Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's conference. My name is Drew, and I'll be your operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Premier Foods plc Q3 2023/2024 analyst conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I'll now turn the call over to your host, Alex Whitehouse, CEO. Please go ahead. So good morning, everybody, thank you very much for joining us, and this is our quarter three trading update call, which covers the 13 weeks up to the 13th of December 2023. I'm also joined on the call this morning by Duncan Leggett, our Chief Financial Officer. So as usual, I'll give an overview of the first quarter trading and then we'll open the call up to questions. So as many of you will know, well, quarter three is our most important quarter, and I'm pleased to say we've actually had our biggest ever Christmas with quarter three sales and double-digit growth across the business and with significant market share gains. So group sales increased by 14.4% and with branded sales up 12.7%. Branded sales are now up 14.6% on a year-to-date basis. I think this demonstrates the strength and the continued relevance of our brands to our consumers in the current economic environment. Of course, that great brand performance continues to be underpinned by our Branded growth strategy, and that's leveraging our great market leading brands and bringing highly relevant new product innovation to market. That's based on our in-depth understanding of consumer needs and trends. We also support our major brands with engaging in meaningful advertising and marketing campaigns that keeps the brands relevant and top of mind for consumers. Then we deliver excellent in-store execution through our strong retail partnerships. And while this is obviously always important, it's especially so, in quarter three, which as I said, is our key quarter in terms of sales. And if you did get a chance to look at any stores on the run-up to Christmas, I'm sure you'll have seen, many of our product displays, around the store. Now, this brand building model is actually very similar, to that used by the large cap, multinational branded food businesses. In fact, we actually see ourselves as a much smaller version of one of those multinationals in the sense that we use the same brand building model. And the main difference, of course, is that we are still in the early stages of our international expansion. And now, as I've just said, brand investment is key, to our Branded Growth Model. And we again invested behind many of our major brands in the quarter, Bisto, Oxo, Mr Kipling, Batchelors, and Ambrosia, all benefiting from an overall uprated level of advertising support in the run-up to Christmas. In terms of product innovation, we again introduced a number of new products based on our in-depth understanding of consumers, and again, these have helped deliver incremental sales. So some examples are Mr Kipling's Best Ever premium mince pies, which have received five-star reviews from consumers, and Bisto Best meat-free gravy, and Paxo chicken and bacon stuffing, and Ambrosia Deluxe Custard, which did particularly well over the Christmas, as we saw people trading up and treating themselves. As this strong performance was notably ahead of the market, and so resulted in strong market share gains. In fact, overall, we gained just over 120 basis points of market share, which really is something that we're very pleased with, and illustrates just how well we're competing in our markets. It's worth noting that these share gains were similar in both grocery and food categories, so a very similar shape to the sales results we reported, this morning. This significant outperformance again reflects the strength of the brands, our proven Branded Growth Model, and the strength of our customer relationships. The growth is once again, pretty well-based across the brands and pricing continued to play a significant role in that growth, of course, although, but of course, what's going to happen, is that pricing will start to drop out during quarter four as we lap, the last major price increase last year. So we also saw improving retail volumes as we entered the quarter, with retail volumes up versus year ago in the key trading week just before Christmas. Looking at our grocery business, the sales increased by 11.9%, and by 11.6% for our brands. And many of our brands and products are, of course, particularly popular over the Christmas period, and that includes brands like Bisto gravy, Oxo stock, Paxo stuffing, and Ambrosia custard. And this year was no exception, as all of these delivered strong growth for us. Not only did the established seasonal favorites do well, but we also launched new products to accompany Christmas dinner, which included the Paxo chicken bacon stuffing that I mentioned before. Nissin Soba and Cup Noodles again reached strong double digits with its great progress continuing towards what is now rapidly becoming a GBP 50 million retail sales brand. In fact, both Nissin and Batchelors have outperformed the category by some distance in the quarter. As a result, we continue to cement our position as clear market leader in the quick meal soups and snacks category. As you know, one of our strategic pillars is to extend our brands into new categories, and sales here more than doubled. Leading the way with Ambrosia porridge pots, and during the quarter for the first time, we advertised these on TV, and we also added an apple and blueberry variant, which is performing very well indeed. And all this helped market share step forward again, now reaching 7.5% of the on-the-go porridge market, and up to 14% in our best performing customer. And we also achieved new listings for Mr Kipling and Angel Delight ice cream in two major retailers, and that's driven sales significantly higher in the quarter. So we're really very pleased with the progress that we're making in new categories so far this year. Well Well now, The Spice Tailor, which we've now owned for coming up to 18 months, continues to perform very well and delivering further double-digit growth compared to last year, and benefiting from distribution gains in the UK and in overseas markets. And I'll come back to that overseas rollout of The Spice Tailor shortly. So turning to sweet treats, sales increased by 21.3%. From the branded side of the business returned to very strong growth, with revenue up 17.1%. And it was great to see Cadbury Cake back in significant growth, with strong performances from core Mini Rolls and cake bars, and we lacked some unscheduled maintenance on the manufacturing line last year, if you remember. And this Christmas saw mince pies just as popular as ever. We sold 195 million of them, and that's 4 million more than last year. And that was helped by the launch of Mr Kipling's new and the Best Ever premium mince pie. Looking at the non-branded business, sales grew by 22.4%, and that's excluding Knighton Foods, of course. The grocery non-branded sales increased by 14.5%, while sweet treats non-branded grew by 28.7%. Revenue in grocery non-branded compared to the prior year was due to pricing and the retailer own label contracts. While in sweet treats, it was a combination of the new contracts that we won in pies and tarts, and the pricing as the growth drivers. So this growth in the quarter is below that seen in the first half of the year, with the pricing effects have begun to moderate. Our overseas businesses made further good progress, delivering 11% sales growth as we continue to expand distribution of our products in our strategic focus markets. You might remember, we've got three key brands which are a strategic focus for us overseas. So they are Mr Kipling, and Sharwood's and now, The Spice Tailor, since, since we bought that brand. And in fact, with The Spice Tailor, we've been making really good progress in rolling it out to new markets. And when we acquired the brand, it was mostly present in the UK and Australia, but we are, now in, or at least got confirmed listings in a total of 10 countries. And this includes New Zealand, Canada, and our first listing in the United States. And, and in Europe so far, we've agreed listings in Belgium, Switzerland, and France, as well as a step change in distribution in Ireland. So our, our future, international expansion will continue to be focused on these three brands, and whilst in parallel, we're also exploring, the potential for FUEL10K overseas. And so looking at Australia, both Mr Kipling and The Spice Tailor are major contributors to the performance, and that was driven by stronger in-store execution. And in North America, Mr Kipling grew by 20% as we gain distribution in more stores. And in cake, we've also just landed over 800 new store listings in Canada. So on top of what we've already gained in the U.S., we're now close to 3,000 stores across North America. To put that in context, that Mr Kipling will now be in more stores in North America than it is in Tesco in the U.K. Which, of course, is all the Tesco stores in the U.K. And of course, at this stage, this has been a much smaller product range, but that should give you some context in terms of store numbers. Moving on to Ireland, the business enjoyed another very good quarter, with sales up 27%, and particularly strong growth from the grocery brands. So Oxo and Bisto, they've had really strong Christmases, with sales up over 50%, and the latter benefiting from advertising in the run-up to Christmas. So if we now look ahead to quarter four, and as you'd expect, and we've got strong plans in place, including further new product launches, advertising support for our brands, and impactful execution lined up for in store. We do, of course, expect the level of top-line growth to begin to reduce as the year-on-year impact of pricing falls away during the quarter. And then as we move into the next financial year, we expect to return to more normal levels of top-line growth, split between a blend of volume and price mix. So maybe think about the top line growth that we were consistently delivering pre-pandemic. So really just to wrap up then, we've had our biggest Christmas ever, with double-digit branded sales growth in grocery and sweet treats for the quarter. And underlined by significant market share gains of over 120 basis points. And we've also continued to deliver against the other pillars in our five pillar growth strategy, with new category sales of 108%, led by the Ambrosia porridge and Mr Kipling Angel Delight ice cream. Our international business grew by 11%. And And Spice Tailor and FUEL10K continued to progress very well. And integration of FUEL10K is running to plan. So all in all, I think we're in good shape for the rest of this financial year, and well on track to deliver on the previously upgraded expectations. And so with that, I'll like to thank everyone for your time. I'll stop there, and we'll pass back to the operator, and we'll be very happy to take any questions. Thank you. Thank you. We will now start today's Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. Our first question today comes from Charles Hall, from Peel Hunt. Your line is now open. Morning, Alex. Morning, Duncan. Morning, Charles. Well done. Excellent, another excellent quarter, and, and great to see the momentum continuing. Can we just chat a little bit more about Q4 and going into next year with much lower inflation in the system and what you're doing in terms of driving volume? And obviously, new product launches is part of it, but what, what are you doing on promotional activities? Yeah, Charles, thank you. Yes. So, you're absolutely right. As we go through this last quarter in the year, all the pricing benefit from that last big price increase a year ago drops out. By the end of the quarter, we'll be, you know, fully back to everything that we deliver from our, from our branded growth model. So I think you know, we're really confident in that. The model's delivered well for us over a number of years now. If we go all the way back to before COVID, if people can remember that far back, you know, the business was delivering really well based on that model. And I have every reason to believe that it'll continue to work for us. So that's the usual repeating model. You know, as you say, it's very reliant on new product development. And, I'm pleased to say that, you know, we've got a really strong NPD pipeline, both the things that have come to market this year, which will continue to grow for us next year, and the products that we'll bring to market as brand new next year. So feeling really confident about that. Our in-store execution is better than it's ever been. You know, our number of displays in grocery that we had out, over the Christmas period was double digits up versus the same period a year ago. So our execution machine is working really well. And then I think the final point that you touched on was, pricing. So, where we've had the space as some of our commodities have come off their peaks, that's given us the space to fine-tune some of our promotional pricing, and we've chosen to do that on areas where we've got the greatest anticipated price elasticity. So some of those sharper price points continue to come to the market over the last quarter of the year. And so far, we've seen some really strong performance responses and volume responses to those changes. So, you're absolutely right. The pricing will drop out as we go into next year, but I think we've got a really strong toolbox and I would expect stores to perform well. Perfect. If I can ask one more question, just on Mr Kipling's rollout in the States, where does it fit in terms of your expectations? You know, is 3,000 locations what you were hoping for, or is it ahead? And also, where are we in terms of those distribution points going live? Yes, so we're actually a bit ahead of where we expected to be for this year in terms of total distribution points in the U.S. So that's quite pleasing, and obviously we haven't finished the year yet, so we're ahead of-- I think it's fair to say we're ahead of the target we have for the full year in terms of total store count. And in terms of the live dates, I think I'm right in saying that pretty much all the U.S. stores that we've talked about, the nearly 2,000 stores, are live now or about now. And we would expect to ship to the new 800 Canadian stores by the back end of quarter four. Perfect. That's great. Thank you so much. Thanks, Charles. Our next question today comes from Patrick Folan from Barclays. Your line is now open. Hey, good morning, Alex and Duncan. Can you quantify maybe on the FUEL10K, how did that do in the quarter? Going ahead, I imagine that will be a bigger part of the kind of top-line algorithm. And then I know you kind of touched on it there in the last question, but just more broadly, just on the consumer environment, are consumers still looking at value? You know, I guess with promotional activity stepping up, probably be more intense next year, and that's gonna drive hopefully a bit more volume footfall, just in the context of pricing falling away. So just kind of comment on that environment and, and maybe with promo stepping up, do you, do you see maybe a foot further drive of market share from, from promo? Thanks. Thanks, Patrick. I'll let Duncan pick up on the contribution of FUEL10K. But the consumer environment is an interesting one, isn't it? I think, you know, having been through, you know, what's commonly branded as cost of living crisis over the last year or so, you know, we're now in a position where we're seeing wage inflation ahead of actual inflation. So people sort of at least start to feel a little bit better off. But obviously coming from a position where everybody's behind over the last couple of years, I think, you know, from our point of view, it doesn't really have a massive impact on us because the business tends to be relatively resilient to those economic changes. So what we see when, you know, people are feeling the pinch and counting the pennies, what will tend to happen is people will eat out less, and therefore, the consequence, they buy more of our products because, they're cooking more at home. And then the flip side of the coin is when the economy picks up and we're in the other part of the economic cycle, yes, we lose some volume to people eating out, but we also pick up volume from people who trade up. So it's, in net net, it seems to be relatively neutral for us. But as I said, you know, to Charles, we anyway always look to optimize our promotion mechanics and our promotional price points. We've got a lot of modeling capability and economic, economic modeling capability that looks at price elasticities, the impact that that has on volume, the way that volume translates to factory efficiencies and ultimately profitability. So we're constantly playing tunes on optimizing those promotional price points to optimize the equation between volume, profitability, and cash profit delivery. That will continue to be, to, to be the case as we go through next year. Does that answer that question, Patrick? Yeah, perfect. Thanks. Great, thanks, Patrick. And then just on FUEL 10K, I'm really, really excited now we've got our arms around it, and I think we're probably more excited, you know, now as we get to know it better and understand the opportunity for further growth than we were when we actually announced the transaction. I think that's all really positive. You know, it's a great brand, and what they're trying to do, it's trying to be a great accelerator for us. So, no, I think in terms of contribution, you know, we bought it partway through the quarter. It's about, you know, we disclosed it's about a GBP 20 million brand in terms of sales last year. We're clearly gonna be expecting to be growing on that, but it's only a couple of months to us. So that probably gives you a feel for how much, but growing nicely, growing nicely year on year nonetheless. Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Webb, from Investec. Please go ahead. Yeah, morning, everyone. A couple of questions on international. Growth of 11% is obviously a very good figure, but well down on the H1 growth, particularly if you adjust that for the Australian destock. So I just wondered what, why you've seen that slow down, particularly when it sounds like the distribution gains have continued to be very strong. Second question, still on international, as you've grown distribution of Kipling in the U.S., I was just wondering whether there had been any change to its performance relative to other brands in that category? You'd obviously been very pleased with its relative performance. I was just wondering if that's continued. Then also, just in terms of your total distribution in the U.S., having got to that 2,000 figure that you've been aiming at, I mean, do we pause here to see how the brand performs, or does that keep rolling out as we go into next year? Sorry, just one final quick question on the U.K., on sweet treats. You've obviously got some very good market share gains there and good revenue growth, but it looks like that's very much led by Cadbury, which was up against a weak comp. I just wondered whether you had any comments on the Kipling range, either in terms of revenue growth or its market share trends. Thanks. Morning, Matthew. So yeah, a few bits in there. So yeah, no, we're really pleased with international growth of 11%. It's a business that seems to deliver consistent double-digit growth for us, but, you know, quarter in, quarter out. You know, if I look at total performance, I think it's probably two things to think about really. One is, you know, there was still a bit of that destocking in the front end of the quarter, and we thought we'd got the, you know, got through all that, but, but it turned out that we hadn't. We're pretty confident that it's that it's all out of the picture by now, though. And it also tends to be a bit lumpy in terms of shipments, because in some markets, you know, we're still fairly small. So we might, you know, ship a load of containers in one month and then not for another couple of months, and just because of the efficiency of transportation. But bearing in mind that, you know, all our products are either long shelf life on the grocery side or on the sweet treat side, they're frozen. So essentially, again, it becomes long shelf life. So you do get fluctuations from quarter to quarter, but as I say, overall, we're really happy with it. The focus, though, I think it's fair to say, is actually on building distribution. So what I'm much more interested in as a KPI is not necessarily short-term revenue delivery, it's actually the number of extra stores we get for Charles, it's the number of extra stores we get for Kipling, et cetera, et cetera. And the progress there is really quite, really, really quite good. And obviously all that, you know, all that leads to growth, you know, further down the line. Moving on to the second part of your question, so if we look at exactly at that growth of distribution and listing Kipling in North America, so performance, and I vaguely remember when we first tested this in a couple of 100 stores, and the performance was really very good, and we were very pleased with it. As we've started to roll out into other customers, you know, that performance seems to have held up. Different stores have got different footfalls, so it becomes a little bit complicated. But overall, I'd say we're really pleased with how it's performing in those additional stores. I'm not thinking that we pause at all at this point. And then we'll continue to push out stores with an increasing focus on what we call seasonal ranges. So having the right products in for Easter, having the right products in for Halloween and those sorts of things. Those events in the States are really important, and that's a great way to get new distribution in new stores. So I think we'll see more of that coming as we go through the next financial year. So, you know, no taking off the gas there in any way, shape, or form. Coming to the U.K. sweet treats, so there's an awful lot happening behind the sweet treats growth number. So you're absolutely right, you've got the weak comps on Cadbury. You know, because of that manufacturing maintenance we had to do a year ago. But at the same time, there's been a lot of things that happened. So, this is also the quarter where we've anniversaried or lapsed the promotional restrictions that came in with the HFSS restrictions, so where you can do promotions in stores. So for the first time in quarter three, we were in a position where we've got more displays in store than in the prior year, and that's not something that's happened for a year on sweet treats. So that is normally where we are, and it's certainly where we are in grocery, but it's not been the case in sweet treats for a year because of those restrictions. So, yeah, good to be in a positive position there. As I mentioned before, sweet treats was one of our most, not the most price elastic part of the portfolio, when we increased pricing to cover commodity costs. And we've therefore, it was the first place that we started to adjust promotional pricing as the commodity prices came off their peak. And so there were some benefits there, across both Cadbury and Mr Kipling, in the quarter. And then couple that with some really good new products, including that Mr Kipling new mince pie, and increased levels of advertising and promotional support. There's a lot happening behind that number. I've no doubt that the biggest piece of it is probably the Cadbury comp, but there's an awful lot of other stuff on the positive side happening. It's just at this stage, we're not able to, you know, deconstruct exactly which element delivered which part of the growth, but I'm sure we'll get greater clarity on that as we go through the next few months. Fantastic. That's really, really helpful. Thanks, Alex. Our next question today comes from Clive Black, from Shore Capital. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning. Yeah, well done on an excellent quarter. A couple of questions, if I may. First of all, you talk about increasing capacity at Ambrosia. Just wondered what that entails in magnitude, and indeed, just across the network, how are you in terms of capacity utilization at the moment? Are you in a good position to cope with growing sales over the next year or two? And then secondly, just in terms of the cost environment, maybe give us a feel for some of the cost movements. You know, the UK National Living Wage comes in in April. What do you think about energy and commodities? To the extent, are you anticipating disinflation rather than maybe deflation in the next, in the next year, if that's a fair question? Thank you. Yeah, morning, Clive. Thanks for that. Yes, so you're absolutely right. We have commissioned increased capacity at our Lifton site in order to be able to make more of the porridge pots. The reason behind that is, you know, we've obviously done very, very well with them, probably better than we ever imagined when we first started off. So we started making them on some existing manufacturing kit that we converted to be able to make porridge. And it's now reached a point where it's quite clear to us that if we don't put some more capacity in, we won't be able to continue to supply the growth and particularly wouldn't be able to continue to support or wouldn't be able to start overseas expansion, which we do think is a possibility with this product. So that's been commissioned now, you know, obviously, these things take a bit of time, but would you know, quite dramatically increase our overall capacity for porridge pots, which is really encouraging. More broadly, across the sites, Clive, there's nowhere really where I'm looking at it and thinking we've got any immediate pinch points. Right. We've got capacity for what we need to do over, you know, over the next year or two, no significant pinch points. Now, having said that, as you know, we have got one of our strategic pillars, of course, is investing in manufacturing efficiency. So there are definitely opportunities where we could upgrade some of our existing manufacturing kit with newer, more modern production lines. Sure. Therefore, you do have a number of benefits there. You'd be much more efficient, your cost per unit would fall, you know, product quality would probably improve. So there's a whole bunch of opportunities that are attached to that across our sites as we go forward. But that's not predicated by lack of capacity. That's more predicated by opportunity and cost out. Does that make sense? Okay, yeah. Yeah, that's it. Thank you. Cost environment. So, what's happening? So you're absolutely right on National Living Wage, but to be fair, that was pretty close to what we'd anticipated, and already built into our costing models for next year. So that doesn't really change anything from our point of view. Energy, as you're probably aware, we have a tendency to sort of hedge and buy, you know, a long way out. So, we're pretty secure on that for next year. So that's unlikely to be a significant variable for us. And commodities, you know, we've seen a bit of softening of commodities as they come off their peak. We expect that to continue. I don't expect that overall, though, you get into a net deflation in any way, shape, or form. But certainly from where we're sitting, from a pricing point of view, you know, we're still in the camp where we don't see that we need to increase our pricing next year, and that's something that we haven't anticipated happens. Yeah, okay. And then just a final follow-on from the previous questions. What's sort, what's the size of the Mr Kipling assortment in the States? And, you know, is there any particular product that's proving to be, to, to have taken off? Thank you. So we started with four flavors of the cake slices, Clive, and that's, you know, that was what we originally tested in those first 200 stores. Why that format? Because it's pretty easy to understand, you know, pretty widely accepted format. And so that is essentially the rollout portfolio, those key flavors, and lemon done particularly well, if that's of any interest. And then, what we've done in some of the stores where we've been in a little longer, we've now started to introduce some additional products. So, I think Cherry Bakewell started to go into some stores as well. And we'll be looking to expand that as we go forward. And then in particular, we'll, as we come up to different seasons, we'll have, you know, seasonal flavors and things that, yes, and even those it gives you access to in-store events. If they do a big display of Halloween products, you know, and if we've got some, you know, pumpkin flavored or pumpkin colored cakes, then we'll get those onto the display events, in a way that you wouldn't be able to do in your core range. And then if you look back, actually, if you look back to how we built the Kipling business to be the number one cake brand in Australia, a lot of that initial work was actually done through seasonal events, and then the range got fleshed out into more all year round type products. Well, excellent. So still quite a tight assortment in the U.S.? Yeah, I think that's important at this stage. I think what you don't want to do is to put too big a range in too quickly, because then you dilute and split your rate of sale across too many products. So it's important to be focused in the initial stages of that. Well, thank you very much. Very helpful. Well done. Thanks, bye. Our next question comes from Andrew Wade, from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Morning, just a couple from me on, on the same sort of theme. You touched in your opening remarks saying that you'd be expecting to return to sort of a historical rate of growth, through a combination of, of price, and volume. So just digging into both parts of that, really. The first part is, how confident are you about, sort of volume growth and what, what might be that confidence? And then the second one, if we're gonna be seeing a combination of price and volume, does that mean you're expecting to put through a bit of price at some stage, contrast to what you said, the answer earlier with Clive? Just trying to square the circle on that. Thanks very much. Morning, Andy. Yeah, so, you're absolutely right. You know, we'd expect to return to those historic growth levels, as I mentioned earlier in the call, we, you know, then we just rely on our, on our branded growth model. And we've got a lot of confidence in that because it's consistently delivered for us, no matter what the external environment seems to have thrown at us. You know, the model of having strong brands, focusing on consumer needs, delivering the new products, supporting the brands well, and executing them well in store, works pretty consistently. So we'll continue to do that. And you're absolutely right, we'd expect to transition from value or value per unit growth to volume growth driven by that model. You know, I think the wider point about volume and price mix is true, but I think in the immediate period, as we go through next year, it's likely that the price element of that, the price mix will be a negative one. Because that will be essentially what's driving some of the volume, won't it? So we'd expect that to be, you know, a negative part of the equation, although that doesn't necessarily mean the price mix on aggregate will be because, you know, mix shifts within our portfolio can make quite a big difference. So there are a few different moving parts to take into account there, to be honest. Got you. Very clear. Thank you very much. Thanks. If you would like to ask a question on today's call, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. Our next question comes from Ashton Olds, from Redburn Atlantic. Your line is now open. Hi, guys. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Yep. Cool. Yeah, just following on to the earlier questions on promotional activity, I think you've been quite clear on where and why you are increasing promotions. It would be good to get a better perspective on how you balance increased promotions versus, I suppose, maintaining or growing gross margin, and I suppose increasing marketing instead, instead. And then secondly, just on sort of the overall market, could you give us a feel for whether peers are beginning to discount more as well, particularly in some of your chosen categories, or whether retailers are demanding, I suppose, busier promotional schedules? Just those two from me. Yeah, sure. Morning, Ashton. So yeah, how do we balance the increase in promotion versus margin? It's quite an interesting equation. So, as I mentioned before, we, you know, we see ourselves as being quite scientific and analytical in the way we do these things. They're not judgment based, they're very much hardcore math based. And so we do quite a lot of modeling that looks at how volume will respond to a given change in pricing in store, and how that volume will then flow through our factories. Obviously, more volume makes factories more efficient, and the ultimate impact that therefore has on our margin position. And you'll be aware, over the years, we've been we're quite clear that we look to use expanding margins at the gross margin level in order to fund that marketing activity that you mentioned, and other things we want to do to expand the business, and that's something that's worked really well for us. So we have, you know, a whole basket of measures that we take, and a number of different activity streams that look at how we expand margin. So it's not just, you know, it's not just about pricing and cost, but just a slight, I would say, reassurance on gross margins, what we haven't done is sacrifice gross margin in order to fund those new price points. What we've done is we've looked at commodity prices coming off their peaks, and we've used that fall in our input cost pricing. It's not a fall versus year ago, it's just a fall versus earlier in the year, but nevertheless, it's a fall. And we've used that to create the space to sharpen those promotional prices without sacrificing any margin. But does that make sense? Yes, I suppose you sort of see the benefit of increased volumes as greater than the benefit of maintaining, you know, a higher gross margin, or growing gross margin, I suppose. If I, you know, if we look at, you know, strategically, if we look over the medium term, what we expect to do here, we expect to continue to make ourselves more efficient. That will manifest itself in margins, and we will use some of that margin to invest back into growing the brands, including into marketing spend. That's something we've been, you know, really clear on, and something that we've done consistently over, you know, over a number of years now, albeit with some, you know, fluctuations driven by, you know, some of the strange market conditions we've had over the last few years, whether it was COVID, post-COVID, or indeed inflation. But, you know, the underlying trend is very much part of the strategic plan. Okay, that's clear. Mm-hmm. And then just on broader discounting activity across peers? Yeah, to be honest, we've not seen a massive difference in our categories. I know there's been quite a bit written about, you know, supermarkets, you know, pricing, and price competitiveness, but I think a lot of that has been happening in non-branded and, you know, the fresh areas of the store. If I look at our product categories, they're pretty intense promotionally. They always have been. I've not really seen a significant shift in the intensity of that promotional activity, but monitor it. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Thanks. Our next question today comes from Damian McNeela from Numis. Please, go ahead. Hey, morning, everybody. Well done again. Just one from me. Most of mine have been answered. Just, I couldn't help but notice, as you mentioned in your call, that there's a lot of gondola end exposure for your brands through the festive period. I'm just wondering whether you could give any reassurance about the margin implications of doing that, whether that sort of, I know you sort of just talked about how rigorous your modeling approach is, but whether you could just sort of, add some further color to that, please, with regards to gondola ends? Yeah, sure. So the, I mean, you know, the cost of the business on gondola ends is basically the price discount. So the pricing that we implemented over Christmas was no different from, you know, our standard promotional pricing over the year, with the exception of those sharper price points that I talked about, which we funded through the slight fall back in commodity costs. So, there's no real, you know, noticeable margin impact of all that gondola end activity. In fact, you know, if you were to work it through, you'd probably find it's a net benefit for a couple of reasons. One is, drives more volume, puts more volume through the factory, and two, you know, the mix benefit we tend to get over the winter period and over Christmas seems to be intensely margin beneficial. Yeah, that's very helpful. Thank you, guys. That concludes today's Q&A portion. I'll now hand you back over to Alex Whitehouse for any final remarks. Well, thanks for dialing in everybody this morning. Y ou know, hopefully, you get the picture. You know, from our point of view, we think we've had a cracking Christmas, a really strong quarter three, overall, and that's underpinned by those strong market share gains. And we've also made, I think, really good progress against all the other pillars of that five-pillar growth strategy, and we can talk about that in more detail, obviously, when we get to full year results. The new brands, Spice Tailor and FUEL10K, both performing really nicely. And looking at the rest of the year, I think we're in really good shape, and as we said today, well on track to deliver what was obviously a twice previously upgraded expectations. You know, all in good shape, I would say, so thank you very much. That concludes today's call. You may now disconnect your line.