Joe Scalzo: Yes, thank you. It’s out there, Kid.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Baumgartner with Mizuho. Please proceed with your question.
John Baumgartner: Good morning. Thanks for the question.
Joe Scalzo: Hey, John. I wanted to ask about buyer growth at Atkins. Joe, as it is the growth has been pretty strong. And I’m not sure if you can drill into how much of that is driven by your core demographic relative to noncore. But as you build Atkins as a lifestyle brand, how do you think about either extending your existing consumers for longer, or also raising the appeal to non-core buyers. And the other opportunities for more age specific innovation, or age specific marketing may be appealing to older folks who become lapsed buyers over time? Can you creep down a bit to younger consumers? Just how you think about building the next phase of growth at
Shaun Mara: Wow, great question. I wish we had an hour. What I would tell you is this, look, the core demographic is, if you think about the positioning change on the brand, we moved from a core demographic of what we would call programmatic dieters, people looking to want to lose 15 pounds in with an event in mind over a certain period of time, or shift in that, you know, that demographic right, move from those folks to folks who, on average, are worried about their health and their weight every day, right, not looking to lose large amounts of weight, but looking to eat healthier and potentially look better, right, that demographic, the math on that demographic was for estimate the Democrats. So we had about 8 million 9 million programmatic dieter target to something around that 35,34 35 36 million kind of we call them self directed low people, they want to control , right.
Our progress against that has been pretty outstanding. So the program that when we started this, and this is relatively new data, when we started this, buyers of the brand at any one time that were actively using the program to lose weight was at what was about 15% of our buyers, that is now down to single digits. So we in the in large part has shifted the mix of our brand to these lifestyle consumers, which then begs the question, how do you feel about buy rates and dieters probably complying more lifestyle consumers new piece of data, lifestyle, consumers from a buy rate standpoint, buy at the same rate as the average for Atkins. So we’re not seeing a tail off in consumer consumption based upon a move towards a more lifestyle consumer. So good news all around.
The thing that I think you’re asking is, talk to us about, talk to us about are you looking at different demographic groups, I’m assuming you mean, age, ethnicity and frankly, we do a lot of that in our digital platform, right. So a lot of social digital marketing to those groups within and we can handle that question for you offline and a little bit more detail. And frankly, we get you in front of some of the marketing people to talk about some of those things.
Joe Scalzo: Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay, have a good day. Thanks, John.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Pamela Kaufman with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.
Pamela Kaufman: Good morning.
Alexia Howard: Good. Morning. I just had a follow-up question on gross margin. So given that gross margin fell short of your expectations in the quarter, but you still expect gross margin for the full year to be in line with your prior outlook? Can you talk about the cadence of the gross margins over the rest of the year? And what’s improved in your expectations for gross margins for the back half of the year? What’s changed there?
Joe Scalzo: Yes, I would say the commodity costs are probably the biggest piece of it, obviously. And we talked about what we think we’re seeing in the dairy protein and how much we locked in already. So I think from a standpoint of commodities that’s in better shape than we have, we the way we look at this for the year, we see GM improving slightly in the second half of the year, as we said, however, I think if you take a step back on margin, we did have a 450 basis point decline and Q1, that I would say the inflationary pressures that we had led to our second price increase did not start impacting cogs until mid Q2. So remember, in Q1 of last year, our GM was actually up 75 basis points. So as we look at the rest of the year, we expect gross margins to decline in Q2, and for the total year.
And just to dimensionalize it a little bit. We expect the total year margin to decline over 100 basis points and the margin decline and Q2 to exceed that. So I don’t like give you more context and perspective.
