And I think again, it’s coming with the right investment package behind it. But look, I think that’s encouraging. And I think over a period of time where we are looking for this business, not just for the next month or the next event, but really for the balance of the year and going forward, I think it continues to support what we believe is true, which is that this category continues to be strong. And look, just as a context, right, I know we forget this sometimes, and there’s a lot of reasons why we can go back in these last several years and point to maybe non-normal one-time elements that affected it. But if I would have told you that the four-year CAGR on the soup category was going to be around 3% to 4%, we would have all felt really good about that given that it’s the greatest growth period the categories had.
And so, even though we’re experiencing some slowdown in this year, I continue to believe that the underpinnings of this category, especially in the areas that we’ve identified as the most important growth areas, continue to have a good solid runway ahead. And I think Thanksgiving just becomes maybe a little bit, as I said, not the complete victory, but another proof point in that story.
Operator: Your next question comes from a line of Robert Moskow from TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Robert Moskow: Hi, thanks. Mark, last quarter you did some work to segment out grow versus optimize soup brands, and I want to know if the grow brands performed any better than optimize in the quarter, or were there comparisons at play to kind of change it around? And also maybe a little bit into the tactics you used for grow compared to optimize, how were they different?
Mark Clouse: Yeah. So, an interesting quarter on that front because you had, I would say, some real strength and some challenges in both of the two buckets. So, they were fairly consistent in the quarter. A little bit better, I would say, on shares. Broth recovered in the optimize, which was a good thing given its significance at the holiday. But the tactics, I think, for both — and again, if I look at this over the last couple years, as I said in the fourth quarter, you do have a pretty dramatic difference where the growth businesses over the last couple of years CAGRs about 3% of upside and growing, and the optimized businesses are down about the same amount and even a little bit more. More importantly, in the growth areas over the last two years, you’re seeing relatively strong shares across most of the key areas like Chunky and the icons on condensed and Pacific.
I think in this particular quarter, what helped the optimize was some of the work and some of the benefit that we saw on broth kind of regaining its footing relative to private label. And I would say that was more of a function of just cycling private label than anything dramatic we did. I will say as we went into the key weeks, and if you remember what I said on broth, even as an optimize, what’s important is that we win those key holiday weeks. And I think the good news is for a reasonable investment relative to what we expected, we saw that where broth for the quarter or for the four weeks was up 4% on dollars and up 1.2 share points in the latest four weeks, which is a great sign while private label was down pretty significantly. I think on the growth, Rob, what we’re seeing, that’s a headwind, right?
I’d say condensed cooking icons, Pacific, all of those are doing extremely well. I will say the pressure on ready-to-serve has been a bit more pronounced in the last quarter. And this is really, we believe, a dynamic of consumers, especially our lower-income consumers that are under a lot of pressure that are migrating a bit more to what we would call stretchable meals from single serve. And so, one of the things that you’ll see us doing on Chunky in particular is really positioning it more through the lens of the protein content and its ability to also stretch in meals to match a little bit where those consumers are going. But I do think in the quarter what dampened a little bit of the growth trajectory was that ready-to-serve. I’m not particularly concerned.
I think we’ll continue to see as we get into the season. A lot of activity on that business and all the other areas of growth are doing extremely well.
Robert Moskow: Great. Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason English from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Jason English: Hey, good morning folks. Thanks for slotting me in.
Mark Clouse: Hey, Jason.
Jason English: Hey there. So, in terms of inflation as an enabler to gain the margin recovery in the back half, it sounds like you’re looking for core commodity inflation to remain roughly stable where you were in the first quarter, the low single-digit rate. But when you show us the margin bridge, there’s a big gap there. Like the 2% core inflation rate would suggest far less gross margin compression than the 460 basis points you show with the inflation in other bucket. So, what’s going on with the other? And what should we expect going forward?
