. We feel very proud about the water reduction, the Scope 2 reduction. We feel very good about the progress we’ve made with our positive choices portfolio. And then, this is I guess the consequence of all this is we’ve been growing very fast, we’ve been growing 11% over the last three years and our EPS has been double digit 12% EPS consecutive for the last two years.

Clearly, the consequence of all these investments, great work by our people, long-term perspective in delivering a superior financial performance way above our long-term target, and what we have been able to deliver in many years in the past. But what makes us also very proud, is the recognition that we’re getting externally from our customers. Clearly we take that with a lot of value, but not only our customers, we are seen as one of the more high integrity companies. You see 100 best property citizens, one of the most world’s most ethical companies. And also we’re being recognized by the way we treat our people and that is clearly to me a sign of sustainable performance as well for the long-term.

So, this is our last five years. Now, let’s spend a bit of time on where are we going from here? How do we take in this momentum that we have, this stronger foundation that we have in our technology, our people, our brands, our capability in general to continue to deliver outstanding performance for all our stakeholders.

The first thing is growth, and we’re very excited about the growth opportunity for the company, mainly because we operate in two very large, very fast growing categories, globally relevant where we participate at scale, but if you see we’re still a very small part of those two categories. So, we are less than double-digit both in convenient foods and LRB globally. And those are categories that are growing around 5% around the world. So, if we are able to leverage the strength of our brands, the strength of our people, the strength of our infrastructure to continue to grow these categories and build market share as we think we will, this is a great opportunity.

The second one is, we are well scaled international company, but we have a lot of opportunities to continue to grow internationally. And you see there, there’s not only an opportunity from the demographic point of view, obviously we have a big business in the U.S., population is outside of the U.S., but in the U.S. as well, but big part of it outside of the U.S. And look at the category development in the U.S., outside of the U.S. both for LRB but also for our savory business. So, you have the combination of demographics plus the opportunity to develop our categories and the scale that those international business are starting to have already in terms of capacity to invest, capacity to attract the best talent, to innovate, you see the opportunity that we have over the long-term.

Now, we have very clear priorities on how we plan to do that for every one of the businesses in the organization be it the beverage business, be it the food business, be it in North America or international. But, the things that I want you to focus on is the capabilities that we plan to scale in the company that I think will make us successful.

Number one is, consumer centric innovation. I’ll talk about it. Second one is, how do we leverage our brands beyond what they are today into ecosystem of solutions that drive consumer occasions in multiple parts of the day. And this ability to be always everywhere through our go-to-market systems, through our innovation we can be in every day, in every single day part of the consumer journey, but also being everywhere in home and away from home to capture that consumer.

So, let me spend a bit of time on how we plan to do that. When you think about innovation there’s a few spaces that we want to double down. One is, as I said positive choices. We will continue the journey of positive choices through superior R&D, be it reduction of sodium, reduction of salt, reduction of sugar, positive ingredients, whole grain, lentils, etcetera. So, we’re working on a lot of innovation around foods and beverages that around positive choices.

Second is, new occasions. We want to make sure that consumers can find us in many more occasions than today. That will come through packaging innovation as you see there, minis that has been a great opportunity for us to have portable snacks throughout the day, powders and tablets as you saw there outside, but also make your own beverages, giving the consumers the opportunity to personalize their beverage through the SodaStream ecosystem plus other solutions. So, consumers can have beverages throughout the day as they please with their own personalization.

We’re planning to move our food business beyond snacking into meal occasions, and we’re going to do that at home. We think our products belong, and we’re seeing that already in at home both as side dishes, but also as ingredients in the meal. And, we’re also going to double-down on providing the consumers with food experiences that are away from home. If you think about consumption is moving away from home, consumption of calories, especially in developed markets, in developing markets has always been there with street food.

We plan to participate much more in meal occasion. You have there are some examples like Walking Tacos and some other ideas, but we’re working on becoming a solution for consumers that want convenience away from home. And of course we’re thinking about other categories whether it is sweets in our variety packs that we already do or testing how do we expand our brands into spaces like alcohol. And, as you know we’ve been playing with different models for the last few years.

Now, when you think about what I was saying the other big opportunity for us is to take our large brands and build them from just one or two solutions into an ecosystem of solutions. And, this is the example of Gatorade, what I think will clearly illustrate it. Gatorade, if you think about it five years ago was a ready-to-drink hydration solution for high-performing athletes. A great opportunity, we’re doing a great job. We think about Gatorade and the brands that we’re building around Gatorade as an ecosystem of solutions for both hydration and fuel that go way beyond the ready-to-drink solution. And, you see here some ideas. We’re taking basic Gatorade Zero, Gatorlyte being a rapid hydration. You take Fast Twitch is the convergence between hydration and energy. You then go into powders and tablets, so giving consumers the opportunity to find Gatorade or to use Gatorade in a much different way.

You go to equipment, and the equipment business is flying for Gatorade given the strength of the brand, be it the bottles or some other solutions for consumers to take home. And, now we’re creating Gatorade iD which is a digital solution for consumers to participate in this ecosystem being able to personalize their bottles, being able to have tested scientifically how do you, what are your hydration needs and we can provide you with personalized solutions of it, and also having special LTOs and special unique choices for you as you become part of the Gatorade club.

So, this is how we’re thinking about brands. I’ll tell you about Tostitos later, how we’re thinking about Tostitos also as an ecosystem of solutions. So, it is about innovation, but it is also about taking our brands into many more spaces and create an ecosystem digital and physical for consumers to connect with our brands.

When you think about channels, we’re also thinking about a very expensive channel evolution. Obviously at home is our core occasion, but within home, we think that we can move into meals in a much more intentional way. And a lot of our innovation and our marketing is about our products going from snacking to meals, and we think that is a big opportunity.

When you think about e-commerce clearly a huge growth opportunity, e-grocery being a big part of it and we’re obviously improving our capabilities to be participating in that opportunity above our fair share. But, also we’re creating direct-to-consumer solutions be it with Gatorade, be it with SodaStream or be it with Snacks.com where we can personalize solutions for consumers and those are starting to become scalable solutions already.

And now Away From Home is a big, big element of our future strategy. We’re big in Away From Home, we’re big in on-the-go, we’re big in on immediate consumption both in our snacks and our beverage business. We want to provide more experienced solutions to the consumer Away From Home, so we can capture more calories or more of the hydration needs for consumers Away From Home. And you would see some executions like Doritos Late-Night where we show up with Doritos’ trucks in universities with Doritos full meal solutions or other brands that will participate in Away From Home higher value occasions as we go forward.

Now, I was saying Tostitos, so similar to Gatorade, Tostitos was also a packaged corn-based solution. Now, this is real in Mexico today. Tostitos is way beyond a cornmeal dipping solution. It is already, we have specific executions of Tostitos that go with meals, local rituals in Mexico with Tostinas or we participate in Mexican breakfast. It’s in food service. We have Tosticentro, which are street food, street vendor solution. So, Tostitos is today we have over 10,000 street vendor trucks or whatever you call it, that where consumers can buy a solution which is Tostitos with veggies, with tomatoes, with their own personalized solutions and that’s already a big business for us. And, we’re obviously trying to move into restaurants, some solutions for the brand to participate much more holistically in what is the full food experience where we want to be always everywhere for the consumer wherever they are.

Now, we’re excited not only for our growth opportunities and you saw that in the categories where we participate, the scale of our brands, the international opportunity and the innovation opportunities. But, we also feel very excited about where we can take the productivity of the company based on the foundation we’ve built for the last five years. We’ve invested in technology. We’ve invested in data. We have our data in a much better place to be leveraged. We’ve invested in the mindset of our people and the capabilities of our people. And there’s four big areas where we plan to elevate productivity.

One is, network optimization and making sure that we accelerate the automation in our plants in our warehouses. That’s a big pillar. It’s already underway and will give us a lot of good returns and will create better jobs for our people. The second one is, how do we do work across the company? We do work in a probably too complex way. So, we’re streamlining processes, we’re simplifying and standardizing our processes through the leverage of global business services which is a capability that we’ve built over the last four years. Now it’s at full-scale.

Obviously, we plan to use data and AI in a much more scaled way, and we were not able to do that five years ago, four years ago because our data was not in a way that our people could be empowered to use the data as they are today. I’ll give you some examples. And, the other thing is just an example of a capability that we’re building is, how do we make sure that our costs are in the areas which are valued by the consumer. So, it’s a consumer backed way of value engineering everything we do. We call it design-to-value, but it requires a lot of capabilities so that our people can understand what do consumers really value in our products or in our processes and then go back and put make sure the cost of the product or the cost of the business is against those areas the consumers are really value.

And so, we’re going to elevate productivity, productivity that we need to invest in growth. We want to be the best performing company from the topline point of view. And, these are just some examples of how we plan to use digital and AI now that we’re ready for it across, what are the core capabilities of the business, how we innovate and how we go to market, how we plan. So, if you think about an integrated business planning process that goes all the way from automatic forecasting to automatic purchasing, integrated visibility of that process. That was not something we had in the past. We want to have that AI forecasting. For example, we forecast all our cash flow today almost through AI. We don’t have a lot of human intervention in how we forecast our cash flow.

Obviously in the how we make our products agile, agile networks that are much more ready to pivot against what have been complex supply chain situations in the past. Selling, I think we are as you know, we have a DSD model in the majority of the countries, the large markets where we participate. That’s a great opportunity for us both for growth and productivity. If we make our frontline associates more intelligent with real-time data of where they’re selling, how they’re selling that would elevate both their ability to sell more, but also will help us with productivity. So, we’re planning to execute a much more aggressive data and AI strategy against the core capabilities of the business and that will drive both more growth and more productivity.

And then lastly, we remain very committed to pep+. Pep+ as I said earlier it is essential to our strategy. We’re planning to change the way we do agriculture. We’re changing the way we do our value chain, the amount of water we consume, the emissions we have, the amount of waste packaging waste that we have in our system, and obviously how we up skill our people, how we develop our people in our value chain, so they can fulfill their potential in life. And then positive choices, the portfolio strategy being critical for us and positive choices being critical to how we evolve the portfolio to remain centered to what consumers will prefer today and will prefer in the future. It’s not only about packaging reduction but it’s critical but also as I said earlier reducing sodium, reducing sugar, increasing positive ingredients like whole grain or plant-based proteins in our portfolio.

So, this is where we think we can save the company. I’m sure we can talk more in the Q&A. And now, I’m going to pass it on to Jamie, to take us through the capital allocation and the financial objectives. Thanks.

Jamie Caulfield

Good morning, everybody, and it’s great to be back at CAGNY after a four year hiatus. And I’ve really enjoyed over the past couple of days reconnecting with a number of old friends. So, as Ramon mentioned, I’ll just go through a few slides on capital allocation and our long-term financial targets and we’ll begin with our capital allocation priorities. No change from what we’ve shared with you in the past.

Our priorities are: Number 1, invest in the business. Number 2, pay and grow the dividend. Number 3, selectively consider acquisitions, divestitures and partnerships and in doing so with a very strict strategic and financial lenses. And then Number 4 is, to return residual cash flow to our shareholders through share repurchases within our capital structure framework.

As we look at capital investments, really beginning in 2019, we had four priorities. One was, expanding growth capacity. Number 2 was, supporting productivity largely through automation and the network optimization that Ramon referred to. Number 3 is, modernizing our IT infrastructure that really creates the foundation for a lot of our digital efforts. And Number 4 is, advancing our pep+ sustainability initiatives.

Our CapEx peaked if you look over the past five years, peaked in 2019 as a percent of sales and has since moderated a bit in the earlier part of that five-year framework. The emphasis on capital investment was more directed towards expanding the growth capacity and really removing some bottlenecks that had built up in the system. And over that time, the investment in capacity has moderated a bit, but at the same time that’s as we’ve ramped up our investments in IT, in sustainability and in productivity.

Expectation going forward is that, as we complete a lot of the IT foundational work that the CapEx will begin to moderate a bit more as we get into 2025 and 2026. On dividends, we have a very long established track record of paying an attractive dividend and growing that dividend steadily over time with our recently announced July 2024 dividend action that’ll mark our 52nd consecutive annual dividend increase.

And then finally, turning to our long-term financial targets, again, unchanged from what we shared with you in the past. Number 1, mid-single-digit organic sales growth. Number 2, core operating margin expansion of 20 basis points to 30 basis points a year. Number 3, core constant currency earnings per share growth in the high-single-digits. And then of course, the dividend plays a really important component of our overall TSR framework and our dividend yield currently stands at about 3%.

And with that, Bryan, we’re ready to go to Q&A.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Unidentified Analyst

Can you guys hear me?

Ramon Laguarta

Yes.

Jamie Caulfield

We can hear you.

Unidentified Analyst

Okay. We’ll go Dara, Andrea and Bonnie, and then I’ll come around to the next round.

Dara Mohsenian

Thanks. Dara Mohsenian, Morgan Stanley. So Ramon, you talked about the per capita consumption opportunity in D&E markets over time. I was particularly interested in savory where there’s a large gap versus North America. Can you talk a little bit about what you can do internally and the key factors you can drive that per capita consumption? Obviously, some of that is external macro development, but what are your key strategies internally?

Ramon Laguarta

So, thanks Dara. I think you got in the, what is the critical anchor for our growth internationally, which is developing the per caps. And the basics are simple. It’s about affordability, it’s about distribution, so being everywhere and it’s about becoming part of the local food rituals. So, those are the three things that we work all the time. So affordability, normally in developing markets and emerging markets, there is an end package, snacking habit normally, end package. And there is local lower value solutions that people use for snacking.

So, affordability means that we’re very always measuring our products against those two big buckets of addressable market. So, the end packaged and the low value package. And there’s a lot we can do as we scale the businesses to become more efficient. Our agro programs become better, so we can grow potatoes, we can grow all of our ingredients at lower cost and that becomes a great way to move consumers from what is a, let’s say, low value snacking opportunity to much more higher value.

The second one is ubiquity. We want to make sure that our products are everywhere. And scaling availability in developing markets has a lot of complexities if you think about India, and then how do you get to 5 million stores and then get to 10 million stores. And, I think we’re very good is that, one of our core competencies how do you build ubiquity and affordable go-to-market.

And the third one, which is very important is how do you become part of the local ritual. So, you’re not an American product going into India or an American product going into South Africa or Turkey or Brazil, but you localize. You localize the brand, you localize the flavors, you localize the occasion where you participate. So, consumers adopted with less friction. And those are the three things we’re working on.

As I said, as we scale the businesses and we have, you saw Mexico, China and India, these are very large businesses, but we have a lot of businesses already in that $300 million to $1 billion. And those are very resource rich businesses already where we can invest to make our brands kind of lost and iconic in each one of those markets. And I’m very optimistic that the more resources we have, the more scale those businesses are, the better we’re going to be at transforming per capita into our savory snacks or convenient foods in general.

Dara Mohsenian

Maybe if I could just follow-up on that. International margins, exceptional performance in terms of year-over-year expansion in the back half of the year. How do you think about the ability to harvest that topline growth to the profit line and margin expansion going forward? Can that continue? Are you now at a scaled point where you can really drive margins more aggressively? Or is there more investment to come as you think about international and D&E specifically?

Jamie Caulfield

Yes. I think it’s a balanced. We’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made on our productivity initiatives around the globe, not just in international and certainly see the opportunity for margin expansion in the international businesses as we go forward. But, there’s a tremendous growth opportunity and so we’ll balance how much of that productivity flows to the bottom line versus how much we invest in a lot of the activities that, Ramon talked about to continue to build out the per caps.

Dara Mohsenian

Okay.

Unidentified Analyst

Okay. We’ll go to Andrea and then Bonnie.

Andrea Teixeira

Thank you. Andrea Teixeira, JPMorgan. I wanted to go back to that international opportunity in the sense of having also balancing the affordability. Ramon, you mentioned one of the key affordability and also localized space. How can you think about as we go into this high inflationary environment that continues in certain parts of the world where you’re very present, how can you continue to, number one, tackle that in terms of the affordability? And then second, be able to expand and take those other countries except for Brazil, China and India. What are the next level? Is that a high group of countries that you can leverage and then use that CapEx that you’re putting in until 2025? Is that a CapEx that we are putting in mostly to those international capabilities as you go forward?

Ramon Laguarta

Let me say, the levers of affordability and being able to scale the businesses are related to scale in many cases, right. So, if you think about a big element of our cost is agro, agriculture. So, we have as we get into a market, we basically build potato growing capabilities in the market. In some markets, that’s already established and many are not. So as time goes by, we’ll build more capability. The yields of potato go like four times, five times. So, that’s a big element.

The second one is, the manufacturing capabilities and how we can cover a large market like Brazil or a large market like India or like China or Turkey or whatever. And obviously, you first establish that footprint and then you need to feel those factors. There’s a huge element of volume related or per capita development and scale that impacts your cost per unit and your affordability, and the same with go-to-market.

So, there is a high value of, as our businesses get bigger, businesses get more profitable and also have more resources to invest in the per capita development. So, it is to your question on what is the next level, the next level is countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, China, India obviously, those are the markets if you think about Poland, Romania, some of the CIS Republics, those are the countries that are in $300 million to $500 million already and that can attract the best talent. We are large for those markets. Talent makes a huge difference in our business, and that we can deploy everything that we know from all the other markets into those particular geographies and we take to the next level.

So, that’s how we’re thinking about the market. And it’s not, international foods is not margin dilutive to PepsiCo, and international beverages neither of course because it’s a franchise business.

Andrea Teixeira

The CapEx question for the U.S. vis-a-vis international, is that something?

Ramon Laguarta

The CapEx, as Jamie was saying, we’re going to be investing in growth. That will be mostly international markets. We’re going to be investing in technology. That is global, but the U.S. will take a lot of our technology investments to become a much more digitalized business. And, I think there’s a lot of growth and productivity initiatives that come from applying digital in the U.S. When you think about sustainability that is across the world, but also the U.S. So, there’s elements of the CapEx that are more international, there’s elements that are cut across both domestic and international.

Unidentified Analyst

Bonnie?

Unidentified Analyst

Hi. I wanted to stick on the same topic of international and the opportunities to build scale. So, I guess my question is, it seems like you have great capabilities given the portfolio you have and your ability to continue to innovate as you discussed. So, trying to understand if you think you have the right infrastructure and partners in a lot of these markets as you try to expand your distribution further? Or do you see opportunities to either make improvements, make changes? How do you think about that in terms of just further distributing your business in these markets?

Ramon Laguarta

Great. The food business is mostly ourselves, right. And the partnerships come from agro partners to scale up agriculture. That is, the rest is us end-to-end. And I think we have the know-how from obviously the U.S. being a big source of know-how, Mexico being a big source of know-how on how we expand globally, low cost capital solutions, low cost go-to-market solutions and innovation.

When it comes to beverages, obviously we rely on local partners and we have very strong partners in some parts of the world. We have partners that we’re working together to become more capable. So, some of our operating capabilities, we’re working with our partners to make them more capable. And in some cases, we’re also working on scaling up our partners by, let’s say, taking three or four markets and aggregating into one larger bottler with contiguous geography.

So, you will see in beverages a combination of aggregation of bottlers and transfer of capabilities. In the food business, we feel more confident about leveraging Frito and our Mexico business to deploy capabilities globally end-to-end from agriculture all the way to consumer and go-to-market and manufacturing.

Unidentified Analyst

Okay. We’ll go to Filippo, Robert and Nik and then I think we’ll go to the breakout.

Filippo Falorni

Thank you. Filippo Falorni, Citi. So Ramon, going back to the U.S. business, you also made a lot of investments there since you became CEO. Can you give us an update where you think, there’s more areas to invest and particularly on PB&A, there’s you’ve laid out a target on improving margins, but also to improve market share for the business. So, how do you balance those conflicting priorities? Thank you.

Ramon Laguarta

Yes. I think for the U.S. business, investments will be in the form of systems and digitalization, new technology platforms. So, if you think about Frito is investing in some new cooking methods, so scaling popping or scaling baking. And those are technologies that we don’t have. It’s not so much in the beverage business where I think we have all the technologies pretty much there. And there will be a lot of investment in productivity basically through automation. I think automation will be a big driver of our creating better jobs for our people and improving the efficiency of the system. It applies to both businesses, the food businesses and the beverage business, both in the manufacturing part, but also in the move and warehouse and move.

Unidentified Analyst

Robert? And then we’ll wrap it up with Nik after Robert.

Unidentified Analyst

Hi, thank you. I know it’s just a couple of weeks ago when we talked on some of this, but I’d love to get kind of any better clarity on the state of the U.S. consumer. There was a lot of weather noise in January. So, any better insights and particularly the lower-end consumers, let’s say the bottom 20% and tied to that, obviously a lot of pricing taken over the last two, three years. As you look to provide more value to lower-end consumers, how do you feel your toolkit has developed in terms of packaging, promo targeting by zip code and other abilities to target that group? Thank you.

Ramon Laguarta

That’s great. We really don’t have too much to share other than what we shared two weeks ago, other than it was a good Super Bowl. So, that’s what happened between then and now and so on. And we capture good it was a good Super Bowl for us.

Now, in terms of our capabilities to desegregate consumer and how do we are able to execute more granularly against the beginning of the month and the end of the month and entry price points. I think we have a business that is quite flexible in terms of packaging solutions versus other categories. If you think about our food business clearly has multiple entry points and a lot of flexibility on pricing sizing.

The same with beverages, the beverage business a bit more rigid when it comes to price packaging, but I think both businesses are quite flexible. We have developed a lot of capabilities over the last few years in terms of granular understanding of the consumers in different parts of the country. And obviously our DSD gives us an advantage in terms of executing quickly those nuances by zip code and otherwise together with our retail partners.

So, I think we’re advantaged in that respect, Robert, in how we can execute granularity and agility both in beverages and foods in the U.S. in particular. But in other markets around the world that’s a capability we’ve developed globally. And, if you think about businesses like Mexico where the consumer is even more challenged than here, we’re able to execute a lot of price points in the same rack or in the same cooler and give the consumer the opportunity to be connected with our brands throughout the day depending on the cash money they have in their pocket.

So, I think we feel good about that, in terms of relative performance and also to where we were five years ago.

Unidentified Analyst

Okay. We’ll take one more from Nik Modi and then we’ll go to the breakout.

Unidentified Analyst

Thanks. Ramon, can you just talk a little bit about Gatorade? Just the kind of more holistic strategy that you have is going to be very I think a very competitive year with obviously Coca Cola try to get Powerade and BodyArmor back on track. And just talk a little bit about the marketing pivot when you think about athletes, the everyday hydration and the consumer insight that was kind of driving that change because Gatorade had a, it’s been a great brand over time, but we’ve had pockets over the last two decades where the physician kind of might have gotten out of sync and you went back and forth?

Ramon Laguarta

We continue to see active hydration as a big growth space in the LRB. If we can help consumers move from tap water, regular water into other more functional experiences, this is a big opportunity for everybody participating in LRB and that’s what we’re trying to do. It’s not only going to be Gatorade, but it’s going to be combination between Gatorade, Propel and some other solutions that we have. It’s not only going to be ready-to-drink bottles, but it’s going to be powders and tablets and we’re making big investments in the supply chain of those powders and tablets. We think that especially new generations, they think about beverages in a different way and they prefer to have their own bottles and they create their own drinks. So, those are the pivots that we’re thinking about.

Now, Gatorade as a brand continues to be super healthy. We continue to be investing in Gatorade, meaningful amounts of dollars and I think in the right way with the right messaging. Science is still at the basic of Gatorade, and we now have opportunity for consumers to be tested on their hydration needs and then personalized solutions.

So, I think the brand continues to be above, I would say, many of the competitors in that space. But the most important thing is that we keep the category growing above LRB. I think that’s the real job to be done by the marketing teams is to make sure that we keep bringing more consumers from tap water and bottled water into more complex hydration solutions that provide other benefits and just so electrolyze, selling the value of electrolyze, selling the value of other functionality that we need as we play a football game or we just go to the gym for 30 minutes as most of us do every day.

Unidentified Analyst

Okay. With that, we’re going to join the, go to the breakout. Please join me in thanking Pepsi for their sponsorship and Ramon and Jamie for spending time with us today.