Clorox, the parent company of Kingsford, reported earnings today for their quarter ended June 30th, 2025. It was a bad quarter for Kingsford, but Clorox thinks they can turn it around.

They’re also facing an uncertain consumer, like everybody else. Consumers are still spending money though, even in some unexpected ways.

Consumer Pressure

With frequently changing regulations and changing tariffs, consumers understandably have a great deal of uncertainty. One way they’re dealing with it is by buying value in two different ways.

As we take a look at our current environment, consumers continue to seek value, and the bar is now higher. Our wallet-constrained consumers are continuing to buy smaller sizes and trading into lower-price-point offerings within our portfolio. For example, in Brita, we saw consumers buying smaller pitchers, and in Food, consumers are buying smaller bottles of dressing. At the same time, we see other consumers seeking convenience and better experiences and are willing to pay for them.

Clorox Management Prepared Commentary Q4 2025

In addition to some consumers buying smaller to seek value, others are going the other way and buying through Club channels. Those are both two sides of the same coin.

Another interesting dynamic that Clorox is seeing are consumers still paying for experiences and convenience. That’s important for outdoor cooking because those are both attributes that companies can sell.

At the same time that you see this value seeking and you see this uncertainty behavior from consumers interestingly, you also see this really made accentuated trend right now on convenience and experiences. Consumers are still buying things and experiences they like. You’re still seeing them do things outside their home, go back to eat, et cetera which might not be rational at this moment, but you can see how consumers are starting to shape those experiences.

We’re seeing in our categories. We’re seeing significant move to convenience. So our wipes business, which might be counterintuitive, is growing very strong right now. trade up to our business, Scentiva, which is a highly experiential fragrance cleaning line, we saw 40% growth in Scentiva this year.

Linda Rendle, CEO of Clorox

Clorox doesn’t expect the consumer environment to change through the balance of the year. They just plan to execute better and leverage what makes them a strong company.

At this point, we are not predicting a significant change to the consumer environment. We expect our categories to be above flat to 1-ish sluggish, but that’s very difficult to predict quarter-to-quarter, moment to moment, and we’re really focused on reinvigorating our categories through good advertising spend, pulling of the levels of superiority, including innovation.

Linda Rendle, CEO of Clorox

Kingsford Sales

A weak spot in Clorox’s business for the quarter was Kingsford. They saw it with Memorial Day, so they are acting quickly to fix what’s broken. They believe that they can execute better through the balance of grilling and tailgate season.

Particularly for Kingsford, we did call out that was a business where the execution just didn’t meet our expectations for the quarter. And there was a lot going on. I think you all know there was some pretty terrible weather in Q4 for Memorial Day.

But frankly, it came down to us not executing to the degree we know we can and we must execute on Kingsford in the key holidays. And that’s what happened in Memorial Day. We had slightly less merchandising. And not necessarily all on the right sizes as we shifted our plan.

And so the good news is we adjusted our plan for July 4, and we saw improvement in the plan, and we’re seeing the trend on share moved in the right direction. Bonnie, I don’t think this is an issue of our price gap versus private label, our value versus private label, all that remains what it was before. This was really just execution, and we are adjusting our plan to ensure that we do that.

An example would be, as we can see consumers want some smaller sizes for those who just want to have 1 or 2 grilling occasions. We are doing that to ensure that they have a smaller size and we’re able to do that, and we’re not just offering them a very large size for them to stock up on when they don’t have that out-of-pocket.

Those are the types of adjustments that we’re making for Labor Day coming up here in a month. But don’t feel like this has anything to do with our value equation between us and private label. It really just was execution.

Linda Rendle, CEO of Clorox