First thing I think about when I hear the word pop tarts is yummy.
The pantry at my nano's house.
My childhood and being very happy.
The one word I would say is nostalgic.
For 60 years, this toaster pastry has dominated the breakfast market.
it, transcending generations, a of convenience, nostalgia, and innovation, and
pop tarts is showing no signs of slowing down, despite decades of pushes for healthier alternatives.
In 2022, the product brought in nearly $1 billion in U.S.
sales.
That's an 8.7% increase from the prior year, people loved it.
the comfort of the food.
They love and that nostalgia is quite important actually I think.
With a new eponymous NCAA college football bowl in December 2023 and the almost 3 billion individual pop tartar.
consumers bought in 2022, pop-tarts relevance and the cultural zeitgeist continues to be prioritized by its maker, Kelanova.
Formerly known as Kellogg's.
What our fans and our consumers love is us to be part of popular culture and it's about
key moments and what better moment than in a college football big game.
Coming up with Cool Brand but we're also creating myself what our fans are taking us to.
Bill Post, now 96, was working at Keebler, a and cracker company based in Michigan at the time.
He was tasked with creating the pop-tart in 1963.
At the time, American society was focused on convenience, and breakfast was becoming out of the kitchen.
Kellogg's, which had a cereal empire at the time, wanted to expand it to reach further and was challenged with adding new products in other categories.
Fork barks around the edges and they said, can you make this?
The focus groups and mothers didn't really know what to do with these popatars.
They put them in a toaster,
sometimes they would bend,
sometimes they would burn,
but I had a son and daughter 13 and 9 at the time,
Dan and Rachel, who had asked them So in 1964, Kellogg started testing out four flavors, blueberry, strawberry, apple currant, and brown sugar cinnamon.
The shortage was just a taste at the success yet to come.
The snack would mainstream the following year when it hit shelves nationwide,
adding two new flavors,
cherry and concord grape, and replacing apple currant with raspberry apple Kelloggs, contact Stumpkin, eat him in the morning, eat him in the evening, Kelloggs.
Frosted Pop Tarts, America's favorite kind arrived in 1967.
With its success in the financial backing of its cereal business,
Kellogg's was able to successful marketing campaigns aimed at kids of popular characters, and that focus continues in 2023.
As of 2023, Pop Tarts are sold in more than 20 standard flavors, along with periodically released limited edition versions.
In 2023, Kellogg's split into two independent public companies, W.K.
Kellogg supports North American serial division.
Now, our focus is on snacks.
Is anything going to change?
I'd say, absolutely.
When comes to 24, we actually have a great new innovation.
It's going to be one of our biggest launches in at least five years.
Snacking brought in $7.5 billion, or 60% of all sales for the company in 2022.
Let's Poptart's uniqueness has been the key to its success, and help Kalanova become, in its own words, the world's best-performing snacks-led powerhouse.
The biggest surprise about Poptart is how steady the growth has been over time.
There really haven't been any other copycats that have had any success.
there's a very small subset of brands like this that consumers used when
they were young and continued to use when their teens and then even keep using when they're adults.
Half of Kelanova's net sales come from its five snacking brands.
Pringles, Cheezits, Pop Tarts, Eggo, and Race Crispy Streets.
In 2023, their growth continues to outpace the rest of the portfolio.
The overall trend of poptars is it's a force of nature,
it's growing,
it's thriving our consumers love it, nearly 30% of the US would eat poptars and that is something that we're really proud of.
Pop Tarts has endured recessions, natural disasters, and consumer preferences, but held steady through the years.
Though not immune to rising costs,
a look at the Pop Tarts'
original pricing of $0.39 to $0.45 in 1964 shows that the snack has remained affordable,
given the rate of inflation between then and As of November 2023, a pack of eight costs around $4.49.
That's $0.56 each.
Look, costs will always go up in the future.
That's the way of the world.
We want to make sure we do everything to keep this at the lowest cost that it should be.
According to Chicago-based research firm Circana, prices rose by about 11 percent from 2021 to 2022 and 12% between 2022 and mid-October.
While unit sales have declined, profits rose.
In that's when they and pretty much the whole grocery store started raising price a lot to offset inflation,
which drove a lot of dollar growth.
In its third quarter of 2023, Kelanova's sales volume fell 7.4%.
net sales, however, were only down 0.2%, still beating analyst expectations.
While Calanova has grown its gross profit margins through repeated price hikes over the last two years,
the company noted that it got, quote, an immediate lift once the company split.
In North America, where we're spending it off, we are still a very much scale player.
And we're growing faster than most retail is, so we provide a tailwind of growth.
In 2004, a Walmart executive told the New York Times that strawberry pop tart sales increased by seven times ahead of a hurricane.
But Poptarts has gone through some rough patches,
beginning in the 1990s a series of house fires were linked to Poptarts,
Kellogg's was taken to court and later settled with a number of defendants.
Yet, consumers continue to buy them.
Kellogg's biggest battle, however, has been against the health food industry.
Poptarts aren't exactly the healthiest.
is snack.
A single strawberry pop tart contains 16 grams of sugar.
That's more than half of the daily recommended amount for kids and adults.
Poptarts both say household penetration rate of about 28%, which Kelanovis has a strong compared with other family stacking brands.
The really important thing to us is that this is a snack,
this is not a meal or a meal replacement,
and this is something that we know our consumers love and they want to enjoy, and that's what we into is that enjoy.
While some data suggests that the recent rise in GLP-1 drugs like Ozemphic and Wagovee,
which suppress appetite, could shake up the snack category period, the company isn't concerned.
We don't know the penetration that these drugs will get.
We don't know longitudinally what happens with consumer behavior.
We know what people are saying they're doing in terms of changing their behavior.
and so forth, but it's just way too early to tell.
5% of the population reducing calories by 20% is really only 1% impact on volume.
So we've been very reluctant to change our long-term views on pop tarts or any other.
a major snacking brand.
I the brands who target younger consumers inherently will have less exposure to GLP1 risk, for sure.
Competition hasn't been much of a concern either for the Kellogg family.
Quaker and Nabisco had their own versions, but they are no longer so.
sold.
General offered an adult version in 2008, but the product was short-lived.
I the beauty of the Pop Tarts brand is that there really isn't any other competitor in the toaster pastries category of any meaningful size.
I think their biggest competitor is And now,
PopTarts is a part of Kelanova's push to tackle emerging markets,
like Mexico and Brazil, which the company noted represented 30% of 2022's net sales.
It's adding new production plans across the globe, and new product features by 2026 as it hopes to expand its snack empire.
Kelanova generates half of its revenue from in Canada,
and in its third quarter of 2023,
posted net sales growth of 17% in Europe and Latin American regions, despite falling sales in North America.
I think, you know, this can travel and I think it's a really, really interesting space for us.
At same time,
we're really excited about where this can go in North America and just how much potential there is as we think about this is a sweet brand.
Fourth quarter 2023 will be the first time Kelanova stands on its own without cereal.
It remains to be seen whether Poptarts and its peers in the category will deliver.
It's a really exciting time for us as a company.
We make decisions like this so we can drive brands like Poptarts.
That's very, very powerful versus we go forward.
So we talk about a billion,
you it us, but reality is we're looking for that next billion and how we start to continue, you know, that wonderful journey.
I'm a very simple pop tart eater.
Like fresh out the pack.
I don't need it toasted, microwaved, warmed up.
This is just, it's, it's gold.
Just like this.
