Now price gap management, in terms of how we’re approaching that, we’re looking across our portfolio. And just in the case of like spices and seasonings, it’s a really broad portfolio with many subcategories underneath there. And each and every item — you take compare black pepper to Montreal Steak they all have different price elasticities and where the consumer is to go. And so we have been surgically looking at this at a SKU level to make sure that we’re doing the right thing to really drive overall growth in volume and unit consumption. And so that’s allowed us to really, I think, be very, very sharp about how we drive this investment in a targeted way to make sure that we’re starting to drive volume growth. In 2023, we saw a lot of improvement in parts of our business where we started to apply this.
And I think like I said on the call, a good example was Black Pepper or Vanilla, and we started to really see the — not only the volume of the unit share gain. And so that gave us really, I think, a lot of kind of stair-step into those investments. And that’s the way we’re going to do it in 2024 too. We’re expanding that investment. We’re going to continue to look at the line, we assess it. Honestly, every month and taking a look at where we see the individual products perform across the shelf. And then we decide what we need to do from a revenue and category standpoint. But I wanted to put on top of that, we’re applying more A&P to the business, too, at the same time. And I think that’s really important. We are seeing really good performance from A&P and it encourages us to continue to spend more on the business.
And so you’ll see more of that from us, I think, going forward. I’m not sure if I captured all your questions there, but let me know if I did.
Brendan Foley: I think to maybe one point. As we get the price differentials right, the advertising is even more effective. And that’s important. And we’re happy with the ROIs on our A&P, but it gets even better when you have the right price differential, as we’ve seen with Black Pepper, Vanilla and other categories.
Ken Goldman: No that’s helpful. Thank you. And just a very quick follow-up, I wasn’t quite sure I picked up on what you think the most important tactics may need to be to get momentum rolling in your China Consumer business to the extent you want. And maybe how quickly some of those actions can start to take effect.
Brendan Foley: On China, and just a little bit of context here, our food away from home business, which is included in Asia Pacific Consumer, it definitely will – we expect to see slower demand, especially sort of in the first half of the year. But we do expect overall China sales in 2024 to be comparable to 2023. But maybe for some more additional context, Mike and I spent a week in China in early January, just actually a few weeks ago just visiting our teams there and assessing dense conditions. And I would say, broadly, our outlook for the Chinese consumer does remain cautious. There’s a number of indicators that kind of point to this. There’s high unemployment with young adults, low consumer confidence. We see consumers with a reluctance to spend.
And uniquely in our business, we tend to serve the smaller independent restaurants, particularly in Central China, and we see them losing traffic to larger chains and QSRs, because they’re really driving either really strong value or they’re winning on just even more store growth overall. And so we see this playing out in the retail category there, especially with the modern trade. Just to share a quick anecdote, as we were there, I took one afternoon just to walk around and actually I forgot the pack a tie, So I had to go buy a tie and go to an apartment store. What struck me was really a lot of movement in people outside than on the streets. And I want to go get a cup of coffee. It’s kind of empty. Go to the department store, not spoke with anybody almost.
And so there’s just not really a lot of active spending. We see a lot of people out and about the mobilities there, and it’s returned, but we’re not seeing the spending. And I think it’s broadly sort of an example of what we are observing as we were in the market there. Having said that though, like we do in other regions, we do have plans to really address the change in trends with the Chinese consumer. And we do expect our Flavor Solutions business to be a bit stronger this year just due to the QSR trends. But we do expect a gradual recovery in China, starting probably more in the second half of 2024. And the exact pace of growth will really be determined by how that macroeconomic parameter kind of plays out and consumer confidence plans over the next few quarters.
But we really do continue to believe in the long-term growth trajectory of this market and are working to strengthen those plans as we go through 2024.
Ken Goldman: Thanks so much.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alexia Howard with Bernstein. Please proceed with your question.
Alexia Howard: Good morning everyone.
Brendan Foley: Good morning.
Mike Smith: Good morning.
