CHICAGO — Mondelez International is honing its US value proposition as tariff-related inflation concerns have led some consumers to rein in snack purchases.

In the fiscal 2025 first quarter, North America marked the only region where Mondelez had negative revenue results across the board. Reported net revenue fell 4.1% to $2.54 billion and was down 3.6% organically on decreases of 3.1% in volume/mix and 0.5% in pricing. The region accounted for roughly 27% of the company’s quarterly net revenue.

“What’s going on is that the consumer feels very uncertain about the future and, as a consequence, they’re trying to prioritize essential items,” Dirk Van de Put, chairman and chief executive officer, said of the US market in a conference call on first-quarter results. “In food, those are essential items like meat, vegetables, eggs and so on. The more indulgent categories or the less essential categories — that would include personal care items, alcoholic beverages and snacking — are generating less interest at the moment. We saw that certainly play out in the first quarter.”

Mondelez’s North America performance in the quarter was “clearly softer than what we would have expected,” Van de Put said. “We see consumers switching to more essentials in grocery, and snacking categories are suffering as a consequence of that.”

Roughly 75% of Chicago-based Mondelez’s revenue is generated internationally, and Van de Put said “consumer sentiment is quite mixed” across the company’s markets.

“That’s driven by overall global macroeconomic uncertainty,” he said. “Probably where we saw the biggest effect on the consumer was in the US, where consumer confidence declined sharply in Q1, and it declined another 11% in April. That’s all driven by inflation fears. People see their income slowing. We see the prioritizing of essentials, which is pressuring snacking. We see a shift to value, club and e-comm channels. We’re seeing more promotional pressure and largely lower-income consumers shifting to smaller packs, while higher-income consumers are shifting to larger packs for value.”

In the call, Luca Zaramella, chief financial officer, described the biscuit category as “soft” but “holding up well outside of North America” and “faring better than other snacks.”

Organic net revenue for Mondelez’s biscuits and baked snacks business edged up 0.3% in the first quarter despite a 1% dip in volume/mix.

“If you look at the snacking categories, I think almost all of them except for yogurt are down versus last year in volume,” Van de Put said. “Within those, however, biscuits is doing better, relatively speaking.”

In biscuits, cookies performed better than crackers, Van de Put said.

“We gained about 0.3 points of share,” he said. “I think that was driven largely by the fact that we launched a number of affordable formats, which we call ‘fresh stacks,’ which are under $3. We are seeing that offering compelling value to consumers really matters at this stage. I have to say that I really do not expect to see a significant improvement in consumers’ confidence in the near term in the US.”

In the first quarter, US retailer destocking negatively impacted Mondelez’s overall volume/mix by 0.6%.

“If you exclude the destocking effect, we were slightly down but almost flat in consumption,” Van de Put said. “The way we are thinking about it is that, first of all, we need to hit the right price points. While two, three years ago consumers would easily pay above $4 for a pack of biscuits, we’re now seeing that we need to be below $4 and ideally below $3. And so we’ve launched a number of packs that hit that below $3 price point. That certainly is having an effect for us.”

Mondelez also plans increased promotional support for biscuits, including its offerings that give consumers more value.

“If we can run good activations and get extra displays, that also makes a difference,” Van de Put said. “Going forward, we are planning on things like July 4 and Labor Day to really drive activation. We’ve got some interesting Oreo activations coming up. For instance, we will launch a global promotion in the coming months, and we think that will also make a difference. We did at the beginning of the year, and that worked very well for us. The third thing I would say that we’re trying to do in biscuits is push our multipacks harder. That is for the consumer who tries to buy bigger packs to get a better value, and that also is working quite well for us.”

Mondelez expects the impact of US retailer destocking to continue into part of the second quarter but subside thereafter.