General Mills, Inc. (GIS) Presents at dbAccess Global Consumer Conference Transcript

General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) dbAccess Global Consumer Conference Call Transcript June 5, 2025 4:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Jeffrey L. Harmening – Chairman & CEO

Conference Call Participants

Stephen Robert R. Powers – Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division

Stephen Robert R. Powers

Okay. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us. For our next session, I’m thrilled to welcome back General Mills to the conference and equally thrilled to welcome back Jeff Harmening, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. So Jeff, thanks for being with us.

Jeffrey L. Harmening

Great to be here. Thank you.

Stephen Robert R. Powers

I’ll let you pour your water.

Jeffrey L. Harmening

Yes, pour my water here, yes, that’s right.

Question-and-Answer Session

Stephen Robert R. Powers

I guess we’re going to use the entirety of our time for Q&A. So I’ll just jump right in. And I’ll start, Jeff, with the way that I’ve started with a lot of teams here. It’s just obviously been a very eventful start to ’25, lots of different cross currents and pressures on the consumer. So maybe just start there, talk about your assessment of consumer health broadly and how those dynamics have impacted your categories specifically.

Jeffrey L. Harmening

Yes, sure. Thank you, and I appreciate everyone being here in person and those listening online. I’ll start with the U.S. because 85% of our business is in the U.S., and then we can expand later on from there. But it has been an eventful start to our 2025 year. And the U.S., consumer sentiment is really tough right now. The University of Michigan puts out a poll. And what it would say is that it’s the second lowest reading they’ve ever had. And the lowest reading was right after the pandemic began in 2020. So consumer sentiment is tough. The U.S. consumer is stressed financially. They’re still buying, but they are stretched. You can see U.S. consumer debt has risen. And