Kingsford’s parent company, Clorox, reported earnings for their quarter that ended in September, 2025. It’s a quarter that has multiple grilling holidays, so it’s an important one for the Kingsford brand.

Some of the themes that Clorox mentioned before continued in the quarter in regards to a stretched consumer and some changes in shopping behavior. Clorox did an ERP change this year, so it impacted their raw earnings because they had to change they shipments to retailers, and they did deal with some out of stocks.

 So I think when we look at the phasing for the full year outlook, it might be easier to just exclude the impact of the ERP in both Q1 and Q4. And if you do so, organic sales growth in the front half would be in negative low single digits and organic sales growth in the back half would be positive low single digits. The assumptions around the category remain the same. We assume that our U.S. retail category remain muted, kind of on average, growing 0% to 1%, still below historical average. And so the improvement in the back half is really driven by improvement in consumption driven by improvement in market share.

Luc Bellet, EVP and CFO of Clorox

To help drive sales and continue to take share, Clorox has a number of planned innovations over the next year. It’s possible that we’ll see innovation at Kingsford. It wasn’t called out by name, but they said all their “major brands” would have innovations.

We will have additional innovations. And the way I would think about it, Filippo [Falorni of Citigroup], is that we will have innovations across all of our major brands this year. And so you’ll see those coming in the back half. Some of these innovations are brand-new spaces for us in terms of what we are going after from a consumer perspective and what problems we’re trying to solve for them. And then some of them build again on existing capabilities that we already have. And I know you can understand that I can’t get into exactly where those are right now. But I think the key takeaway is innovation across all major brands.

Linda Rendle, CEO of Clorox

Changes in Pack Sizes

Clorox was seeing customers respond to different pack sizes across all their brands. Some consumers might be drawn to large sizes for a cheaper cost per unit, while others are looking for a smaller check size and are buying smaller pack sizes.

This was seen at the Kingsford brand with both smaller and larger sizes. With larger sizes, they saw a strong response to their Kingsford twin packs. Those are my favorite, that I’ve been routinely buying at Sam’s Club.

What we took an opportunity to do is as consumers are adjusting their behaviors, we’ve adjusted our plans to sharpen that spending in the back half. I’ll give you some examples. Some of it is innovation as we’ve gotten clearer on what distribution looks like and what retailers plan to do, we’ve made adjustments in spending on retail media. We’ve made adjustments in spending in advertising or how we might do a promotional kickoff in a retailer. Those are the things the teams have done. In addition, I’ll give you an example in Kingsford, we saw that many consumers are doing exactly what they are in other categories from a value perspective. They’re either trading up to larger sizes or they’re looking for an opening price point.

So for really the first time in July 4 and Labor Day, we had much more merchandising on smaller sizes and larger sizes. It actually grew household penetration as a result of that plan and that we adjusted that spending based on the learnings we had from Memorial Day, where we talked about the merchandising plan did not go as we had anticipated and we didn’t execute to the degree we wanted to, we made those adjustments in July 4 and Labor Day and are taking those forward as we look at the back half of the year. So it’s across a number of things, Chris [Carey of Wells Fargo]. We’re using the tools that we have, the consumer understanding that we’re getting and making real-time adjustments with retailers to try to capture as much of the change as we possibly can.

And because we feel very confident about our ability to deliver strong returns on that advertising, we feel confident about the choices that we’ve made. And frankly, we’ll probably continue to make adjustments as we learn more. And our business units are fully empowered to do that, and they’re watching the consumer carefully, and we’ll make adjustments if they need to, to support innovations or the base.

Linda Rendle, CEO of Clorox