Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. (NASDAQ:KDP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Bryan Spillane: Bob, I guess, hey, so my question was just around Coffee Systems, and I appreciate the perspective you gave on kind of the perspective for €˜23. But can you give us a little bit of — we’re getting a lot of questions about holiday sell-through, both in terms of some of the retail disruption, but just whether consumers are making other choices about small appliances at the holidays? And maybe if you could talk a little bit about in the outlook for this year, how much of the brewer decline do you think has just been — there’s been a bit of a pull forward in the last couple of years. How much of it do you think is disruption at retail? Or how much do you think is just a function of consumers being sensitive about how they’re spending their discretionary dollars.

Robert Gamgort: Yes. Good question. Let me start with something I said a number of times in the past, especially when we’ve had quarters where the brewer sales were up significantly, and that is — we’re not in the business of selling brewers. We’re in the business of driving household penetration. And while there is a correlation between brewer sales and household penetration, there’s not this direct causation that we’ve talked about a number of times in the past. And what I mean by that is there are three reasons consumers buy brewers. It’s a new household. It’s a replacement of an existing brewer or it’s an upgrade. And so there’s a number of factors that you can see brewers sales down, and it has no impact on household penetration, because it means that somebody has delayed an upgrade, for example.

So two things to point out in 2022 versus 2021, obviously, in Q4 is we were delivering 3 million new households in 2020 and 2021. So obviously, in 2022 with 2 million households, you would expect to sell fewer brewers. The other part is we have seen a challenged retail environment, and we referred to that in our script, particularly in specialty channels in some mass customers as well. And while we’re working with them to continue to drive growth of the whole category and our brewers specifically. We also think it’s smart to continue to look for other opportunities to pick up that consumer demand elsewhere, where the consumer demand is moving. A lot of that, as you know, is moving towards e-commerce. Having said all of that, I think your question on consumers making other choices.

The reality of it is KDP brewers or cured brewers picked up share of all coffee makers and of small appliances. So it’s not a decision to buy something in place as it, but there’s clearly been some pressure on small appliances in general. And some of that is the rebound effect post COVID, but some of it is also due to some retail pressure that we described in the prepared remarks.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question today comes from Kevin Grundy with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Kevin Grundy: Great. Thanks, good morning, everyone. Bob, just to follow-up on Bryan’s question, but very succinctly, as you kind of pull this together, look at household penetration, your confidence in the business, is this — your Coffee Systems business is the expectation that this grows mid-single-digits longer term. I think that’s really important, because it’s a key debate for the stock. And then just my follow-up unrelatedly, just on the advertising and marketing increase. Bob, maybe just a little bit more color there on the magnitude of the increased key areas of spend, I think that would be helpful for folks as well. Thank you very much.