Jeff Harmening: Yes, I would say — Alexia this is Jeff. I’ll answer the first part of that question, and maybe Jon Nudi can give any insights on the second. I would say, in general, what we — in general, what we would expect is that marketing spending growth would be roughly in line with sales growth. And we’ve seen last year, we’ve seen so much inflation on the food — the cost of ingredient side. Our marketing spending has grown 4% or so, but it hasn’t kept up with the sales growth. That’s because we saw so much food inflation. But it actually has kept up more than kept up with pound growth. And the same is true this year, we’re seeing double-digit increase in marketing spend. But over time, we — our goal would be to increase our marketing spend roughly in line with our sales growth. So Jon, do you want to take the second part of the question?
Jon Nudi: From a merger standpoint. So if you look at versus pre-pandemic levels, merchant our categories is still down double digits. I will say you’re seeing frequency this past year increased high single digits. And that’s really driven by the fact that we’re getting back into merchandising in some categories that we couldn’t support from a service standpoint over the last few years. At the same time, you’re seeing merch price points up double digits across our categories as well. So again, as all of us are dealing with inflation and leveraging our SRM capabilities, we’re raising the floor on many of our merged promotions. So, as we move forward, service is still not back to historical levels. So, we don’t expect there to be significant inventory to be getting aggressive from a pricing standpoint.
And obviously, everyone in the industry is dealing with increased costs and inflation as well. So, we expect to continue to make sure that we’re rational from a merchandising standpoint as we move forward.
Operator: The next question comes from John Baumgartner of Mizuho. Please go ahead.
John Baumgartner: I wanted to come back to Steve’s question, I think, on U.S. retail. The elasticity still favorable, but that elasticity alone sort of masks the underlying percentage volume declines from this pricing? And that’s an industry issue, not just mills. But since food at home is not losing share to away from home, I mean you also think, I guess, once consumers normalize to these new prices, volume declines should also moderate independent of recession. So I’m curious, Jeff, for John, absent a bounce from recession, how you’re thinking about that path to volume normalization? And then just given your brand-building innovation, do you think the portfolio’s volume plus mix can grow reliably with population over time? Do you aspire to ahead of population growth? Just what’s the expectation for that normalized performance at the portfolio level where you sit right now?
Jeff Harmening: Let me start this is Jeff. Let me start with the end in mind. And the end is that we think absent the current inflation environment we see, which, by the way, we don’t think is going away anytime soon as we talk about mid-single-digit inflation in our next fiscal year. But absent a heightened inflationary environment we would expect our portfolio — our exposure to growth to be in the 2% to 3% range, so call it 2.5% range. And that’s what we talked a little bit about at CAGNY. And that would imply some level of volume growth as well as some level of pricing growth, a mix of those two, which would, of course, fluctuate based on what happens in any particular year. But we would think once we get back to a normal environment, which we don’t see coming actually in the next 12 months.
But in a normal environment, we would see some level of pound growth and some level, a little bit of pricing as dictated by the growth in our categories. And then you have another deeper question about recession versus non-recession. I’m not really sure how to go about all of that other than to say that what we do see is mid-single-digit inflation coming in the next 12 months.
