The Kraft Heinz Company (NASDAQ:KHC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Lavery : I just wanted to drill into your foodservice growth pillar a little bit more. In Slide 13 or 12, I guess it is interesting with some color here. Can you just unpack a little bit of how you’re gaining share relative to competitors? Is it new items in existing customers? Is it broadening your distribution into new accounts? And — is it — are those customers gaining share? I’m sure there’s some components of maybe a few different things. But what’s the primary driver of outperformance there?

Miguel Patricio: Michael, we are having a great momentum in foodservice across the globe, both on U.S. and — or North America and the international zone. So I will ask Carlos and then Rafael to comment.

Carlos Abrams-Rivera : Yes. And I would say North America, I would say, is — in the items that you mentioned, it’s all of them. So we grew in the Q4, we grew about almost more than 20%, and we actually gained share. And for me, the way I kind of look at it is the investments that we have put in place are paying us. So we have put new leadership in place. We have simplified our portfolio significantly, reducing almost 50% of the number of SKUs that we had only a couple of years ago. We have renovated our foodservice portfolio. We’re bolstering kind of our sales team to make sure they drive distribution in the right places. And more importantly, we’re also investing in capacity to make sure we support that growing demand. So as we look forward — and just to give you a sense of the opportunity here is we still are only in 25 or top 50 QSR in the U.S. So we know that everything that we’re doing continues to be an opportunity for us to further drive growth.

And then going back specifically to your question is already what we have seen is that we are in fact expanding distribution across all areas of foodservice. We are winning with distributors. So we’re actually expanding with key distributors at present. We’re actually also expanding with no commercial accounts. So if you think about hospitalities and particular distributors who service those kind of non-commercial businesses, we have also made an effort against those, and those are working. We have expanded in new restaurants, with things like Fast Casual, think about from — that is a type of restaurants that we actually have now increased the number of items we sell into them. And QSR, which continues to be a focus for us as a company. From Papa John to Pollo Tropical are places in which we are actually now expanding the number of SKUs we sell into.

So it’s an area that we continue to be bullish on, and we — and why one of the places that we feel that we can be winning globally. And with that, I mean Rafael, if you want to build on the…

Miguel Patricio: Before, Rafael, I’ll just build on one thing Carlos mentioned. One of the reasons of our improvement in growth as well is capacity. We’ve been investing throughout these years on capacity on foodservice, and we continue to do so. So now in May, we will have an extra 25% capacity in the U.S. on pouches and we’ll have 50% more capacity on paper and squeeze, which are absolutely critical items for the growth of foodservice. With that in mind, Rafael, please go ahead.