Sean Connolly: Well, I’m not sure we’re having a lot of interaction there. Even our Birds Eye business is kind of behaving similarly with the balance of our frozen business. But what you’re seeing in frozen [Technical Difficulty] most of the frozen items we sell are frozen convenience items. And what you’ve seen over the last quarter are more of this consumer pivot to what we’ll call meals for many instead of meals for one. It’s more of a speed scratch type of thing where you can stretch your buck and feed more mouths, but that’s a laborious effort, and it’s also not exactly the food that people are habitually accustomed to eating. So when I look back over the last 50, 60 years and you look at consumer trends, by far, the most unshakable trend in the consumer packaged goods space is the trend toward convenience.
And so we know, and you saw it in the long-term frozen data that I put up, that consumers don’t have the time to make stuff from scratch. They don’t have the culinary skills and they don’t want the waste associated with it. Does that mean they won’t do it from time to time and buy a bag of rice and a can of beans and some ground beef? No, they will do that. Those are the kind of the short-term cheat codes that I referenced. But they tend not to be very lasting behaviors because, as I pointed out, consumer habits and practices are highly entrenched. So really, we’re focused on that. We know that this is a short-term dynamic, and we expect it to change. And we certainly, within frozen, have the brands that drive the growth and drive the share with the innovation we’ve delivered.
I think our categories over the last five years have accounted for about 70% of the growth in all of frozen, and we expect that kind of highly competitive performance to continue.
Nik Modi: Great. And then maybe one for Dave real quick. Just wage inflation, obviously, has been a big issue as it relates to conversion costs in terms of finished goods that you may buy and you have all these union negotiations going on in other industries. And I’m just curious, like, what are you seeing right now in terms of conversion costs kind of coming upstream in terms of how your cost of goods is shaping up?
Dave Marberger: Yeah. Our inflation assumption for 3%, we had assumptions on conversion costs, which kind of in that mid to upper single-digit area. So that hasn’t changed. We’re very — we spend a lot of time on our compensation benefits working hard to be competitive as part of our overall strategy for all of our employees. So we feel like we’ve captured it in our estimates for inflation.
Nik Modi: Excellent. I’ll pass it on. Thank you.
Operator: And our next question today comes from Jason English with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Jason English: Hi, good morning folks. Thanks for slotting me in. And congrats on the momentum in International and Foodservice. Great to see. Sean, a lot of questions, obviously, today on your back half guidance, and I’m sure it’s not lost on you, there’s clearly some skepticism on your ability to get to the volume growth you’re promising in the back half. If that doesn’t come to fruition, what, if any offsets, are in your P&L to allow you to get to the bottom-line guidance?
Sean Connolly: Well, look, it is — [a quarter] (ph) of the year is behind us. And as I’ve said many other years, a quarter doesn’t make a year. So we are on or ahead of pace on most of our goals after one quarter. And the challenge has been this consumer behavior shift, which, as I mentioned, we view as a temporary dynamic. Between that are favorable comps, the increased investment, we do expect meaningful top-line progress in the second half. And that’s our playbook, we feel good about it. We are investing more to drive the business. We are trying to do a couple of things here, which is deliver a strong ’24 but also set our business up to have excellent momentum as we go out of ’24 into ’25, which we’re confident will be a very different environment. Dave, do you want to add anything to that?
