Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Andrew Lazar – Barclays Capital.
Andrew Lazar - Barclays Capital
I guess I think as of last quarter you had been looking for flattish gross margins for the year. I was just trying to get a sense of whether that still held. And given you had pricing that was very solid in both the fiscal 1Q and 2Q I guess I’m surprised that gross margin improved a bit sequentially given the significant shipment volume deceleration. So I want to get a sense of why volume de-leveraging didn’t hurt margins more or maybe it did and there was some offset that came up in the second quarter that helped you.
Douglas R. Conant
Andrew, at a high level I will tell you that we do expect to see gross margins very solid for the full year. So that implies we’re going to continue to have growth in the second half. Anthony or Craig, do you want to get at the – a little more detail to it?
B. Craig Owens
Sure. I mean, on a full year basis we expect growth margins to be ahead of the prior year. And to your question about volume, we did actually see a negative impact on margins due to the volume related to the inventory reductions and that’s reflected in our U.S. Soup, Sauce and Beverage segment results.
Andrew Lazar - Barclays Capital
Was there something that helped offset that relative to the first quarter? Because you had good pricing in both first and second quarters.
B. Craig Owens
No, there wasn’t anything extraordinary underneath that.
Leonard F. Griehs
Okay. Next question Devon.
Operator
Your next question comes from Eric Katzman - Deutsche Bank Securities.
Eric Katzman - Deutsche Bank Securities
I guess my question has to do with the trade de-loading, Doug, and how much impact that had on soup. I think you gave a 3% hit for the entire division, but can you be more specific as to what happened in soup? And you also kind of suggested that that was below I guess your consumer off-take was better, and maybe you could give us some sense as to what that means.
Douglas R. Conant
Eric, the information we provided was that there was about three points of sale lost to this inventory reduction. And it happened in our warehouse businesses, which would land it squarely in our U.S. Soup, Sauce and Beverage categories. It was most pronounced in our U.S. Soup and Sauce businesses. And it was even more pronounced, surprisingly to me, in condensed soup and sauces where consumer demand was actually increasing. We have great visibility into this because we have good consumer CRM capability in terms of consumer replenishment, excuse me. So we have visibility into the dynamics of the categories.
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