Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. (NASDAQ:KDP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Robert Ottenstein : Thank you, very much. Two questions. First, congratulations on the deal with Electrolit. When I was at NAX [ph], a month or so ago, it was all the rage. A lot of talk about it. Can you just — you mentioned that it was accretive to your mix. Can you talk about what that means? Because I would have thought this is just a distributor margin that you’re getting. So maybe talk to us about the impact on your business? And then the second question is — and this is kind of outdated. If you go back before Keurig and you talked to the old management team about the smaller pack sizes, Dr. Pepper was lagging, and there was a little bit of pushback saying that going into this different variety of pack sizes and can sizes would add unneeded complexity. And I know a hell of a lot has changed since then. I’m just wondering where you are in terms of your manufacturing and canning capabilities today in terms of meeting that greater variety of pack sizes?

Robert Gamgort : Yes. So, Robert, I’m glad that you saw Electrolit at NAX and the excitement about. This is a business that we’ve been tracking for some time, and we’ve been really impressed with their strong growth. The fact that their consumer target is multicultural. And it’s a perfect example as we’ve discussed with C4, with La Colombe, with Polar, where we can take a brand that is very strong and has a clear consumer base and opportunity and help them grow through expanded distribution, proof merchandising, and access to our RGM capabilities, category management capabilities, and more. And so, this one, I think, is another one of these win-win structures. When we think about Electrolit coming into our business and its implications on 2024, clearly, it’s a contributor to revenue growth.

Similar to what we talked about with C4, in its first year of incorporation, we don’t think about it as much of a driver of profit growth. But when you get into its second year, it will be able to contribute profitability and we’ll provide framing around that at that time. And that’s because we make significant investments in the first year to get the brand on board. And also, as we discussed earlier, this gives us a wonderful opportunity to put more investment in our — market system to be able to improve coverage with the fact that we now have larger job sizes and increased frequency. And as we said a number of times, that benefits all brands within our system. The fact that we put in the prepared remarks about the 50% growth in large outlet C-stores for us is a very significant consideration here in terms of our ability to cover our convenience stores for our entire portfolio.

So, this is yet another great example of how we’re able to build our capabilities. Your point about smaller pack sizes, yes, the other world has changed quite a bit. we have substantial distribution, and we have good manufacturing flexibility on small pack sizes. We see them as an incremental driver of growth. They happen to also be margin accretive. They’re very much in line with consumer trends where if someone wants to treat themselves and a portion of our portfolio is in the treat need state that we give them an opportunity to do so in a smaller pack size. And that’s been the case in other CP industries. And as we think about our manufacturing base going forward, flexibility in formats and pack sizes is a critical capability that we continue to invest in to give us the optionality of price pack architecture moving forward.

Operator: Our next question comes from Bonnie Herzog with Goldman Sachs. You may now go ahead.

Bonnie Herzog : Bob, I was hoping you could give us some more color on the exiting of certain private label contracts in terms of maybe how big these customers are and if there’s an expectation for more to come. And then you called out a tough comparison on your pod volumes in the quarter, given the trade inventory builds in the year-ago period. So just trying to understand how big of an impact do you think that was? And could you just confirm, I thought you said that you’re already starting to see pod volumes improve in Q4? Thanks.