Signs of more progress in the supply chain and slowing inflation in intermediate goods and input costs this week, but demand remains surprisingly resilient, and evidently strong enough for companies to still feel comfortable raising prices, suggesting the lag between improvement in input cost inflation and consumer price inflation may be longer than we'd like.
Inflation Macro Datapoints:
September ISM Manufacturing and Services Indexes both showed continued improvement around inflation. The Manufacturing survey’s result was the lowest since June 2020 and the Services survey result was the lowest since January 2021. As a reminder, these surveys ask participants a variety of questions and give them the options to say “better, same, or worse,” with the results weighted at 100, 0, and -100. Results below 50 indicate prices are falling, with results above 50 indicate prices are rising, with the degree greater or below 50 usually directionally representative of the degree of price inflation or deflation.
S&P Markit’s September Manufacturing and Services PMI’s showed similar results. On the manufacturing side, S&P said:
“On the price front, input costs rose at a slower pace in September. The rate of inflation was still historically elevated amid reports of hikes in energy and material costs, but eased to the softest since January 2021 as inputs such as steel, plastics and lumber reportedly fell in price. In an effort to drive sales, manufacturers registered a softer increase in selling prices compared to earlier in the year. That said, the pace of charge inflation ticked up from August as firms sought to pass through higher cost burdens to clients. Supporting the softening of cost pressures was the least marked deterioration in vendor performance for two years at the end of the third quarter. Reports of greater input availability and less severe transportation delays contributed to greater supply chain stability.”
Then on the Services side, S&P had this to say:
“At the same time, firms registered slower increases in input costs and output charges during September. Although still historically elevated and linked to greater material, energy and wage expenses, the overall rate of cost inflation was the softest since January 2021. Companies highlighted lower prices for some inputs, especially imported items. Reflecting efforts to drive new sales and pass on slower increases in input costs, selling prices rose at the weakest pace since December 2020. Despite firms passing on higher costs to clients, a number noted concessions and discounts made to customers to secure orders”
JOLTS (Job Openings, Layoffs, and Terminations Survey) Data on Tuesday showed job openings meaningfully fell in August. The Fed has been hoping that they could cool the labor market off by reducing job openings without necessarily causing actual layoffs. Ultimately they just want wage inflation to slow, but the Fed seems to have returned to the view that price inflation cannot be truly contained if labor inflation is still high. Thus, they think they need to force unemployment higher to get price inflation sustainably lower. Time will tell if that needs to happen or not.
As Jordi Visser from George Weiss noted on his latest webcast (highly recommend for investors, and can be found here: https://www.gweiss.com/insights/rates-vol-says-market-regime-shift-is-near-video), the August JOLTS drop was the largest in the 22 year history of the data, with the exception March and April of 2020 when the world shut down.
The Jobs Data itself on Friday had pros and cons (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf). On the one hand, although still pretty strong, job growth continues to slow, with September producing 263,000 jobs during the month, down from August’s 315,000 and July’s 537,000. Given government jobs actually declined by 25,000, however, private sector payrolls actually improved from August’s level (to 288,000 from 275,000 in August). The “bad news” of the employment report is that the unemployment rate fell from 3.7% in August to 3.5% in September. This was driven by the labor force (somehow) shrinking. How we still depend on a household survey to tell us these important statistics when there are clearly other sources that could help (banks, payroll processors, credit and debit card companies, etc.), will almost assuredly be the subject of a future podcast. Some perspective here: the Household survey claims the labor force (meaning the people actively looking for work or working) is basically flat since March, yet since then, 2.4M people have taken jobs. How likely is that? This is significant, however, because it makes the number of unemployed people look smaller than it probably really is, and thus, even though job openings have come down, a lower unemployment rate makes the labor market still seem tight. Even though, and this was probably the best part of the jobs report, wage growth appears to have continued to slow down, coming in at only 0.3% for all private employees and 0.4% for manufacturing and nonsupervisory employees. This amounts to annualized wage growth of 3.6% and 4.8% for those two groups respectively, which is not far off from the levels we saw pre-COVID. Back then, the Fed did not believe that wage growth at these levels was necessarily going to be a problem for price inflation, so this is a key difference now versus then. Ultimately though, wage growth is what matters, so if that cools without mass layoffs, the Fed will probably come back around to their Pre-COVID view.
The jobs data sent the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast for 3Q up to 2.9% (we should note that there was a major revision upward after last week’s Personal Consumption Expenditures data due to consumption and investment being better than previously expected so far this year). This “good news” may actually be bad news, as it may indicate that the economy is still too hot to cool price inflation, and thus, may result in more interest rate hikes from the Fed.
Other Items to Note:
Used car prices continue to fall at wholesale (which are the prices dealers pay to buy cars), but have not fallen much at retail (which are the prices you and I pay to buy cars). These usually tend to follow one another, so its likely we’ll see consumer prices ultimately follow wholesale prices, but this category fits the trend we talked about last week: that wholesale prices and input costs across the economy are rolling over, but this has not yet flowed through to lower (or at least slower increases) in consumer prices. And the latter is what matters for the Fed. On Manheim’s Quarterly Call on 10/7, they put forth the theory that part of the reason for resilient retail prices is just dealers trying to make a consistent gross-profit-per-unit (GPU) on the higher cost inventory they purchased a few months ago when wholesale prices were higher. Thus, as they start to acquire this lower priced wholesale inventory, if they try to keep their GPU flat, retail prices should fall.
New York Fed’s Supply Chain Index continued to show improvement in September. The index is now only 1 standard deviation above normal. As we’ve talked about elsewhere, though not fully back to normal, supply chains have normalized considerably over the past several months. We’ll likely talk more about this in a separate post.
Class 8 Truck orders were the highest monthly total ever in September, according to ACT Research, which should increase fleet sizes and hopefully put further pressure on prices and also improve supply chain efficiency and delivery times. This may not be good for truckers but may be good for everybody else. It’s also a sign that component and parts shortages may no longer be as big of an issue, as September’s 53,000 compares to 249,800 over the entire last twelve month period. ACT stated “The strength in orders reflects OEMs’ having fully opened their orderboards for 2023 a bit earlier than normal, as the seasonally weak period for truck orders typically runs May-September.” At the end of August, ACT reported that the order backlog was 197,000, so September’s orders represent more than 25% growth in the orderbook. 74% of the freight in the US economy is moved by truck, for perspective.
In what feels like a 100 year storm every 5 years now, water levels on the Mississippi are again near record lows, and barges are being prevented from making shipments. While this impacts food exports predominantly its unclear what the impact on US food prices might be. Something to watch.
Commentary on Inflation from Publicly Traded Companies:
Acuity Brands Inc. (Ticker: ACY) – Lighting Equipment Manufacturer
We are continuing to deal with the global supply chain challenges, particularly around component shortages, and we are continuing to work through some of the higher cost inventory. This could result in margins that are a little lower in the first part of the year as compared to later in the year.
As Karen indicated, we expect to work through the first part of next year with continued inconsistency and some component availability, which impacts our ability to level load the factories, one; and two, some higher cost inventory related to -- that's in inventory right now related to higher container costs historically. But we feel pretty solid about where we're going for next year.
we are working through some of that higher cost inventory related to the increased container costs from earlier in the year. That was one factor that impacted it. Definitely, the component shortages that we've experienced had some impact on our ability to level load our facilities, particularly earlier in the first couple of months of the quarter. And then we did see costs for freight to our customers. So the outbound freight to the customers also increased in addition to the higher commissions that I mentioned. So that really kind of impacted the margins at ABL this quarter
On the -- from an entire industry perspective, and I'll use us as representative, we've made 7 price increases in our last fiscal year. That's more than -- obviously, I haven't been in the industry that long, but that's more than anyone in our company can remember. So it's dramatically kind of changed the dynamic of the pricing environment. And so I would observe, it's not as linear as the question would imply that we introduced a new product, therefore, we can charge more for it… Obviously, the input costs in this year moved more than we had anticipated. And so we got -- we found ourselves chasing that a little bit, but I think that's true of pretty much everybody.
As it relates to kind of trade downs in the inflationary environment, that is something that, obviously, is always happening. But I would tell you as anecdotally that the performance of our architectural portfolio, so the things which are -- I think we would all generally consider more at the top of our product portfolio, has been stronger this year than in -- certainly in any time since I've been at the company. So it's really a healthy -- we're really healthy across the portfolio. We're significantly more healthy across the portfolio -- our portfolio at the high, the middle and the more value components, which is how we've delivered kind of the volume, the margin and the mix as you see it. And that's what we feel good about going forward.
And then I just had a follow-up on the deflation question because it's a question I get from investors. We've obviously seen freight rates coming down quite a bit, raw material prices have come down. So the question is, will the lighting industry have to reduce prices? Or are you going to keep the extra profits? What is your view there? It sounds like you expect to keep the extra profits?
Well, I would note that even though those prices have come down off their highs, they're larger -- they're higher than they were before. So on a relative basis, there still is -- there still are -- kind of the general market is an inflationary -- is an inflationary market.
Levi Strauss & Co. (Ticker: LEVI) – Jeans and Apparel Manufacturer
AURs were up mid-single digits in a more promotional environment and the pricing we've taken to offset inflation has largely stuck. Third, and as a result of our pricing power, our gross margins, though off modestly versus a year ago primarily due to currency and discounting, remained strong and are still nearly 400 basis points higher than pre-pandemic levels as we have successfully offset significant inflationary cost increases.
We delivered these results even in the face of higher FX headwinds, transitory pandemic-related supply chain issues intensifying in the U.S., resulting in our inability to fulfill orders as well as stiffening ongoing economic and inflationary headwinds impacting consumer discretionary spending in the U.S. and Europe.
And though in the month of September, we're continuing to experience momentum in our U.S. direct-to-consumer business, which is up 10%, we are tempering our outlook for the remainder of the year to reflect ongoing supply chain disruption and macroeconomic pressures.
Our outlook reflects a more cautious view with regard to supply chain challenges, particularly in the U.S. into the fourth quarter.
Ike. Chip, the only thing I'd build on is from a cost perspective, what we're seeing. So Ike on one hand, we built up inventory as we close the year, but we've built up inventory when cotton was much lower than what it was for the first half of next year. As you -- as we see the future of cotton for the second half, cotton down to a little over $0.80, which is the normalized. So there should be some tailwind there in 2023. The second is some reduction in distribution costs and freight costs as we start thinking through the second half of next year. And so I think those are the things that probably help.
Jay, overall, what we'd say is all the parts of supply chain are indeed improving. We're still feeling the impacts of disruption. We additionally have some condition within our logistics and distribution network due to inventory build that we did to protect Q1 revenue as well as our ERP transition. With this transaction comes a loss of efficiency in our distribution network. And so we think Q4 will be the peak, and we expect to start improvements in Q1. And to offset this and build -- as I said earlier, we're kind of reducing our H1 by big time. And so that by the end of quarter 2, inventory levels return back to normal. And the congestion is largely between the ports, the transloader and goods on our distribution center a lot. So we're working through it. And the majority of it is largely in the U.S. And U.S. is primarily a core market. So we're working through that. We're working through the same with our customers, to ensure there's minimal disruption, but it does hurt overall revenue
The only thing I would add is you probably heard others about supply chain improving significantly. Their starting point was a lot different than our starting point. Our supply chain issues are kind of in line with the issues that we had last quarter, 2 to 3 points worth of growth left on the table due to supply chain issues. We didn't have the major supply chain issues the way some of our peers did 9 to 12 months ago because our eggs are spread across more baskets than relative to our peers who have so much of their supply chain concentrated in 1 or 2 markets. So the change on change is not as significant for us as it has been for some of the others.
So let's put it this way, Dana, we're not going to be leading an aggressive promotional environment, but we're not going to be left uncompetitive. Just as we did in the third quarter when we saw that the promotional environment was heating up, we took steps to be competitive. But we're not in a place where we've got to go out and passively liquidate a lot of inventory. So we're not going to lead it. And it's not going to be less uncompetitive. That may mean -- that may not mean that we're going to go all the way to 70% off if everybody else is going to 70% off. It may mean that we go for fewer weeks, but we'll be competitive, but we're also -- at the end of the day, we are about the strength of our brand and an overly promotional -- hot promotions brand. It's not good for brand integrity. And so we're going to do our best to protect gross margin without being competitive in the marketplace.
Constellation Brands Inc. (Ticker: STZ) – Beer and Wine Manufacturer
We continued to experience headwinds driven by the inflationary economic environment, particularly in packaging material costs and shifts in mix. However, beer operating margin increased over 330 basis points to 40.5% primarily driven by more favorable impact from pricing, lower obsolescence charges and lower marketing spend as well as the favorable impact of fixed cost absorption from strong shipment volume growth.
Our updated fiscal '23 outlook includes a 2% to 3% price increase, which is higher than the previously anticipated 1% to 2% expectation and medium-term algorithm range as elevated costs continue to create pressure across the supply chain
However, we continue to expect an implied operating margin of approximately 38% for fiscal '23. We anticipate second half operating income margins to be negatively affected as we expect the benefits from our pricing adjustments and cost-saving actions will be more than offset by ongoing inflationary pressures across raw materials and packaging, particularly as more favorable hedges will continue to roll off, additional headcount in training as well as increased depreciation from our brewery capacity expansions and higher marketing spend as previously referenced.
Dara, on the margin piece. So one, I would say that you would expect that this year's margin profile on a first half versus second half would reflect something that's more normal, which we really haven't had the last couple of years due to sort of production issues that we had to contend with, which led to sort of a rebalancing of shipments. Again, this will be more because we're in a more typical production environment. You will see a more sort of normal first half versus second half margin profile. We are expecting margins in the second half to be negatively impacted as I said in my remarks as the benefits from pricing and some of the cost-saving actions will be more than offset, again, by ongoing inflationary pressures. From a materials perspective, we continue to see some pressure from corn as well as cans and cartons and glass. As you know, we have a relatively robust hedging policy. But the way that we layer in those hedges and then the way that those hedges then roll off, we saw the greatest impact from those in the first half of the year. So while we're nicely hedged, they just won't be at the favorable rates, if you will, as we were in the first half. And then again, as is typical -- and then as typical as we're laying out incremental capacity, we will be impacted by incremental costs as we bring on people to train in advance of the capacity coming online. And then finally, we're expecting to see a significant increase in marketing in the second half versus the first half as we support new marketing campaigns around college and NFL football. For FY '24, our guidance is -- continues to be clear on that. We continue to view the right way to think about our margins is in that 39% to 40% range, and we're not coming off of that
As it relates to your point on pricing, as we said in our scripts, we are taking more pricing this year. We upped it for this year from our normal 1% to 2% algorithm to 2% to 3%.
McCormick & Company Inc. (Ticker: MKC) – Food Spices and Flavorings Manufacturer
In constant currency, sales grew 6%, reflecting 10% growth from pricing actions, partially offset by a 1% decline from the Kitchen Basics divestiture and 1% decline attributable to the exits of low-margin business in India and the Consumer business in Russia and a 2% decline in all other volume and product mix.
During the third quarter, supply chain challenges continued and recovery of certain constrained materials is taking longer than expected. We continue to incur elevated costs to meet high demand in our Flavor Solutions segment. While in our Consumer segment, where demand moderated from elevated consumption trends more quickly than expected, we are experiencing lower than optimal operating leverage. Across the supply chain, we remain focused on managing inventory levels and eliminating inefficiencies, though the normalization of our supply chain cost is taking longer than expected, pressuring gross margin and profit realization in the current period. Over the coming months, we will be aggressively eliminating supply chain inefficiencies. Importantly, as we had expected in the third quarter, our price increases are catching up with the pace of cost inflation in both segments. We began to recover the cost inflation that had been outpacing our pricing actions and other levers most significantly in the Consumer segment. We expect this will continue into the next year as we plan to fully offset inflation over time.
And from a cost perspective, as we responded to demand volatility over the past several years, we have incurred additional costs above inflation to service our customers and have seen inefficiencies develop in our supply chain. These are costs we have absorbed. We have not passed into customers on our pricing actions. We are targeting to eliminate at least $100 million of these costs with a significant benefit in 2023. We're moving aggressively to take these costs and inefficiencies out as well as normalized inventory levels that have built up. Some of our actions include: Investing to increase both manufacturing capacity and reliability in bottleneck areas to enable better customer service and repatriation of production from excessive use of co-packers. We're returning to more normal ship schedules and reducing our spend on expensive surge capacity. We are already seeing the benefit of lower overtime and temporary labor reductions. In this more normalized environment as, well as through customer collaboration, we are already beginning to reduce expedited freight costs and less-than-truckload shipping costs as well as other transportation inefficiencies. We are resolving raw material and packaging supply issues. For example, we are beyond the shortages of glass bottles and certain organic spices which impacted supply of our U.S. gourmet line. A supplier facility closure announced in September drove the discontinuation of a component of our dry recipe mix packaging, and through our quick qualification of alternative supply, we mitigated a major disruption during the fourth quarter. The long-running shortage of French's mustard bottles will be resolved in the first half of 2023 as new molds come online at a second supplier. And from an inventory perspective, we are also executing on plans to return to historical safety stock levels, which were raised to protect against supply disruption. We expect the impact of our actions to normalize our supply chain costs; increase our efficiency and ability to meet demand; lower our inventory levels; and importantly, increase our profit realization beginning in the first half of 2023. We have managed through various supply chain challenges over the last several years, with the peak disruption experienced in the third quarter of last year. Since then, there has been steady improvement, building progress and bolstering our confidence in our plan to enhance our operational performance and optimize our cost structure. While we will always prioritize meeting our customers' needs, I'm encouraged by our disciplined approach to resolving the increased cost within our supply chain. We've continued to define and quantify specific actions within our plants since we shared we would be driving the elimination of the supply chain inefficiencies in our preannouncement last month. We look forward to sharing more details and progress with you in January when we provide our 2023 outlook.
Our spices and seasoning share was pressured by service-related distribution losses, a shortage of certain packaging items as well as certain organic spices, which has largely been resolved and some trading down by consumers who remain under pressure from broad-based inflation.
And finally of note, in line with our expectations, the impact of our pricing actions in the third quarter began outpacing cost inflation in both segments, more significantly in the Consumer segment. We expect pricing to continue outpacing inflation into next year as we plan to fully offset inflation over time. Overall, our cost recovery and gross margin improvement will vary by region and segment with a slower Flavor Solutions recovery. Importantly though, we have now passed the inflection point with significant gross margin improvement since last quarter, driven by our Consumer segment performance, and we expect further improvement in the fourth quarter.
We are projecting our 2022 adjusted gross profit margin to be 350 to 300 basis points lower than 2021, primarily driven by our Flavor Solutions segment. Given the rapidly escalating cost environment this year, cost inflation outpaced pricing in the first half of the year. We expect pricing to outpace inflation in the second half of the year and continue into next year. This adjusted gross margin compression reflects the impact of a high teens increase in cost inflation, higher supply chain costs, lower operating leverage and unfavorable impact of sales mix between segments and favorable impact from pricing and CCI-led cost savings. As a reminder, we have priced to offset dollar cost increases. This has a dilutive impact on our adjusted gross margin and is the primary driver of our projected compression. We expect our adjusted operating income to decline 11% to 9% in constant currency.
But right now, all of our customers recognize that inflation is ongoing, and we continue to have, I'd say, productive pricing discussions with our customers. We just did take another round that is effective here in our fourth quarter, and we're really not seeing that kind of push back right now
I think the reality, Ken, is we're still recovering. Our pace of pricing has caught up now with cost. And we'll -- say, we'll recover dollar for dollar in 2023. But there is a trend that is going in the right direction. And obviously, as we look at 2023, we look at what's the cost environment, things like that, we need to do again next year. But that's still kind of...
Lawrence E. Kurzius: And I think particularly on the Flavor Solutions side of the business, we have -- we still have more work to do
So Flavor Solutions is really the division that has stumbled the most. I mean, when I look at profit this year compared to like pre-pandemic, it's well below your prepandemic levels. So can I assume that most of the $100 million in savings is -- or recovery is going to happen there? And then my second question is, I remember years and years ago that the Flavor Solutions had problems because it was trying to do too many things for too many customers. It had spread itself too thin. It needed eventually to have a rationalization of its customer base. And I wanted to make sure that, that's not possibly one of the root causes today. You've grown your sales a lot. Do you feel like the organization is capable of still getting back to like 12% operating margin across all of those customers?
Lawrence E. Kurzius: Yes. I think that stumble is the wrong way to characterize it. I think that we're a bit of a victim of our own success. We've won a lot of new business, and we prioritized keeping our customers in stock and supplying them. And that has put a lot of pressure on our supply chain in a few areas. And we've got projects underway to address the kind of a normalization of our production through capacity additions. Some of these wins are substantial, and we've had real brick-and-mortar projects that take a couple of years to put into place that are coming online right now and that are going to get at a lot of the extraordinary costs. There's some parts of our business, the 24/7 shifts that we've gotten out of most of our business, we're still doing that in a lot of our -- well, I wouldn't say a lot of the parts of our Flavor Solutions business. And that is a less efficient shift pattern, even though it does get you some capacity. It's certainly an example of expensive surge capacity. But we've got new seasonings capacity coming online in the Americas, some of it now, so some of it in the first -- early part of 2023. We're starting up a new Flavor Solutions plant in the U.K. We've got expanded distribution that's shipping -- really starting to ship right now. And so I think that we've got a lot going for us in Flavor Solutions to support that strong growth in a more efficient way. As a margin issue on Flavor Solutions, partly is just the way our contractual arrangements work with our customers, there is a pass-through mechanism for the major raw materials that go into their products. There's a lag to it. In times when inflation was 1%, 2%, 3%, that lag really wasn't important. But this year where it's been double digit, it has been important. And we are going to catch that up.
But remember, costs keep coming in. I mean, we didn't just get cost inflation on January 1 and priced for it. These costs have been steadily increasing all year, and in fact, continue to increase. The inflationary outlook has not settled. So there's been a bit of a -- we've gotten -- we've passed costs through, but there's been a bit of chasing it as new -- as costs have continued to go up.
But we would have more pricing in effect in the second half of the year, especially going into the fourth quarter, than we have -- than we did in the early part of the year. Now we've, in the Americas this year, taken a number of rounds of pricing. That included the most recent one being here right at the beginning of the fourth quarter. And so there is more pricing in effect now helping out our Consumer business primarily there. And so you can see that coming through now. And really, other than the contractual windows that we were just talking about in Flavor Solutions, we largely have our actions for this year in place, and we're looking ahead to 2023 now. I think that in Asia, we've got one more round that goes into effect that's actually this month. But really, our 2022 actions are away.
Michael R. Smith: Well, maybe a little bit of that -- I mean, we did talk about a month ago. I mean, some of the challenges on Flavor Solutions this year were cost-related supply constraints. We could have sold more. We could have had higher volumes than you noted. So I think from that perspective, some of the actions we've talked about, kind of getting more capacity will help. But the demand is very strong.
Lawrence E. Kurzius: Demand is very strong
But I do want to be clear of what's the most important thing, I'm glad you really brought this point up about volume, is that the continued growing demand for flavor and the strong growth of our business that we're fueling with executing on our strategies and with our passionate and engaged employees is the most important thing. Inflation is a reality, and our pricing has caught up with it. We're seeing that coming through in the margins now. You're going to see it -- see us keep caught up and taking the actions that are necessary. And then comes supply chain. That's really kind of the third-most important thing, which is to eliminate the excessive cost and inefficiencies that have crept into the supply chain. So I do want to keep that in perspective, that growth is still at the top of the heap
Lamb Weston Holdings Inc. (Ticker: LAMB) – Potato Processor and Manufacturer
We expect this environment to remain challenging, at least through fiscal 2023, as inflation, a growing threat of recession and industry-wide supply chain disruptions continue to pressure demand for fries as well as our cost structure. It's no surprise that inflationary trends for food, energy and housing have affected restaurant traffic in the U.S. over the past 6 months. We saw similar restaurant traffic trends during the Great Recession as consumer discretionary income came under pressure. While traffic at quick service restaurants has held up relatively well, it has come at the expense of casual dining and full-service restaurants as consumers increasingly choose less expensive options when dining away from home. In the past month or so, we've seen casual dining and full-service restaurant traffic tick up from summer lows, but traffic remains below levels achieved just prior to the war in Ukraine
In the quarter, our sales grew 14% to more than $1.1 billion. Price/mix was up 19% as we continued to benefit from product and freight pricing actions that we announced last fiscal year and as we began to execute new pricing actions during the fiscal -- for the first quarter. Our sales volumes were down 5%, primarily reflecting the softer restaurant traffic trends in U.S. casual dining and full-service outlets that Tom described earlier as well as the timing of shipments to large chain restaurant customers.
Gross margin expanded nearly 900 basis points versus the prior year quarter and 230 basis points sequentially to more than 24%. Pricing actions and productivity savings drove these improvements, more than offsetting the impact of higher costs on a per pound basis and lower sales volumes. Cost per pound increased high single digits, with inflation again accounting for essentially all of the increase. Higher prices for inputs such as edible oils, ingredients for batter and other coatings, labor and transportation were the primary drivers. Potato costs were also up as a result of the [poor] crop that was harvested last fall.
And finally, we continue to incur higher costs and operational inefficiencies associated with labor, spare parts and ingredient shortages and other industry-wide supply chain challenges. Benefits from our portfolio simplification and other cost mitigation efforts, however, offset some of these higher costs.
Sales in our Global segment were up 12% in the quarter. Price/mix was up 14%, reflecting domestic and international pricing actions associated with customer contract renewals, inflation-driven price escalators and higher prices charged for freight. Mix was also positive. Overall segment volumes declined 2% as North American volumes fell, primarily due to the timing of shipments to large QSR chain customers, including the effect of lapping a notable limited-time product offering in the prior year quarter. Global's product contribution margin, which is gross profit less advertising and promotion expenses, nearly doubled to $84 million. Favorable price/mix more than offset the impacts of higher manufacturing and distribution costs per pound.
Sales in our Foodservice segment grew 14%. Price/mix increased 26% as we continued to drive product and freight pricing actions that we announced throughout fiscal 2022 and earlier in the quarter to counter inflation.
In our Retail segment, sales increased 28%. Price/mix was up 32%, reflecting pricing actions across our branded and private label portfolios as well as favorable mix with the sale of more branded products. Volume was down 4%, reflecting incremental losses of certain lower-margin private label products. We'll be lapping the last of that -- lost private label business in the second quarter.
In addition, we expect our sales volumes will be affected by near-term production and throughput constraints as we continue to face disruptions and availability of key product inputs and spare parts. Additionally, while labor and access to shipping containers have improved, we continue to see the impact of shortages.
We continue to expect gross margins during the second half of fiscal '23 that approach our normalized annual rate of 25% to 26%, and we feel good about the 4 key factors underlying this target. First, as Tom noted, we believe the potato crops in our primary growing regions will be at the lower end of the historical average range, and that any effect on our operations and financial performance will be manageable. Second, we're pleased with the continued progress in implementing pricing actions to counter cost inflation. Third, we're making steady progress in adding production workers in order to ease labor pressures in our factories. And finally, the availability of domestic rail and trucking assets as well as access to shipping containers continues to improve.
Chris, the main factor, if you think about a year ago, we were at 15% margin. And so it's really focused on pricing through inflation. We have absorbed a tremendous amount of cost inflation in this business, just like everybody else has in the space. So it's really driving pricing to offset inflation. And we're making, obviously, great progress against that. We have a lot more to do. It's still -- from an input cost standpoint, we're going to see more inflation come at us in the future. So we're adjusting our pricing architecture to offset that as much as we can and we believe we will.
Yes. And we are making steady progress as we add production workers based on some of the actions that we've taken to attract and retain employees while there's still those labor shortages. We are seeing the impact of that and some of the changes we've made to shift schedules and other things, just getting back to your run rates and throughput question.
Thomas P. Werner: Yes. And just one of the big challenges we still have is container issues for our international business, Chris. And it's -- while it's getting better, it's still hindering our ability to ship to some of our international markets in a pretty significant way, which is impacting the overall volume in our Global business unit. The team is working through it as best we can, but it's still challenging from a container standpoint on the West Coast.
So the big thing, Tom, is our global contract negotiations are kind of wrapping up for this next fiscal year. Most of those will start flowing through in the back half. And as I said in the remarks, we feel good about where all those ended up. So we'll start seeing -- realizing those in the back half. In terms of the other segments, we've been ahead of the curve in terms of the pricing to offset inflation. And we -- as we always do, we'll continue to evaluate based on what we're seeing on our cost structure, evaluating when we go to market and change prices going forward in the Retail and Foodservice segment.
Bernadette M. Madarieta: Yes, that's right. And then the last price increase that we announced in Foodservice, Retail in July, you'll begin to see more benefit of that in Q2, Q3.
Thomas P. Werner: You might start to see a little bit of slowdown in transport though, just so you have that. So remember, we've been talking about product pricing here, but transport will start to come off a little bit just as the cost of transport goes down as it -- and most people on the call know that we try to make that as a pass-through as possible. It's -- over time, it tends to be gross profit neutral, but it will be a little bit more volatility on the top line because of that
RPM International Inc. (Ticker: RPM) – Coatings Manufacturer
While supply conditions remain tight, material availability did improve throughout the quarter. This is primarily a result of measures our teams have taken, including using our Corsicana, Texas plant for self-sourced raw materials.Our R&D and procurement personnel have fought throughout the supply chain challenges by identifying new sources of raw materials and qualifying them to ensure our customers receive the quality products they expect from us. This collaboration, which is occurring across RPM's businesses, has allowed us to better meet customer demand, add resiliency to our supply chain and realize additional savings from our MAP 2025 margin achievement plan
Consolidated unit volume increased approximately 5%, while pricing on a consolidated basis increased on average of 15% as we work to catch up with continuing cost inflation that increased year-over-year 28% in the first quarter.
Demand in North America was strong, and we generated good sales growth across all of our segments. Emerging markets also performed well during the first quarter with double-digit revenue growth in Latin America, Asia Pacific and Africa and the Middle East. Europe, which comprised 13% of overall sales in the first quarter was the outlier with revenue down 8.5%, which drove operating earnings down in the region 35% quarter-over-quarter. These declines resulted from the challenging macroeconomic conditions in Europe exacerbated by rapid inflation. Our Construction Products Group and Performance Coatings Group, which have relatively sizable presence in Europe, felt the impact of these challenging market conditions most acutely.
As we look forward to the second quarter of fiscal 2023, several of the challenges we faced in the first quarter are expected to continue and possibly intensify. Supply chains are improving, both from our initiatives and market conditions but remain tight, and any disruptions can delay the realization of benefits from the execution of our growth initiatives.A strong U.S. dollar is expected to continue to be a headwind to both sales and adjusted EBIT growth, particularly in our CPG and PCG businesses, which have a larger percentage of their sales outside the U.S. From a macroeconomic perspective, Europe is expected to be challenged by high inflation and impacts from the war in the Ukraine. In the U.S., persistently high inflation and rising interest rates have increased the economic uncertainty and the possibility of an economic downturn
So I commented on our organic growth and the split, which is roughly 5% unit volume on a consolidated basis and 15% price. Either we or any of our competitors provide specific price detail at a segment level. But with that guidance, we had higher-than-average price increases in consumer. That's consistent with the historic patterns of getting price typically at a 6- to 9-month lag to what we get in other parts of RPM.
The last comment I will make, and then I'll stop and answer additional questions, is that despite the strong quarter, only at our Performance Coatings Group are we operating at record EBIT margins. We are not back to record EBIT margins at Construction Products and Specialty Products or at Consumer, so we still have some more work to do, both in terms of executing on MAP 2025 and on addressing cost price mix issues that have been driven by the inflationary environment that we're in
I can tell you in the quarter, inflation was up year-over-year by 28% and sequentially from Q4 up about 2.5%. And I'll have to let Rusty for more specifics.
Russell L. Gordon: Yes, alkyd resins, John, were more than double that, over 60% increase.
We are aware that fundamental primary chemicals have dropped meaningfully. That is not showing up in the paint coatings industries purchased chemicals yet. As I said, we've had 28% inflation year-over-year in Q1. What happens in Europe relative to the Russian war on Ukraine and its impact on energy costs and economic activity, particularly in the winter, it's hard to know.
Depending on the product line across all of our consumer group, and this is principally a North American commentary, our fill rates range anywhere from the mid-70s to mid-90s. That is not at the 98% or 99% that our customers expect or that we delivered for decades, but it's substantially better than the 50% to 60% fill rates that we and others in our industry were operating at in fiscal '22 and part of fiscal '21 as a result of all the supply chain shortages.So there's been significant recovery there, and you can see that in our Consumer Group results. But we still have more work to do, and we are utilizing outside consultants on manufacturing and operations side in various places of RPM, but in particular, in our consumer businesses to address some inefficiencies that popped up both in the midst of the COVID boom and then the challenges that everybody faced with the supply chain issues.
We got higher price increases over the summer in consumer than we got over the summer in our other businesses because we were late. So again, if you go back last year on a quarter-by-quarter basis, you saw really solid performance as we were gaining price in our industrial segments. And it took us that typical 6- to 9-month lag to be able to start to catch up on the cost price mix in consumer.
In Q1, our raw materials were up 28% year-over-year, and they were up about actually 2.6% from quarter-to-quarter from Q4 to Q1. They are increasing at a lower rate certainly than what we saw in Q4 and Q3, but they're still up year-over-year
So I'll answer the last part. The answer is no. We were fully caught up in a number of our industrial businesses. And then I think people were expecting, particularly with some of the underlying primary chemicals coming down, that we'd see a flattening out. And so in our Construction Products Group, in a few instances, we're behind the curve because of continuing inflation in Q1. We're getting there in Consumer. And again, that's more related to the lag that the people are aware of that has been true for us forever. And so that, I think, that's an issue. We did have $30 million of benefit from the MAP 2025 program in Q1, and we will provide more detail on our expectations when we talk in our Investor Day on Friday, including over the MAP 2025 program, some anticipation of improving in the commodity cycle which should benefit our margins. That's anybody's guess, but the current underlying lower levels of propylene and polyethylene and ethylene and some of the primary chemicals, which are down but have not translated into lower prices of the type of specialty chemicals we buy yet, are things that we'll talk about on Friday. And I think things that we anticipate should benefit margin recovery over the MAP 2025 program.But the world we're living in today is still inflationary. The situation in Q1 is may be surprising to some of our businesses, but it's the world we live in.
So I think we'll have solid contributions from price in Q2. It will start -- the benefit of price across RPM will start to -- it will still be positive, but start to deteriorate in Q3 and Q4 as we annualize price increase actions that our companies took in fiscal '22. And then unless there are further price increases, which would be in response to further inflation, I think we round the annualizing of pretty much all of our price increases by the first quarter of next year. And so you'll see the impact slowly diminish after Q2, but still be positive. And that assumes that things stay stable as to where they are now.
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