Colgate-Palmolive at Barclays Conference: Strategic Path to 2030

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE:CL) presented at the Barclays 18th Annual Global Consumer Staples Conference 2025, offering a strategic overview that highlighted both achievements and challenges. CEO Noel Wallace detailed the company’s successful 2025 strategy and introduced the 2030 plan, focusing on growth, innovation, and adaptability amid a cautious consumer environment.

Key Takeaways

• Colgate-Palmolive achieved consistent top-line growth over six years, driven by a broad-based approach across categories and geographies.
• The 2030 strategy aims to accelerate growth through global brand penetration, AI and data analytics, and a high-impact culture.
• Challenges include adapting to a cautious consumer environment and managing inventory reductions, especially among online retailers.
• Hill’s Pet Nutrition outperformed despite weaker category growth, thanks to disciplined brand management and science-driven technology.
• New productivity programs are set to fund strategic initiatives and enhance efficiency and innovation.

Financial Results

• Organic Growth:

- Q2 organic growth was 2.4%, excluding private label impacts.

- Long-term growth has remained at or above 3% to 5% for six consecutive years.

- 2025 organic growth is expected to be at the low end of the 2% to 4% range.

• Advertising Investment:

- Increased investment over the last five years to enhance brand penetration and health.

• Cash Flow:

- Record cash flows achieved through productivity initiatives and efficient capital management.

- Balanced cash allocation for investments, dividends (61st consecutive year), and share repurchases.

• Productivity Initiative:

- New initiatives announced to accelerate growth and efficiency.

Operational Updates

• Innovation:

- Focus on science-led innovation, with products like Elmex in Europe and serum-based products in Asia.

- EltaMD skincare brand is expanding with new skin barrier technology.

- Science Diet relaunched with active biome technology for pets.

• Revenue Growth Management (RGM):

- Advanced AI tools for pricing optimization and value creation.

- RGM uses data and AI for volume, sales, and margin improvements.

• Omni Demand Generation:

- Integration of online and offline marketing strategies, with China as a prime example.

• Supply Chain Realignment:

- Efforts to enhance supply chain efficiency and customization.

Future Outlook

• 2030 Strategy:

- Key themes include leveraging brand penetration, omni demand generation, and AI advancements.

- Increased investment in North America and the Holly and Hazel business in China.

• Strategic Choices:

- Focused investments in specific markets to drive growth.

• Investment Areas:

- Continued emphasis on innovation and AI capabilities.

- Strategic planning to define company purpose.

Q&A Highlights

• 2025 Strategic Plan Success:

- Achieved growth in dollar top-line and earnings, building capabilities in AI and innovation.

• Biggest Changes for 2030:

- Increased resources in North America and consistent omni demand generation globally.

• New Productivity Program:

- Aimed at executing the 2030 strategy with streamlined and efficient investments.

• Hill’s Pet Nutrition Outperformance:

- Driven by disciplined brand management and science-driven technology.

• Category Growth Slowdown:

- Consumer uncertainty leads to cautious product usage and inventory management.

• Destocking:

- More pronounced among online retailers, driven by consumer behavior.

In conclusion, Colgate-Palmolive is committed to driving growth and innovation through its strategic plans. For more details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Barclays 18th Annual Global Consumer Staples Conference 2025:

Yvonne, Host: Okay. We’re going to get started. So next up, we’re pleased to welcome Colgate’s CEO, Noel Wallace, to the stage. Noel is going to start with a presentation highlighting the success of Colgate’s 2025 strategic plan, give us a little peek into a few topics of the 2030 strategy, and then after that, I’ll come back on stage for a brief Q and A.

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Well, thank you, Yvonne, and good morning, everyone. A reminder, I’m sure you’ve seen this a couple of times already. Okay. So in terms of my prepared comments, I’ll spend about fifteen, twenty minutes reprising our 2025 strategy, more specifically, the short term results that we’ve seen this year in 2025, the longer term results over the period of that 2025 cycle, which started in 2019, and then I’m going to jump into some of the capabilities that came out of that 2025 strategy that set us up for our 2030 strategy, which we just introduced to the company two months ago and will begin to execute come December 31. Okay.

Financially, in terms of where the quarter was, you saw the highlights in the second quarter, 2.4% organic growth ex the impact of private label. That’s really the key number to take away from this chart. If you look at other aspects of that second quarter earnings call, we announced a new productivity initiative, which is quite exciting for the company, particularly as it parallels the 2030 strategy that we’re introducing. And it will give us the resources and the funding to not only continue to accelerate the top line growth of the company, but hopefully continue to accelerate the bottom line growth of the organization as well. A couple of initiatives to that productivity.

It will be a supply chain realignment in terms of getting the supply chain to work more efficiently in the current environment where customization is highly required and more personalization from our retailers. And secondly, getting our organizational structure more aligned behind this concept we call omni demand generation, which requires us to behave differently and process the inputs a little bit differently to execute more effectively on the ground. Our 2025 outlook, no change from the second quarter. Okay. So let’s jump into the strategy and what’s working over the longer period of time.

And more importantly, as we kicked off the 2025 strategy back in 2019, the key aspect of that strategy was to get back on our front foot from growth. And we really wanted to drive more sequential consistent top line growth. And you can see for six consecutive years, we’ve been at or above our long term range of 3% to 5%. As you heard me say in the second quarter, we expect 2025 to be at the low end of the 2% to 4% organic that we communicated on the second quarter call. Importantly, it was getting that growth to be more broad based across all of our categories, and that certainly transpired over the last five years.

And importantly, likewise, the breadth of our business geographically, both here in North America and around the world, particularly in emerging markets, ensuring that we’re growing all aspects of the business, and that has continued to prevail. An important part of the 2025 strategy was reinvesting in our business to accelerate growth. And you can see that we have stepped up our advertising investment over the last five years. That’s growing brand penetration, but most importantly, brand health, which particularly in a market that we’re competing today is critically important to sustain the penetration and the continued growth of our brands. Productivity, cost controls.

And despite increasing a lot on the advertising line, you’ve seen obviously the sequential dollar earnings per share growth that we’ve seen over the period of that twenty five cycle. Likewise, record cash flows from in house productivity initiatives, managing our working capital more efficiently, which has allowed us to invest back behind the business in terms of different acquisitions, but more importantly, our dividend for the sixty first consecutive year likewise, share repurchases, but we’ve balanced our cash very effectively across the company to ensure that we continue to drive investment in the business and shareholder returns. Okay, let me get into this 2025 strategy, which I talked about quite a bit over the last couple of years in terms of the capabilities we’ve been building and focused upon. What I want to talk about are two important ones, which are innovation and revenue growth management, and that will set me up for some of the things that we’re going to talk about relative to the 2030 strategy. So two aspects.

Science led innovation was a key aspect that we wanted to invest behind as we went into the 2025 strategy and build our innovation capabilities. I’m pleased that we’re progressing quite well there. You’ll see some examples of that. And then I’ll come back and talk about how we’re scaling different capabilities that we’ve invested behind. As we’ve had more flexibility in the P and L over the last three to four years, it was critically important for us to look where the businesses were going to need operational benefits in the future and investing behind those capabilities in the short term.

Elmex, a great example of innovation. Premium business in Europe that we strategically decided to leverage much more effectively across the European market and in select markets around the world. Let me show you an example of some of that innovation and advertising that supports that.

Unidentified speaker, Advertiser: No need to cope with sensitivity. Switch on relief as instantly as a click of a switch. With Elnex Repair and Prevent, unlike normal toothpaste, it closes instantly to sensitive areas,

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: deploying this strategy, both innovation, stronger support in this part of the market, you can see the sequential growth, which elmex is the one of the fastest growing toothpaste in the European market. And importantly, as we look at the incrementality of that share on the franchise, coupled with the growth that we’ve had on the Colgate franchise, we’ve seen now our record European share. We’re around the world to Asia, a serum based again capitalizing on the antiaging benefit and the insights that we’re seeing in the Asian market in China. We have technology which restores the collagen in your gums to prevent further collagen loss, which is an exciting proposition in terms of antiaging. New innovation, new segment and very, very premium.

Going now more south into India, which is very interesting, and I talked about that earlier this morning in one of the tabletops. Our anti cavity core businesses is a big, big part of our franchise around the world and particularly in India. Here’s a breakthrough technology combining amino acids and arginine with calcium in order to provide two times stronger teeth. Again, the anti cavity segment in India is the biggest part of the market. We need to continue to innovate in our core businesses to ensure that as we launch premium businesses, they come suitably on top.

Here’s an advertisement that reflects that piece of innovation. What’s important strategically here is that the cavity segment continues to be a major prevalent disease worldwide. And although most of us think this is old school stuff, we need to be very focused on bringing new technology to this and making it continue to provide the efficacy that our brand has always stood for and ensure we’re bringing more users into the category. Moving into Personal Care antibacterial franchises around the world, a great example of taking a strong existing business, bringing new science to it with a new twenty four hour claim and superior breakthrough technology, new packaging, new advertising. And interesting, in very, very mature market like South Africa where we’ve just introduced this, we’ve seen four fifty basis points of share growth in the market since its introduction, which clearly shows that the science driven technology that we’re bringing to the market is playing out with consumers in that marketplace.

Here’s a piece of that advertising.

Unidentified speaker, Advertiser: Protex is different. While other folks work on the surface, Protex’s breakthrough technology absorbs into your skin to give you twenty four hour longer lasting germ protection. PROTEX protects against 99.9% of germs.

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Again, taking big core franchises and ensuring that we bring technology and innovation and the best science to those brands. Moving into our premium skincare, EltaMD. Hopefully, many of you used this over the summer, just an extraordinary product, the number one brand recommended by dermatologists here in The U. S, 100% mineral sunscreen that we’ve now brought a skin barrier technology to it. Redness is a key issue with many people around, particularly in The U.

S. This product reduces redness and sensitivity in your skin by 52%. So great technology not only in terms of the SPF side, but on the skin side as well. So an exciting add on to our strong skincare portfolio in derms. Moving on to Hill’s, a big business, our Science Diet relaunched again this year, upgraded with an active biome.

We’ve been spending years understanding the microbiome in pets, understanding the importance of the microbiome in digestion. We now have an improved product that delivers on improved digestion and organ health. On the therapeutic prescription diet side, many vets are dealing with problems, sometimes with multiple issues in pets. These two products allow vets to address dual problems that are quite common in pets with one product, which is quite exciting for the veterinarian community. And a new campaign for Science Diet, which has been based on quite a few years of really understanding consumer insights in the category.

And the basic tension or insight behind this is that we can’t possibly love our pets the way they love us. And the guilt that you feel with not providing as much love to your pets, the best thing you can do in that regard then is to feed them Science Diet. Here’s an ad that reflects that.

Unidentified speaker, Advertiser: To be a pet parent is to be human.

Yvonne, Host: Sometimes, we can

Unidentified speaker, Advertiser: only do so much.

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: That’s why more and more

Unidentified speaker, Advertiser: pet people rely on him with scientifically proven formula to give more love than humanly possible. Because you’re only human, there’s Hill’s. Science does more.

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Great emotional insight that we’ve now captured with our the scientific value that we bring to to pet owners. So off to a great start with that campaign. Okay. So that innovation side, just a quick peek at that. Let me move on to some of the capabilities that I think are critically important to us as we embark on our 2030 strategy, but we’ve spent the last three to four years building in ways that we think are going to provide significant benefits to us down the road.

And the one I really want to talk about is revenue growth management, where we started with basic analytics and have now moved into really advanced AI on all the proprietary tools that we’ve developed under RGM, which RGM is our revenue growth management initiative intended to drive more pricing and value in the categories by using data and now AI to generate better solutions. So, me take you through that in more detail. This chart really depicts the journey that we’ve been on over the last five years. We started with a basic version, which was more on descriptive side, so basically just doing analysis. We then moved into the predictive part, bringing AI into it, which allowed us to predict pricing models based on vast amounts of data.

And more exciting now, we’re going to be expanding across the world and scaling is our new prescriptive AI, which is going to allow us to not only combine all these data resources that we’ve had globally around the world, but now start to provide recommendations on solutions to try out for the category, whether your inputs are on volume, your inputs are on sales or your inputs are on margin. So, a very advanced piece of technology that’s going to allow us to make much smarter decisions and work collaboratively with our retailers as we share their data with our data to drive category growth moving forward. Here’s just an example of that. Again, it’s an AI optimizer that we can take over 1,000,000,000 data points and inputs now and get recommendations in less than thirty minutes on how to optimize based on the objectives that both ourselves have and our retailers have collaborating together. So, it provides significant flexibility to drive value for us.

Okay. So, let me look quickly at 02/1930. I’m not going to get into a lot of specifics here. What I’m going do is try to give you some sound bites in terms of how we’re thinking about 02/1930. As I mentioned earlier, we have rolled this strategy out to the entire organization, which is really exciting that we’re basically ready for 2006 to come.

We’re starting to put our money where our mouth is in terms of the strategic choices that we’re making and the operational benefits that this 2030 strategy will unlock for us moving forward. So the five key thematics for you to think about without getting into too much specifics. Big global business. We need to leverage the penetration of our brands around the world and market those a little bit differently moving forward in terms of how we organize ourselves. We’re going to put more money particularly in key geographies around the world, North America being one, our Holley and Hazel business in China being another.

We’re going to harness the best in class omni demand generation. I will spend more time on this in just a moment and tell you why that’s so important to how we see the market evolving moving forward. We’ll continue to double down on the capabilities that we’ve been building in the last three years in data and analytics and advance our AI even further to generate more ROI, efficiency and productivity for the company and importantly, to develop our high impact culture by aligning our KPIs and our training and development and inclusion numbers. Okay. So a couple of examples of omni channel.

I’m going to take you through some specific examples in China, which I think is really the best example around the world on markets that have truly evolved omni, but we’re seeing this issue, quite frankly, evolve all over the world as we speak. This is about as simple as you can get in terms of trying to map out the consumer journey that we’re dealing with today, in terms of how do we lock in our media strategies to address all these different touch points and ensure that our communication and our content is truly addressing the moments that matter. Now why is this simple? Because it’s not done by demographic, by age group, by region or other segmentations that we have. So you can multiply this exponentially to really get a sense for the complexity in organizing yourself to deliver a message that truly drives awareness, conversion, purchase and loyalty in the end.

And that’s what we’re spending a huge amount of time over the last couple of years to ensure that we have a structure and a capability in place that really brings all these skill sets together in a much more harmonious way to drive a seamless integration and consumer centricity to our marketing strategies. So, China is a great example of that. 40% of the China market is online today, so one of the biggest online markets that we compete in the world. That means that almost 60% of the business is still on brick and mortar. What’s interesting in China is 80% of the media today is digital.

Interesting sound bite to give you a little bit of sense of the complexity of getting the path to purchase and the consumer journey understood. 15% to 20 of BABA’s flagship store sales happen between twelve p. M. And 06:00 in the morning. So I used that simply to demonstrate the fact that to really understand the consumer journey, you have to organize yourself in ways to really understand what are the moments that matter in the target consumer that you’re after.

And China is doing an exceptionally good job at that. So if you take what they’re trying to do is how do we develop a brand when you have a good percentage of the market that only buys online, yes, you can market on those specific platforms, but I still have 60% almost 60% of my business is buying brick and mortar. How do I influence those consumers together so I have a very harmonious strategy behind building my brand in a very consumer centric way? And so what we do here in this example is we’re advertising on the online platforms and understanding which consumers are buying offline and online to ensure they were impacting both online and offline purchases. And here, we’re doing it exceptionally well.

Perfect example of that is Sam’s. Sam’s Club is one of the strongest and fastest retail environments. I’ve done years we advertised, specified where we were going after Sam’s consumers, allowed to drive content that excited the Sam’s consumer, got them to either buy the product in store or offline. The example I’m showing you is the Colgate pump. This brand has been in the market for eight years.

With the integration of data from online and offline and the personalization that we do, we increased sales at Sam’s 30x simply by truly understanding the target market that we’re after. That is what omni demand generation is all about, truly making sure that your media is working in a much more synergistic way to drive effectiveness and spend. So, here’s some of the learning. Obviously, centricity is just the heart of it. You have to have the consumer journeys mapped out cleverly well.

Omnichannel orchestration requires you to think about the entire channel. What you can’t do is operate in silos any longer. You have to be thinking about the choices you’re making on how you’re going to grow purchase and repeat over the long term. And obviously, it takes strong cross functional collaboration to make that happen. So, in summary, overall, we feel our strategy has worked.

We’ve gone from $15,000,000,000 to $20,000,000,000 in the last five years. Clearly, the strategy we have in place for 2030 is to continue to accelerate top line and bottom line growth for the company, and we’re excited about obviously beginning on that journey despite the challenges that we currently see in the marketplace. So with that, I’ll invite Lauren back up.

Yvonne, Host: Perfect. Just had to take my glasses. Right.

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Want to over here?

Yvonne, Host: I was grabbing my glasses and my water. Granny, over here. Okay, perfect. Great. So the comments on your success on the 25 strategic plan were really interesting.

I was curious if you could share sort of what areas of that plan do you think were the ones where you were the most successful? And what are ones where you could still improve upon?

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: So if we go back to, I guess, 2019, I mean, clearly, the whole focus for the company in 2019 is we got to get back to growing dollar top line growth and dollar earnings. It’s an amazing part of our success. But the top line growth is one thing. What we needed to do was ensuring that we weren’t just focusing on the quarter and the year that we were building capabilities for the long term. And that’s what we’re most excited about that we’ve spent a lot of time building AI capabilities across the company.

We’ve trained an enormous amount of people in terms of how they can enhance their current jobs. We’ve showcased those examples around the company so people can leverage those. We’ve built capabilities in digital where we’re behind and now we’re much more advanced. We’ve increased our level of innovation. Our level of innovation as a percent of sales over the last five years has grown 500 basis points.

That’s good, but in my view, not good enough. We need to step that up as we move into the 2030 strategy. So innovation capabilities around digital and AI and certainly getting more focused around top line growth has been key. The other aspect that I think is important for the audience to take away is we’re much better at strategic planning. I mean we now have made real choices on where we’re going to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace and how we’re going to continue to drive sustainable growth for the company.

And that has allowed us to get much more aligned in terms of what we’re trying to accomplish. We’re not having a lot of inefficient discussions about whether we should do this or that. We have a clear strategy and a clear purpose for the company that’s well understood by everyone, and now the 2030 strategy is the next step.

Yvonne, Host: Okay. And you gave us a peek on several topics for 02/1930. Why was omnichannel demand generation the one that you chose to spend more time on? A lot of

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: the learning that we’ve garnered over the last couple of years has showed us how complex consumer journey has become. And the days of flooding the networks with prime time commercials now, those days seem so simple, but they’re so far in the past now. We truly have understand those moments that matter. And there’s nothing more important for our company than the media spend that we have to build our brands. And if that media spend isn’t targeted and choiceful and isn’t working synergistically between how consumers buy offline and how they buy online, we’re going to waste a lot of money moving forward.

Our responsibility is to drive more consumers into our franchise And the omnichannel demand generation is a behavior change for the company. So you can’t have a channel per se, the days of here’s e commerce and here’s our e commerce spend. That doesn’t work anymore in my view. We have to have here’s a channel where consumers may buy their product, but the spend that we have has to work for the entire market in terms of what we’re trying to accomplish. And if we’re too siloed in terms of how we organize ourselves to address that, we’re going to waste a lot of money and we’re not going to drive consistent top line growth for the company.

Yvonne, Host: Okay. What are going to be the biggest changes as you transition to the new strategy?

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Well, we’re going to continue to step up innovation, as I mentioned. North America will be one area where we’ll put more resources into. I mentioned the Holly and Hazel, which is a great business that we have in China. Clearly, we’re going to spend more money in some of the key growth regions that we’ve allocated. We’ve been more specific and more choiceful around the markets around the world where we’re going to disproportionately overinvest.

That will be a change for us as we move into the 2030 strategy. Our omni demand generation will be a big change in terms of how we organize and structure ourselves. We’ve been playing with that for the last couple of years, and we’re now optimizing that model. And we’re going to drive consistency around the world with that model. We have pockets of success today that we were testing, but we haven’t scaled that.

So it’s going to be about looking at that 2030 restructuring plan and making sure that we’re putting the right capabilities into our market and doing that consistently around the world. The next would be our tech stack. We will continue to invest significantly in that space. AI will obviously be at the forefront of that and how we’re thinking about that. So those would be the three probably biggest areas that I would say will be a change for

Yvonne, Host: us. Okay. The new productivity program, you touched on it a little bit, but you announced the second quarter earnings. Can you talk more about the give us more color, I guess, on the goals for that program?

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Yes. It was certainly, I guess, serendipitous now that we put this productivity in program given, obviously, there’s been we’ve seen a slowdown in the categories that you’ve heard many talk about. So, this is going to be fuel and a catalyst for us over the next five years for us to execute our strategic plan. And what’s exciting is that we’ve got the strategic plan, we’ve got the organization motivated and inspired about the opportunities that we’re going to go after, and now we’re going to have some funding to help them make that happen. And that will be in the areas that I talked about earlier.

But the important thing is that it’s going to allow us to continue to do the things that work so successfully in the 25 strategy while we deploy and spend behind initiatives that we think are critically important to set us up for continued success, 20 and that will take some funding. Some of that funding will drop to the bottom line for sure in terms of how we think about it. It’s going to make us more streamlined. I think it’s going to make us more efficient, and it’s going to make us more choiceful about where we’re investing for the long term. Innovation, as I mentioned, we will spend more money on resources across the organization to ensure that we’re getting more stepped up on the premium side of the business, particularly in North America, which is where we have fallen behind a bit.

And I’m excited about some of that innovation spilling over into our other categories as well.

Yvonne, Host: Okay. If the category growth globally hadn’t slowed as it has, would you have needed to do this restructuring to find the funding for 02/1930?

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: I talked about that a little bit in a meeting earlier that at least where our leadership team sits is that don’t do restructuring when you’re in trouble. Do restructuring when you’re on your front foot. Why? Because that allows you and the insurance to continue to have the investment needs as things go south. We didn’t anticipate the markets were going to decline and slow as they did.

But now based that we’ve done all the work on the restructuring efforts, we think the restructuring not only obviously unlocks more funding for us, but more importantly, operationally sets us up for more success. So if you take our supply chain, we will invest in optimizing our supply chain for a very new and dynamic environment where our retail customers require more customization, our consumers require more personalization, that can create significant complexity and cost in your supply chain if you’re not structuring and anticipating that. And so the restructuring will allow us to do that. And the organization was prepared obviously to continue to go. This is something that we do at the senior level part of the company that we want to ensure that we’re giving them the flexibility and the resources, and we’ll be more choiceful on where we allocate that money to be sure.

But in essence, to me, we would have done it because we’re trying to stay on our front foot and make sure that we’re investing in the capabilities and where the future of our CPG industry is going.

Yvonne, Host: Okay, great. I’m going to switch gears for a second and talk about Hill’s, which on an underlying basis has continued to outperform the pet food category, category is flat to down now, I believe. So why is it that Hill’s continues to outperform? How sustainable is that when the category does come back?

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Yes. Well, certainly, the category has slowed a bit. And importantly, as we’ve talked about the last couple of years, we have stayed highly disciplined on our swim lane. And we know where we compete, we know what differentiates the brand, and we’ve spent resources to continue to invest behind that differentiation and to invest in the channels where we can be successful, particularly the profession and pet specialty and obviously some of the neighborhood pet stores. That has allowed us to stay true to what the brand stands for.

Over the last four years, we’ve invested significantly in advertising to build brand awareness. As we’ve talked about in previous calls, our brand awareness remains still quite low. So the headspace there is clearly available for us as we increase the awareness of our brand and what it brings to pet owners. Penetration is still low, particularly in certain segments of the category. We have made sure that our strategy addresses addresses those segments, whether it’s wet, whether it’s cat, whether it’s small dogs.

And we’ve been able to capitalize on the growth that we’re seeing from those growing segments. We’ve invested significantly in our supply chain. This is a capital intensive category. And the strength of Colgate’s balance sheet has allowed us to invest in the supply chain where we now have optimized our network around the world. What that’s delivered for us is not only increased capacity when we saw the category growing quite significantly, and we anticipate the category long term obviously will come back.

But more importantly, it’s allowed us to be much more distinctive on where we produce certain formulas and recipes around the world and given us significant optimization on packaging forms as well. So that technology is part of our innovation, quite frankly, to bring new forms and packaging to the market in terms of how consumers are looking to buy pet food products. That with the brand, we’ve stayed very, very true to what the brand stands for. And clearly, having both a therapeutic and a wellness portfolio, therapeutic being the prescription diet side of the business, has been an anchor to our the strength of our strategy, which is building further vet endorsement behind our product. And that only happens when you invest truly in developing science driven technology.

And the nutritional value that our Hill’s business brings to pet owners is, we think, the best in the business. We’re very proud of that, and we’re very proud of the fact that we continue to bring in PhDs and vets to develop new and improved science for pet owners moving forward. And staying true to that space has allowed us to be quite successful. There are opportunities, obviously, in the spaces that we see around us, but we want to make sure that if we do anything in terms of taking the Hill’s brand elsewhere, it has to reinforce the scientific credentials that that brand has been built from.

Yvonne, Host: Okay, great. You and the other many other companies this week, well, two days already and through the summer had been calling out weaker category growth year to date and you just mentioned it again a minute or two ago. Why do you think this has continued in these daily use categories? And what do you think it takes to bring category growth back up?

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Yes. Clearly, consumption outpacing shipments, and that’s a function we think of, obviously, a much more challenged consumer environment today. And I’ve talked about it in quite a few meetings that I’m not sure I have anything very different than what you’ve heard, but consumer uncertainty is the number one driver for category vitality. And if consumers are uncertain, they will be more cautious, particularly even in nondiscretionary categories. And what that specifically means is consumers may not have three tubes of toothpaste or two bottles of mouthwash in their pantry, they may have one.

And they may purchase from cycle to cycle instead of having extra inventory at home. That clearly has transpired over the last twelve to fifteen months. Likewise, they will be more discerning on their purchases. They will what we have seen, they will front end their purchases in large sizes and back end their purchases as they move into the end of the month in small sizes. So the key aspect here is they may be saving on nondiscretionary to perhaps save up for some of those discretionary categories.

My personal prognosis is the discretionary will suffer as we move through the back half of the year. But consumers in our categories are just being more choiceful. They’re being very cautious on how they use their products. The only really nondiscretionary category that we have, arguably nondiscretionary, is toothbrushes, meaning that consumers can extend the life of their toothbrushes and not replace it every three months like they should. We’ve seen that category struggle a little bit.

So clearly, are being very thoughtful on how they’re using everyday products in order to maximize the mileage behind that. We’ve seen these cycles before. 2007 and 02/08 was a good analogy for that. Clearly, saw the value in mid price being more discerning, but we saw the super premium part of the market continue to grow. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing today.

Take the elmex business in Europe, very super premium, one of the fastest growing franchises in the market. Our responsibility in a market like this is to bring innovation across all touch points. The fact that we have big core businesses that I demonstrated in the presentation like anti cavity, like Max Fresh, we have to bring a constant stream of innovation in those segments in order to ensure that we’re trading consumers up through the price ladder in our portfolio, but most importantly, bringing excitement to the mid price and the value range of the business and not just simply focused on the premium side, which seems to be continuing to be quite robust today.

Yvonne, Host: Okay, great. And then just destocking has been called out by a number of companies in terms of organic sales versus consumption. You haven’t really called out destocking very much. So are you seeing something that’s different? And why do you think that is?

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Listen, what I have said is that destocking is a function of the consumer, right? First and foremost, if the categories are sluggish, the trade is going to manage their working capital more We have seen in certain trade environments that are growing faster than others, whether it’s the big box retailers like Walmart and Amazon who carry less inventory, obviously, tends to have a bigger impact on the overall category and more acute perhaps as category slow. In this quarter, we have seen some of the online retailers take more significant inventory reductions that don’t seem driven by consumption patterns. They just simply look at reducing inventory online. We have not seen that necessarily in the big brick and mortar retailers.

So, I think it’s more a pattern of retailers managing their consumption. That’s not to suggest we wouldn’t be immune to that. If a rig retailer decides to reduce inventory at the end of the quarter, we may we would suffer from that. But not necessarily a brick and mortar issue, more of an online issue today. And I think it’s a function of just the uncertainty around the consumer environment that retailers are seeing.

Yvonne, Host: Okay. We have to wrap up. There will be a breakout. I know that wasn’t advertised, but there is in fact a breakout. So, please join me in thanking Noel and John and Hope for being with us, and we’ll go over the breakout room.

Noel Wallace, CEO, Colgate: Thank you.

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