General Mills shares are approaching critical lows. Why are GIS shares at support?
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Operator
Good morning and welcome to General Mills third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings conference call. All participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker’s remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question at this time, you’ll need to press STAR followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Jess Seaman, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Jeff Siemon (Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance)
Thank you, Julianne and hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today for a live Q and A session on our third quarter fiscal 26 results. I hope everyone had time to review our press release, listen to the prepared remarks and view our presentation materials which we made available this morning on our investor relations website. It’s important to note that in our Q and A session we may make forward looking statements that are based on management’s current views and assumptions. Please refer to this morning’s press release for factors that could impact forward looking statements and for reconciliations of non GAAP information which may be discussed on today’s call. I’m here with Jeff Harmoning, our chairman and CEO, Kofi Bruce, our CFO and Dana McNabb, group president of North America Retail and North America PET. And before we get to Q and A, I’ll turn it over to Jeff for some opening remarks.
Jeff Harmening (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer)
Thanks Jeff and good morning everybody. We’ll turn to Q and A here in a couple minutes, but I thought I’d just take a minute or two to provide some context on what we’ve been through through the first three quarters of this year. And then based on the progress we’ve been able to demonstrate, you know, how we’re positioned to deliver a significant step up in financial performance which will start in our fourth quarter. Which is why we reaffirmed our guidance for fiscal 26. You know, as a reminder, as we entered this fiscal year, you know, we made a proactive and strategic decision to reinvest to improve the remarkability of our brands with full awareness that this would weigh on near term results as we sharpened our competitiveness. So now three quarters into that plan, we’re seeing strength and momentum on critical building blocks for sustainable growth, namely household penetration, improved baseline volume distribution and market shares. And this progress only reinforces our conviction that this strategy is the right one for General Mills in North America Retail, you know, our investments and remarkability are resonating with consumers. We’re rebuilding household penetration and baseline growth which are the key indicators of future growth in pet. We’re adding households as well and fueling our fast growing cat feeding portfolio and also taking steps to accelerate our growth through Love Made Fresh. And we’re continuing to be competitive in North America, food service and international. We know there’s still more work ahead, we know that, but with most of the reinvestment phase behind us, we expect to deliver meaningful, better top line and bottom line performance in Q4 and beyond. I also want to talk briefly about the other piece of news you may have seen yesterday, which was our agreement to sell our Brazil business and this builds on a strong track record. We have portfolio shaping both in acquisitions and divestitures near a third of our portfolio once this is complete over the last number of years and Brazil includes our Yoki and Katano brands and while it’s not on the scale of pet or the yogurt transactions, it’s the same disciplined approach we’ve consistently taken to reshape our portfolio and namely our desire to prioritize our resources investments on brands and platforms where we have the strongest opportunity to generate profitable growth. This deal will enhance our margins and increases the international segment’s focus on our key global platforms including super premium ice cream, Mexican food, snack bars and pet food where we have stronger margin and excellent growth prospects. So with this transaction, as I said, we’ve turned over nearly a third of our net sales since fiscal 2028 as we as we look to fiscal 27 as well. As we said in our press release, our number one goal is going to be to continue to improve our organic sales results while at the same time maintaining our industry leading. As well as the transformation initiative, we have to make sure we’re maintaining efficiency in 2026. We’re really pleased with the pound share competitiveness we’ve had in NAR as well as dollar share in the other segments. As we look at fiscal 27, we’ll aim to improve our dollar share performance in NAR. Really? As we’ve lapped a lot of these price investments and the rest of our remarkability framework elements take hold. So with that, we’re confident in the strategy we have and want to make and we know that we’re making progress, we’ll continue to do that in Q4 and into fiscal 27. And with that, let’s open it up for Q and A.
Operator
As a reminder to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from Andrew Lazar from Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Barclays Analyst
Great. Thanks so much for the question. Good morning, everybody. Morning, Jeff. Yeah, maybe Jeff. By the end of this fiscal year, General Mills will have the bulk of the pricing investments behind it along with, you know, a lot of the remarkability work. You mentioned in your prepared remarks, your expectation for more stable pricing next year as you lap the pricing. So I guess the key metric will be right. Can General Mills return to some level of volume growth in fiscal 27, even in the context of category growth? That remains for now anyway below the longer term level. I was hoping really for whatever you can share on expectations along these lines at this point, knowing you’re not obviously going to get into like specific 27 guidance yet.
Jeff Harmening (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I mean, Andrew, you’re on the right track. You know, in terms of our thinking, what I would say is that we look at fiscal 27, our, our goal really is going to be to increase our competitiveness in dollar terms. And this year we certainly did in pound terms as a result of all the pricing actions to be more competitive there. And in 27, you know, we’ll try to, we’ll try to maintain the pounds as well as, and at the same time let our innovation and the renovation on our core and our improved marketing and ROIs on our marketing campaigns do the job of increasing our dollar sales results. And so what we feel good about is that we’ve got the building blocks in place. And look, we’ve taken a step up on new product innovation and renovation this year from where we were before. I would look for us to take another step forward as we look at next year, both on innovation and renovation, particularly in NAR and in and in pet. And so that’ll be our goal. It’s a very volatile world. So what exactly that yields we’ll talk about in June. You know, we, we talked about at Cagny, our category is growing about 1%. But as I said, it’s volatile. We’ll come back with a revised view of what we think our categories will grow. But I can tell you definitively that our goal will be to increase our dollar share competitiveness across NARA as we have done in the other three segments.
Barclays Analyst
Got it. Okay, thanks for that. And then price mix obviously in your categories I think has continued to be positive despite some of your price investments. I guess. What have you seen competitively in your key categories? Sort of along these lines, following your own price investments. Thanks so much.
Kofi Bruce (Chief Financial Officer)
Good morning, Andrew. Thanks for the question. What I would say from a price mix standpoint is we have seen price mix in our categories up a little bit. That is behind some small brand Innovation, but predominantly in terms of our price mix this year. As you know, in the front half, it was about investing to get our base shelf prices right. It was not about promotion, activity, adding frequency or depth. It was about getting below key cliffs and gaps to the competition, getting that right. Which is why our price mix is down as we start to lap that. We laugh it a little bit in the back half of this fiscal year, but really the full lapping will occur in the beginning of next fiscal year. We’re starting and we expect to see that price gap close, starting first with our Pillsbury business, then cereal and then we’ll start to see some of our fruit snacks come along. And we do expect to get back to price mix growth in fiscal 27.
Barclays Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from Leah Jordan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Goldman Sachs Analyst
Hi. Thank you. Good morning. Just kind of building on some of that. You called out the step up in innovation this year. Just can you talk about how that’s been resonating so far? How is the growth tracking for new products versus the 25% goal that you had stated previously? And as we look ahead, I know you called out strong seasonal events for 4Q. What should we be looking for? Or any early commentary on 27 as well.
Jeff Harmening (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you. Yeah, overall I would say, you know, we’re really pleased with our innovation and we’re tracking at about 25%, maybe a little higher in North America retail and between 20 and 25% for the portfolio in aggregate. And I’m really pleased with what we’ve seen out of nar. So maybe I have Dana get kind of give a little bit of color on kind of what’s resonating.
Dana McNabb (Group President of North America Retail and North America PET)
Yeah. From a NAR perspective, I think we’ll land a little bit higher than the 25% growth from new products. We have really leaned into mainstream premium benefits such as protein and fiber. Better tasting news on some of our snacks items and that is running really well. I’ll use Cheerios protein as an example. The biggest brand getting a protein benefit that’s going to be $100 million by the end of this year. Some of the taste renovation that we’ve done on ...
