General Mills Repriced Two-Thirds of Its Portfolio and Still Lost Volume. Here’s What’s Really Growing Units.

Key takeaways:

• General Mills hit its elasticity targets on roughly 90% of its price investments and still closed fiscal 2026 with volume down a point and North America Retail operating profit down 20%.
• Meanwhile, Conagra went the opposite way, took price up, and lost 1.4 points of volume. So price direction isn’t the variable anymore.
• The manufacturers growing units are buying physical availability and repeat purchase. Freshpet grew net sales 15.5% last quarter on 15.7% volume with price/mix at negative 0.2%.

Most of the packaged food industry spent the last 18 months running the same experiment. Give back price, win back volume, protect share, rebuild margin once shoppers come home. The logic was sound and the elasticity models supported it.

The fiscal-year results are now in, and they didn’t cooperate.

What General Mills bought with two-thirds of its portfolio

General Mills ran the largest version of this experiment. On its second-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call in December 2025, chairman and CEO Jeff Harmening told analysts the company had finished making base price adjustments across roughly two-thirds of its North America Retail portfolio. He also reported elasticities at or ahead of expectations on about 90% of those investments, Nielsen-measured pounds up 1% in the quarter, and pound share holding or growing in eight of the top 10 US categories. By the model’s own scorecard, the pricing work did what it was designed to do.

Then the fiscal year closed. General Mills’ fourth-quarter and full-year results, released July 1, 2026, put full-year net sales at $18.4 billion, down 5%. Organic net sales fell 2%, with volume contributing negative one point and price/mix contributing negative one point. North America Retail came in at $10.6 billion, down 3% organically, with segment operating profit down 20%. The company held or gained pound share in 65% of its top 10 US categories, and fiscal 2027 guidance calls for organic net sales somewhere between down 1.5% and up 0.5%.

In other words, General Mills won the share fight, hit its elasticity assumptions, and still gave up a point of volume and a fifth of its segment profit. The forecast was right. The strategy behind it wasn’t.

Harmening noted, “With our price investment work behind us, our focus in fiscal 2027 is to improve our topline growth by driving a step change in the remarkability of our brands.” That’s a CEO moving the growth argument off the price sheet and onto the product.

Conagra ran the opposite play and lost more volume

If cheaper didn’t work, the obvious counter is that holding price would. Unfortunately for Conagra, that wasn’t the case.

Conagra’s fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter and full-year results, released July 15, 2026, show full-year organic net sales down 0.4%, built from negative 1.4 points of volume and positive 1.0 points of price/mix. Reported net sales fell 2.9%, and adjusted operating margin came in at 11.3%. Fiscal 2027 guidance is softer than what General Mills issued: organic net sales down 3% to down 1%.

One giant cut price and lost volume. The other held price and lost more of it. Whatever is suppressing units across the category, it isn’t sitting on the price tag.

Speaking to Food Dive in February 2026, Conagra’s SVP of demand science, Bob Nolan, warned that “lower prices on yesterday’s items doesn’t move the consumer.” The operative word in that sentence is yesterday’s.

The industry number that explains both results

Zoom out and this stops looking like two companies with execution problems.

Circana’s 2026/2027 Global Food and Beverage Outlook, published July 13, 2026, puts US retail food and beverage growth at 2.2% for the first half of 2026. Volume growth was flat at zero. Price/mix delivered 2.3%. Inside that number, packaged food price/mix ran up 3.7% while fresh managed 0.4%.

Every point of category growth this year came from charging more. None came from selling more. Packaged food is charging the most and moving the fewest additional units, and Circana forecasts only 2% to 3% growth for 2027 against a 2019 to 2024 compound annual rate of roughly 7%.

Sally Lyons Wyatt, Circana’s global executive vice president and chief advisor, describes the shopper differently than the trading-down story most of the trade press has been running: “Consumers are no longer simply trading down or cutting back. They are becoming more intentional and efficient.” Intentional and efficient shoppers don’t buy more of something because it got cheaper. They buy what they came for.

Store brand data points the same direction. The Private Label Manufacturers Association reported on July 8, 2026, using Circana data for the six months ending June 14, that private label unit share hit a record 23.8%. Store brand units rose 0.2% while national brand units fell 0.5%. Store brand dollars were flat while national brand dollars climbed 2.2%. National brands are extracting more dollars from fewer units, which is a shrinking business with a growing invoice.

Freshpet grew 15.5% with price/mix at negative 0.2%

Somebody is growing units, and it’s worth looking at how.

Freshpet’s second-quarter 2026 results, released August 5, 2026, show net sales of $305.6 million, up 15.5%. Volume grew 15.7%. Price/mix came in at negative 0.2%. Adjusted EBITDA rose to $52.2 million from $44.4 million, and the company raised full-year guidance to 10% to 12% net sales growth.

Notably, Freshpet makes pet food, not human food. Its category has tailwinds most center-store categories don’t. But it competes for the same refrigerated square footage, in the same stores, against the same wallet, and it grew volume at roughly the rate the rest of the industry lost it. The mechanism is what transfers, not the growth rate.

What Freshpet bought instead of price cuts

On the August 5 earnings call, management named the levers. Distribution points rose 13% in the quarter. The brand now sits in more than 30,000 stores, with roughly a quarter of US and Canadian locations carrying multiple fridges, and another 700-plus rural retail locations planned by year end. Chief financial officer John O’Connor reported media spend at 13.4% of net sales, and said household penetration rose 5% over the year while buying rate rose 7%. Chief operating officer Nicki Baty described the business as moving away from a trial-based model toward a more durable consumer franchise, and called media the main growth driver the company has. 

Strip the brand name off and you have four numbers no elasticity model produces: distribution points, fridge count per store, buying rate, and repeat rate. Freshpet spent its money making the product easier to find and more habitual to rebuy. It did not spend it making the product cheaper, and with price/mix slightly negative, it wasn’t leaning on premiumization either.

But before building a plan around this, there are two things to consider:

1. The first is capital. Freshpet spent 13.4% of sales on media and guided to roughly $150 million in capex this year. A private $300 million manufacturer running two plants and a stretched sales team cannot buy 13% more distribution points in a quarter, and pretending otherwise is how good analysis turns into a bad budget. The transferable part is the sequence and the scorecard, not the spend. Freshpet went after availability and repeat before it went after price realization, and it tracked buying rate separately from penetration. Both of those are free to adopt.
2. The second is margin. Volume growth doesn’t insulate a P&L from input costs. BellRing Brands, another company on Circana’s growth leader list, grew third-quarter fiscal 2026 net sales 4.0% to $570.4 million on 1.7% volume, and still watched gross margin compress 680 basis points to 28.6% on input inflation, tariffs, freight, and a $10 million inventory charge. Units are necessary and not sufficient.

Why smaller manufacturers get 19% of sales from new items

The second pattern in the data is scale, and it runs against the giants.

Circana’s 2025 US CPG Growth Leaders report, its 14th annual edition, published April 9, 2026, names growth leaders across five revenue tiers. In the $2.5 billion to $8 billion band: Chobani, Celsius, BellRing Brands, Georgia-Pacific, and Driscoll’s. From $1 billion to $2.5 billion: Ornua, Sazerac, Freshpet, Daisy, and Pharmavite. Below that sit names most operators wouldn’t have recognized from a shelf set five years ago, including Chomps, Milo’s Tea Company, and Snack Innovations. Only the largest tier is dominated by the companies you’d expect, and even there the top slot went to Red Bull North America.

The number underneath the roster is the one to consider bringing to your next planning meeting. New items accounted for 19% of sales at companies in the $100 million to $500 million range, and 9% at companies between $500 million and $1 billion. Across all manufacturers analyzed, new items moved from 5% to 6% of dollar sales.

So a $400 million manufacturer is running roughly three times more of its revenue through recently launched items than the industry average, and it isn’t because it has more R&D money. It has fewer legacy SKUs to protect and a shorter path from idea to shelf. That’s a structural advantage at small scale and a structural drag at large scale, which is an uncomfortable read for anyone in the middle who inherited a portfolio built in a different pricing environment.

Where AI actually helps here, and where it’s oversold

For most manufacturers the bottleneck isn’t generating concepts. It’s screening them fast enough to launch more than two or three a year, and reading repeat intent before committing a line.

Circana’s Cara Loeys, vice president and industry advisor, points to technology as central to how leading brands compress research and creation cycles. That’s the key use case for AI: faster concept screening, faster shopper testing, a better read on repeat before you build inventory.

What it will not do is decide which legacy SKUs you eliminate to make room, negotiate the shelf space, or fund the media that turns trial into habit. None of the manufacturers in the data above published a before-and-after ROI figure on AI in the innovation pipeline. Treat it as a cycle-time tool and hold the growth claims until somebody publishes numbers.

What to measure Monday instead of elasticity

Here are four questions to answer from data you already own, which is key when the analytics team is already booked through the quarter.

1. What share of your revenue came from items launched in the last 24 months? Across the industry the average sits at 6%, and companies in the $500 million to $1 billion range average 9%. If your number is well under the benchmark for your tier, the growth conversation belongs in the innovation pipeline rather than the pricing model.
2. Did your distribution points grow last quarter? Not dollar velocity, points. Physical availability was the lever Freshpet pulled hardest, and in most planning decks it gets treated as a sales team metric rather than a growth strategy.
3. Is your buying rate growing faster than your household penetration? If penetration is up and buying rate is flat, you’re renting trial. That’s an expensive way to hold share, and it usually shows up as a promotion line that never comes back down.
4. What did your last price investment actually buy? Run General Mills’ math on your own P&L. If you hit your elasticity targets, held share, and still lost volume and margin, then the model worked and the strategy didn’t. Those are different problems, and only one of them gets fixed with a spreadsheet.

General Mills spent a year proving the price lever works exactly as its models said it would, and it still didn’t produce growth. That may be the most useful thing any manufacturer published this year. The companies growing units stopped waiting on price to do the work.