“We have seen as of late following the price increases we put in place in Europe, for instance, that elasticities have been fairly benign. So if we realize that volume is there, we might push price a little bit more forward to in an attempt to offset the cocoa impact that we will have inevitably next year.”

In context

“ittle bit of time for profit to improve and quite frankly profit improvement is more towards the second half of the year. Please also consider as we talk about 2025 that cocoa costs are lower in the second half versus half one. On ‘25, I can tell you that we have done a lot of work in scrutinizing all our costs and we will be removing sizable costs, particularly in the area of overhead and non-productive media expenses. We have increased the amount of productivities that we'll be delivering to our supply chain and we've had clearly a full slate of initiatives in our GM that should limit elasticities. As I said, it is hard to see a path to EPS growth into 2025 unless cocoa adjusts now materially and that is still a possibility and/or elasticities are more benign, allowing us to price more. We have seen as of late following the price increases we put in place in Europe, for instance, that elasticities have been fairly benign. So if we realize that volume is there, we might push price a little bit more forward to in an attempt to offset the cocoa impact that we will have inevitably next year. Operator: We'll move next to Ken Goldman with JPMorgan. Ken Goldman: Hi, thank you. Good afternoon. I had one question on North America and then a follow-up. On North America, the comment was made that your categories are sort of bucking the, what seems to be a larger, more challenged trend across snacking. And you did mention RGM as being part of it. I appreciate that. Just trying to get a sense what you're seeing as the other factors that is allowing or that are allowing your categories to do better than what we're seeing kind of elsewhere across that broader snacking continuum as someone once said? Dirk Van de Put: Yeah. Ken, the -- I would say the category is growing modestly and is improving slightly. And I would say that, overall, we see the consumer also getting more confident. But”