Company: THS
Filing Date: 2025-03-03
Form Type: PRER14A
Source: 0001320695-25-000014
Chunk: 4

Company: TreeHouse Foods, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-03
Form: PRER14A
Chunk 4
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 prior year. Private brands consistently outperformed national brands over the same time-frame, which is a positive sign for the industry. Retailers continue to invest in private brands, and consumers are still migrating to the strong value proposition that private brands offer. In fact, as we closed 2024, private brands unit share reached an all-time high in our categories of just over 24%.

We are strategically positioned to compete within private brands across the majority of our categories. We continue to make strategic investments to strengthen our portfolio depth and capabilities, including recent investments in:

• Tea – in January 2025 we completed the purchase of Harris Tea, which strengthens our competitive positioning in the fast-growing private label tea category and adds unique blending and sourcing capabilities that customers desire. The acquisition includes Harris Tea's manufacturing facilities in Moorestown, NJ, and Marietta, GA, and provides vertical integration across the Company's existing tea business.

• Pickles – purchased Bick’s® pickles and other branded assets in January 2024 to enhance our depth of offerings, expand our presence in Canada, and increase our margin structure in the Pickles category.

• Coffee – we continue to integrate the manufacturing facility in Northlake, TX to enhance vertical integration within our coffee business. This asset has added roasting, grinding, flavoring and blending capabilities, which expand our depth with end-to-end private brand coffee offerings in our portfolio.

Our net sales declined by 2% year-over-year, driven by pricing, primarily due to the impact of deflationary pass-through contracts, temporary product availability disruptions due to product recalls as a result of our commitment to quality and safety, and slightly negative volume/mix driven by a tougher macro environment.

We continued to execute our supply chain initiatives across our network, which generated savings, and maintained profit margins. Our supply chain savings were primarily driven by the work of our distribution and procurement teams, with the latter proving a particular standout, as we were able to better leverage our purchasing scale, building stronger strategic relationships with our suppliers. This work drove significant gross cost savings in the second half of 2024, and we enter 2025 from a position of strength given the momentum in this area.

We maintained the strength of our balance sheet, which provided us the opportunity to deploy capital in a disciplined manner throughout the year. We focused on these investments in our business, including capital expenditures for growth and supply chain initiatives as well as infrastructure and maintenance at our manufacturing plants, and returning capital to stockholders. During 2024, we opport