“Importantly, pricing has now been lending and we expect that this will lead to a better second half volume and margin performance.”

In context

“eliver more than $540 million in gross profit growth or 20% in Q2 driven by top-line productivity and cost discipline. This also resulted in year-over-year gross margin expansion in all regions except Europe, which was impacted by expected customer disruption. Now that pricing is implemented, we expect improvements in Europe too. This growth provides significant fuel to invest behind our brands as well as significant earnings flow through. Moving to regional performance on slide 15. We delivered double-digit revenue growth in all regions, while also delivering volume mix increases in all regions, but Europe that got impacted by pricing-related disruption. This growth translated into operating leverage, NOI dollar growth across the board. Europe grew plus 13.1% with double-digit OI growth. Importantly, pricing has now been lending and we expect that this will lead to a better second half volume and margin performance. Overall, the consumer remains resilient with elasticity is holding up relatively well in chocolate and biscuit, while we saw some incremental elasticity in part of our cheese and grocery business. North America grew plus 12.4% with OI dollar growth of more than 29%, driven by higher pricing, volume mix of 2% and strength from both our base Biscuits business and our ventures, such as Give & Go, Perfect Snacks and Clif. Clif also posted robust growth and deliver another operating margin increase of double-digit percentage points in Q2 versus last year. Now profitability is approaching the level of total North America, but we still have to generate material synergies both on revenue and cost line. So Clif is a business that is growing as now some margins and still with meaningful synergy pot”