Niko Lahanas : Yes, it’s more timing. I think, we’re still feeling good about gross margin for the year overall. The other thing to take into account, we’re going to continue along our cost and simplicity program too. So we’re continuing to take cost out, and that should help. If you look at this last quarter, one of the biggest drivers was our cost out initiatives in terms of expanding margin, and then the moderating inflation definitely helped as well.
Brad Thomas: Very helpful. Thanks so much and good luck this spring.
Operator: Our next question is from Jim Chartier with Monness Crespi and Hardt.
Jim Chartier : Could you first talk about POS by business, how it trended and what were the key drivers behind that?
John Hanson: Yes, I can start. This is John, Jim. On the Pet side, POS trended pretty similar to shipments. Our inventory on the pet side are in pretty good place. And again, the durable POS was significantly that’s where the declines were consumables held pretty solid.
J.D. Walker : And Jim on the Garden side, POS was down slightly for the quarter. Now, our portfolio is a little different than most of our competitors. We have a big Wild Bird business Wild Bird feed, and that usually drives our business in Q1. The unfavorable weather that Niko referenced in the script, impacted our Wild Bird business. So that POS or consumption was off. If you factor out Wild Bird, our POS was up mid to high single-digits for the quarter on all of our other businesses.
Jim Chartier : And then Niko, just trying to understand kind of the impact of the cost out initiative this year. Is there any way for you to kind of quantify the savings that are embedded in your guidance or what the expected savings are from initiatives that have already been implemented or kind of in the process of being implemented?
Niko Lahanas : No, we’re going to stick with what we said before, Jim. We’re going to give quarterly updates. I think in many cases these things take time. So we have to lap a lot of these initiatives. So timing is going to play a role too. So, really hard for us to quantify all of these things going on at once. So, we’re not going to focus on giving you a yearly forecast on cost out, because I’m pretty sure we’d be wrong. Rather we want to focus on what we’re actually doing, and sort of the costs behind those initiatives similar to what we did a year ago.
Operator: Our next question is from Bob Labick with CJS Securities.
Pete Lucas : It’s Pete Lucas for Bob. You covered a lot of my questions here. Just sticking with the Garden business or going back to it here, what are you seeing or expecting this year in terms of pricing versus last year? And do you think somewhat lower pricing could drive higher demand or kind of your thoughts on what you’re thinking for this season?
J.D. Walker : I’ll take that one as well. So what we’re seeing in some of our categories, we’ve seen some pricing — we’ve made some pricing concessions, where we have commodity driven categories, commodities have softened, we’ve made some concessions to the retailers, and they’re in turn passing that on to the consumers. But that’s on some of the business. I’d say the bigger opportunity here is where we’re passing on promotional savings to the consumer. We’re being much more promotional and I think that ultimately will drive more footsteps into the store, more consumption in the categories. In general, across our categories, we’re seeing fairly stable pricing. Certainly not escalating like it was a year or two, but not dramatic drops either.
Pete Lucas: And then just one more for me in terms of the M&A outlook, I think you mentioned in the prepared remarks, seeing lots of opportunity. Is that something that you’re still actively pursuing now or is that waiting for a new CEO or how should we kind of think about that for the near-term?
J.D. Walker : No, we’re all in on M&A. In fact, we had some turnover in that group and we’re adding resources once again to really pursue that activity. And I think, you have a proof point. Just a few months ago we did the TDBBS acquisition and under best leadership as interim CEO. So, we’re not having not having a CEO or permanent CEO call it what you want will not slow us down. We’re aggressively pursuing that initiative because it’s important, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks we want to grow organically and then supplement that growth with some robust M&A activity.
Operator: Our next question is from William Reuter with Bank of America.
William Reuter: I have a couple. So the first, in terms of the Wild Bird being down, do you think that was based upon weather on some level, or do you think this is just based upon weak consumer spending and some consumers not being willing to feed birds when prices are really high?
J.D. Walker : William, this is JD. I’d say that it was almost completely driven by weather. So that business performs best when there’s in the winter months when there’s snow cover on the ground. It’s one of the categories that performs best for us over the last couple of years when we saw the consumer in some categories exiting the categories or household penetration wasn’t as great as it was during the pandemic, while bird actually has been strong throughout that period of time. So I don’t think it’s had to do with the economy and had almost entirely, it was a result of the unfavorable weather.
