The Kroger Co.
Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 4 Mar 2021

[Operator:]

Good morning, and welcome to The Kroger Company Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rebekah Manis, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Rebekah Manis:]

Thank you, Gary. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Before we begin, I want to remind you that today's discussions will include forward-looking statements. We want to caution you that such statements are predictions and actual events or results can differ materially.

[Rodney McMullen:]

Thank you, Rebekah. Good morning and thank you for joining us. With me, today to review Kroger's fourth quarter and full year 2020 results is Chief Financial Officer, Gary Millerchip. This past year presented challenges that none of us could have predicted. I'm so proud of how team Kroger has risen to meet every challenge and to be there for our customers when they've needed us the most. While we hope that the worst of the pandemic is behind us and we're encouraged by the progress around the initial vaccine rollout our priority remains the health and safety of our associates, customers and communities. 2020 was the final year of our three-year transformational plan, Restock Kroger. During which we made strategic investments and changes to our business model to better serve our customers. We focus on widening and deepening our competitive moats which includes seamless personalization, fresh and our brands. As a result, we generated strong momentum and successfully repositioned our company to serve our customers in new and exciting ways. Let me now turn to our results. Kroger delivered strong results during our fourth quarter and for the full year 2020. We continue to gain market share and full year results were above the guidance we shared with you last quarter. Identical sales without fuel were 14.1% for the year. As customers continue to consolidate trips and spend more per transaction. We grew digital sales triple digits in 2020, enabled by our team's ability to pivot quickly and effectively in the first stage of the pandemic to ensure that we were meeting our customer's demand for safe, low touch and touchless shopping modalities.

[Gary Millerchip:]

Thanks Rodney and good morning, everyone. We're extremely proud of our results in 2020 and the balance achieved in delivery for all our key stakeholders; our associates, customers, communities and shareholders. Strong execution by our team and accelerated investments in our competitive moats during the pandemic, allowed us to create significant value to shareholders and strengthen our balance sheet. A momentum, we see our business which started pre-pandemic and accelerated during the pandemic places us in an even better position to grow sales and profitability in the future and deliver on our TSR commitments. Three points of the accelerated momentum in our model achieved during 2020 include significant market share gains, accelerated investments in Fresh and digital experience, over $1 billion of cost savings, $150 million of incremental alternative profit and improved digital profitability. Let me share additional color on each of these points. The change in customer behavior caused by COVID was of course a major factor in our results last year. This bought to the forefront the importance to the customer of Fresh and digital. We continue to invest and aggressively grow our capabilities in these areas of strength to Kroger, leading to significant gains in both digital and total food at home market share. Consistent with our value creation model, we were disciplined in balancing investments in our customers and associates with cost savings.

[Rodney McMullen:]

Thank you, Gary. I'm incredibly proud of our associates during this past year our team was amazingly agile and always lead with our purpose and values especially in dealing with all the unknowns of navigating a global pandemic. We are different company today because of the events of the past year. We're more resilient than we've ever been. We're more confident in our ability to continue to deliver for our customers, associates, communities and our shareholders. Now we look forward to your questions.

[Operator:]

our first question is from John Heinbockel with Guggenheim Securities. Please go ahead.

[John Heinbockel:]

Rodney, can you start with. Can you at least directionally parse out when you think about that $3.3 billion to $3.5 billion how alternative profit fuel and the remainder, how that might perform? And then secondly, your thought on promotional intensity, right that's been a major source of concern question mark, right with all you - as your comps turned negative everybody gets intense promotionally. Your thoughts on that and how that ties into personalization.

[Rodney McMullen:]

Thanks John. On your first question we would expect alternative profits to continue to be a driver as you know 2020 was higher than 2019. We think 2021 incrementally will be a little bit lower than 2020 but very similar and part of it will obviously as the year progresses. As you know, the two major parts of alternative profit, one is Kroger Personal Finance and we believe that will get back on track. Obviously, the pandemic has impacted gift card sales and some of those things which has affected it. If you look at retail media, retail media is increasingly becoming a channel that companies look to advertise in and it's a double win for us because it's an incredibly effective way for CPGs and others to advertise and they get great insight on how good they do and if you look at our data especially and recently there was an independent report that showed how well retail media does when somebody invests in Kroger. So we think that will continue to be an important part of the model and incredible and important part of the growth and as you know, our digital channel continues to grow as well. We would expect fuel to be a headwind from a profitability standpoint in 2021 especially earlier in the year. But we would expect gallons to turn around have meaningful growth in gallons. But the total gallons will still be less than what they were in 2019. For us, fuel is just a great way to providing a reward to our customers that they care about and we're starting to see people, starting to drive a little more and it's one way to reward customers for shopping with us that's unique to Kroger. If you look at promotional intensity, we would expect it to remain similar to where it is. So far, we haven't really seen a lot different. One of the things that I think everybody knows is that, when you start cycling it's because things beyond your company. I think in the past a lot of times when promotional intensity started. It started because somebody thought they were losing share and the insights and data is so much better where people can see where their market share and we still continue to see people shopping more for food at home versus in some of the other channels, so that will help all boats to rise. So that's what we see at the moment, overtime it will play out. Gary, I don't know if you want to add anything onto the, John's first question on operating profit.

[Gary Millerchip:]

Yes, sure. Thanks for the question. John, good morning. I think the only thing I would add is, you picked on a couple of moving parts in the model for next year. As you might imagine when it was like in a year like 2020, there's going to be a quite a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle the overall guidance that we shared for operating profit. I'll maybe just provide a little bit more color on the big piece. As I mentioned you certainly hit on a couple of them with our profit fuel. The only thing I would say in the sort of the tailwind category would be, there will be certain cost as you might imagine related to COVID that we won't have to cycle into 2021. Incentive cost we'd also expect to be lower than they would have been in 2020. We continue to take out cost so we expect another $1 billion of cost savings as part of the model in 2021 as we continue to keep balance across productivity improvements, sourcing savings, savings taking some of those learnings from COVID and how we can continue to operate more leanly and some of those lasting changes that can help us operate more efficiently. We would expect health and wellness to be a tailwind in 2021 as you start to see the new scripts of pharmacy bouncing back and some of those strips that were restricted because of COVID coming back to play. Digital profitability, we think will be a headwind for us as we continue to make progress not only in the part that Rodney mentioned around digital media but also as we continue to improve the efficiency as the cost . And then on the headwind side, sales deleverage of course is a factor that's probably reflected in our model, fuel you mentioned. We fully contemplated the additional investments in Ocado. They would be north of $100 million in our model for 2021 as well as we take the upfront cost of starting the ramp of the productivity in those first sites. We would also as I mentioned in my prepared comments continue to invest in average hourly wage for our associates and then in addition to that, there's still going to be some COVID cost that will continue in 2021 as we make a safe environment and continue to operate through the next phase of the pandemic.

[John Heinbockel:]

Thank you very much.

[Operator:]

Your next question is from Karen Short with Barclays. Please go ahead.

[Karen Short:]

Couple questions just with respect to digital and on your comments on the flow through Gary. I was wondering if you could give a little color on what the digital flow through was in 4Q and actual thoughts on how to think about that for 2021 and then I had another separate question?

[Gary Millerchip:]

Sure, Karen. Good morning. As we mentioned before as you know that our digital pass-through rates profitability is lower than our store profitability typically in the brick-and-mortar stores in the mid-to-high teens actually if you look at 2020 with a significantly ramped up sales volume and we talked about digital being in that mid single-digit range. So when I talk about the improvement that we saw in Q4, it would be taking approximately 5% and essentially a 20% improvement on that, so taking it from mid-single digits up from say in the region of 5% to maybe 6.5% would be directionally the numbers that I was referring to, when I shared that comment in the prepared remarks. And it already comes back to the two levers that we talked about in the last call in that Investor meeting in the fall last year, where we're extremely focused on continuing to use technology and process improvement to reduce the cost to fill a digital order and we made significant progress there across our technology and operations teams. And secondly, as Rodney alluded to in his last answer to John's question around media growth and the significant momentum, we're seeing in media most of that growth is coming through our digital channels because when customers engage with us digitally, we can surely personalize the experience and that's where our CPG partners and they get very excited about the unique value we can create for them by personalizing the offer and the promotion and driving up higher return on our spend. As we look at 2021, we would expect that to continue to improve as we continue to accelerate the momentum in the two areas that I just mentioned. We'll share a lot more color at our Investor Day at the end of March on how we think about the overall path. But the goal that we laid out for ourselves is to get to parity with the store profitability that I referenced earlier and actually with Ocado, we believe there's potential to go beyond that level too as we roll out those facilities and get them up to full capacity.

[Rodney McMullen:]

Karen thanks for the question. And if you look at the overall guidance, we've provided that does reflect the startup cost of the various Ocado Shed that will get open this year as well.

[Karen Short:]

Great, thanks and then can actually just provide a little color on how much of the $1.5 billion in COVID cost will actually be sticky in 2021? I know that's hard to predict but anything in terms of your thought process on that?

[Gary Millerchip:]

Yes, Karen, we're not giving specific numbers in all the individual parts because as you know we tend to manage the model to make sure we can flex as we need to and that's something, we think it's really important because we manage through all the changes when they're are in front of us. I think I shared earlier the cost in Q4 was $275 million approximately we would expect that number to be ramping down in the first half of the year and certainly as we reach the second half of 2021 as hopefully, we're in an environment where the COVID vaccine is more widely in place then that would significantly see a swipe down in those cost. We expect it to be a continued gradual reduction as we move into the 2021 year and as we start to - be able to continue to optimize the plans around safety and cleaning and processes and of course as we're rolling out the vaccination. The reason, it doesn't ramp down more quickly as Rodney shared in his prepared comments. We've been very deliberate about wanting to really focus on helping our associates to get the vaccination as quickly as possible with offering the $100 incentive to our associates to try and achieve that as quickly as we can.

[Karen Short:]

Great, thanks very much.

[Operator:]

Your next question is from Michael Lasser with UBS. Please go ahead.

[Michael Lasser:]

My first question relates to the down 3% to 5% ID sales. For 2021, what have you assumed the market growth rate is embedded in that expectation? Also your share and how much does inflation impact out as well?

[Rodney McMullen:]

If you look at inflation overall, we would expect inflation over the whole year to be 1% to 2%. Now it's going to be incredibly volatile between within the year and within categories. So if you think about meat, will be hugely deflationary we expect in the second quarter because it was so inflationary last year. So we expect quite a bit of volatility but at the end of the year we think it's going to look pretty normal at 1% to 2%. We would expect our market share overall to be very similar to where it is today when you look at minus 3%, we expect to gain share at the minus 5% we would expect to be pretty similar to where we are today. But nothing specific - it's unusual or anything like that.

[Michael Lasser:]

Okay, that's very helpful. My follow-up question is, the key debate right now or a key debate is rapid acceleration and the increase of online penetration in the grocery category. Now we're going to be on the other side of this, the online penetration is going to stick. Store volumes probably decline and that's going to have negative impact on the profitability for the grocery channel in a certain Kroger. It seems like what you're suggesting is, we can manage through that because A; we're improving alternative profit streams, Ocado is coming online and B; we think our store sales will be stable. So can you reconcile all these various forces?

[Rodney McMullen:]

Yes, I'll talk about some of the overall pieces and Gary can get into some more of the specific numbers if we want to add anything. As you know all along, we've always said, we believe that the customer will continue to transition to wanting to do some of their shopping online and what we find is, by far the majority of our customers that move online, they still physically go into our stores. So it's incredibly important for us to create a seamless experience to where customers can be, bounce back and forth, be inspired on both channels. And we've always felt, very strongly that job one was to make sure that we didn't lose any customers. One of the things that we have found that I mentioned Gary and I both have mentioned is during COVID, we had a lot of new customers and we had a lot of new customers that came to our digital channels both that had never shopped at Kroger before and people that deepened their relationship. So incrementally, we get a higher share of the household spend and those new customers as obviously incremental as well. Obviously, that has a certain benefit to profitability. Also our operations team is doing an incredible job partnering with our technology team on changing the way how efficient we can pick in an order, in a store. If you look at overtime, we would expect online to continue to grow but we think it's massively critical to be able to have an experience for our customers still wants to come into a store and shop online and as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we have a 98% retention rate with that customer. And when you look at the overall online, we'll have a combination of Ocado facilities some type of smaller regional type facilities and stores and Ocado is an important part of that overall relationship from a technology and process change. So and then if you look at retail media, we still see huge growth opportunities there because the channel is just now starting to get momentum behind it and people are finding that it's a great investment, their marketing dollars overall and they get a great return for that money and by having first party data. We can help people see whether they get a return on that spend or not. And one of the things that we believe that is total transparency with our customers there. Gary, anything you want to add on?

[Gary Millerchip:]

I think you said it well, Rodney. The other thing, I guess coming back to the big picture question of how we think about our model as Rodney alluded to it in his comments. We've shared this and we'll talk more about it in at the end of March around our value creation model. We feel very confident in our ability to continue to invest in the customer through digital and through what's valuable to them and our associates through average hourly rate and do that in a balanced way as we continue to pay cost out of the business and use that traffic to drive alternative profit streams. So we feel like we got into that flywheel effect and believe that 2020 was an inflection point for digital as part of that as we, scale of over $10 billion in sales and really pulling the different levers together to start to improve the profitability and the model as Rodney described and I think when you take all that together. We believe through the journey to Restock Kroger the combined two years of 2020 and 2021, we think we'll look very strong in terms of TSR and we come out of that with more momentum in our business because we were able to leverage that model and the investments that we made to support customers and our associates as we come through the other side of the pandemic.

[Michael Lasser:]

Okay, thank you very much.

[Operator:]

Your next question is from Rupesh Parikh with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

[Rupesh Parikh:]

So my first question is just on quarterly trends. I was curious if you can give any color in terms of what you're seeing quarter-to-date and also if you're starting to see any geographic differences, lately in your business?

[Rodney McMullen:]

Thanks Rupesh and good morning. If you look at quarter-to-date sales it would be just slightly below where fourth quarter was. But I would put a gazillion caveats in it because we're just now starting - cycling some of the ramp up from a year ago when the pandemic started. Your second question in terms of regional differences. You're starting to see some of those regional differences because it started on the West Coast especially in the Northwest first. So you're starting to see some of those differences as well. I wouldn't put too much into it in terms of my answer to your question because we do think it's going to be very volatile during the quarter. But when you look at it overall for the whole year, we do think we'll continue to maintain and grow share and achieve the numbers that we've given on guidance.

[Gary Millerchip:]

The one thing Rupesh I might add just to give a little bit more color on how we're thinking about the year and label play out and for the quarterly cadence as you know and saw from the guidance that we shared this morning. We're very much focused on the two-year journey and how we do come out stronger through the end totally the pandemic in 2021. As we think about the guidance that we've shared that will be interesting dynamic when you look at the numbers based on the individual year-over-year ID sales and then the two years back ID sales and it will - essentially it will be on an inverse as you go through the year. So in the first half of the year we would expect to be maybe even slightly below the bottom end of the range in terms of ID sales on the individual year 2021. But actually at the top end and potentially over the range on the two years back number. And then as the year progresses, the two years stack numbers move more towards the lower end and maybe even below the bottom end of the range. But actually the current year identical sales improved significantly. So there's going to be an odd dynamic as we go through the year as you might imagine when you think about the quarterly cadence of sales.

[Rupesh Parikh:]

Okay that's helpful and then maybe just one follow-up question and this Gary goes to your comment at the end of your prepared script. You mentioned that you expect 2021 to be the operating profit based, how you expect to grow off of going forward. So does your team right now believe the pandemic comparison related headwinds will primarily impact 2021 and in 2022, it could be more of a normal year?

[Gary Millerchip:]

I think there's definitely going to be some puts and takes in there that will still be floating through. I think the headline would be exactly as you described, how should we think it very much as 2022 will be that new baseline and we feel confident in our ability back to my comments in the earlier question about how we think about the flywheel and the overall financial model that we've created that will be the new baseline in 2021 to build that, the growth buffer.

[Rodney McMullen:]

We do think - and all talked about in various pieces, that digital will continue to grow and it will be incredibly critical for the overall seamless experience for the customers and we believe that in that seamless environment our competitive moats are even more important, in Trust and Fresh food being able to personalize things directly for that customer one-on-one and our brands all of those things are things that we believe that overall ecosystem will continue to add value for our customers.

[Rupesh Parikh:]

Okay, great. Thank you. I'll pass it along.

[Operator:]

Your next question is from Robby Ohmes with Bank of America Global Research. Please go ahead.

[Robby Ohmes:]

I've two quick follow-ups. One is just, Rodney can you give any - if you look at loyal customers and what they did last year versus new customers kind of what played out. did the loyal customers spend a lot more with you and you got a lot of new customers or did you lose any loyal customers or maybe some color on what happened and how you kind of net out? do you just have a lot more customers today than you would have back in 2019 and that's what we should really be considering also for this guidance? And then the second question is just on the - sorry if I missed it. But just with the ad campaign around Fresh, how are Fresh comps relative to expectations. Are they super strong or just any color on that? Thanks.

[Rodney McMullen:]

If you look at customers overall shopped fewer retailers. So we had a significant increase in the amount that they spent per transaction. If you look at the number of loyal shoppers there was a ton of change in the numbers because of consolidation of households where people moved in with family members or shopping for other family members, things like that. So if you look there's a decline in a loyal shoppers. But it's really hard to assign all of that to a customer not shopping with you anymore because what we find a lot of those customers are consolidated with another different household member because people moved back, kids have moved in with parents or kids are buying for parents, things like that. If you look at new customers, the most new customers we've seen in a year probably if you took the last three or four years added together, we had more new customers this year. We've done a couple of things on changing where in the past some new customer had to be with us a period of time because we started engaging with them on a personalized basis. Now we engage with them immediately and we keep improving that personalization to be more, more directed to that just that household as we learn more about them. And then hopefully, they were understanding by being part of ecosystem, the overall value we provide. On our Fresh identicals overall, they would be for the year. If you look at meat and produce and seafood and floral and those, it would be meaningfully higher than our overall IDs. If you look at Deli, it would be behind especially early in the year. Now we did continue to gain share in Deli, but Deli especially in stores where we had a high lunch time crowd of people coming in just for lunch that day. It definitely affected our deli business. If you look within deli, like deli sliced meat and things had great growth that other pieces of it was a little different than that.

[Robby Ohmes:]

That's really helpful. Thanks so much Rodney.

[Operator:]

Your next question is from Greg Badishkanian with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

[Spencer Hanus:]

This is Spencer Hanus on for Greg. My first question was just on your price gaps, how confident are you with where your price gaps are today relative to other conventional in your mass peers? And then are you seeing any signs that price is becoming more important factor in driving market share? Or is product availability still just one of the key motivators about where consumers are shopping today?

[Rodney McMullen:]

If you look at price gaps, as you know one of the things we were proud of we kept doing promotions throughout the pandemic and I wanted to make sure that we continue to provide a good value to our customers. We feel good about where we are on gaps versus all of our competitors. As you know customers decide where to shop based on fresh and friendliness of service and other things in addition to price. It's fascinating, the customer sensitivity to price really doesn't seem to be changing much. But when they get money in their pocket they definitely spend more and they're definitely upgrading to higher quality products as well. So it doesn't appear that there's a huge change in price sensitivity. But there is change in terms of when somebody gets the government stimulus money things like that, you can definitely see that flowing through on spending. Gary, it looks like you wanted to add something?

[Gary Millerchip:]

You said it well, Rodney. I was just going to add spend - I think as Rodney said we feel very good about our position and actually probably compared to some of the more regional players we've potentially expanded our price gap because of the continued investments that we made in 2020. We would expect the promotional environment to be higher in 2021 of course than 2020 because there was a period of time where a number of our competitors were not promoting. That being said, I think it's important to remember a lot of our investments in 2020 were promotional in nature so we can cycle those again and deploy them where they have the most value for the customer based on the way that they are defining value as they come through the pandemic and as Rodney mentioned, we feel very good about our position and the market seems to be acting generally pretty rationally around it's going to be a unique year in 2021 that we're cycling obviously a change in customer behaviour and we believe we're well positioned to manage through that.

[Spencer Hanus:]

That's really helpful and then with a better digital flow through this quarter. Have you seen any changes in online basket size or a mixed shift towards higher margin categories? And then what's your outlook for online growth in 2021?

[Rodney McMullen:]

We would expect overall to grow. We haven't given specific numbers obviously on Investor Day we'll talk about it a lot more. If you look on, in terms of basket size as customers get used to and enjoy the experience, you find they're using it more frequently and usually when they start using it more frequently, their size declines. But it you look at their total spend over a period of time, it grows. And we view that as a positive because we want to make sure when customers think food, they think us, of Kroger. So we see that as a positive.

[Spencer Hanus:]

Great, thank you.

[Operator:]

Your next question is from Matt Fishbein with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

[Matt Fishbein:]

Do you have any ballpark approximation for the basis point benefit to Q4 gross margin owing to shrink from elevated at home food demand or maybe the OG&A rate owing to increase sales leverage sort of just the parts that maybe less sustainable as away from home channels more fully recovered? And a second question would be, regarding your capital allocation that is for the year. How are you thinking about share repurchases and where returning cash to shareholders maybe shakes out in your cash utilization priority ranking in 2021? Thank you very much.

[Gary Millerchip:]

Sure, thanks for the questions. I think as we mentioned in the prepared comments. We really think about the managing the gross margin in the OG&A at the balance within our overall financial model. So we generally don't get into specific elements. As you might imagine, we did see sales leverage and shrink improvement throughout the year and we talked about that in some of our results. We've taken very much balanced approach say to be investing in areas in the business where we believe that sets us up for continued growth in 2021 and that's why I think we do feel good about the position we go in next year having managed through the balance of maintaining those investments and the customer and our associate and being able to then manage through the transition next year and still deliver what we think, by the end of the year will be strong outcome and significantly ahead of our overall TSR model. From a capital allocation perspective, we'll share more again at the Investor Day at the end of March. We haven't given specific guidance on buybacks, we did that specifically in 2019 because we were coming towards the end of Restock Kroger and we'd changed our long-term outlook. So we wanted to make sure we gave everybody clarity on what the financial model would look like in 2020. So we haven't given a specific number. So that being said, I think we've been pretty clear in our communication in our TSR model that we expect between 5% and 6% of our TSR algorithm to be generated from a payout ratio to our investors. So if you think about that then we certainly be expecting with our cash flow being strong that in 2021, the amount of buybacks that we would do, will be consistent with delivering on the payout ratio that will be shared within our TSR model, which is 5% to 6% that includes the dividend between 2% and 2.5%. So we'll share a little bit more color on how we're thinking about cash flow in general at the Investor Day because as I mentioned in my prepared comments. Our free cash flow is significantly stronger over 2020 than 2021 that our TSR model contemplates. And we're being very diligent in looking at what's the best way to deploy that free cash flow to make sure that we're accelerating growth in the company and delivering on the 8% to 11% beyond 2021, as we look at longer term guidance.

[Matt Fishbein:]

Great thanks for the question and thanks for squeezing me in.

[Operator:]

Your next question is from Paul with Citi. Please go ahead.

[Unidentified Participant:]

I'm curious as you look back performance to different categories in 2020, how you think the mix might impact your gross margin in 2021 and also, just curious just bigger picture game share in 2020. Curios if you think, it was losing share and as you think for the future in your ability to gain share where you do think that comes from? Thanks.

[Rodney McMullen:]

If you look at 2021 margin or mix, I think there was a couple of things that happened in 2020 that I think will be permanent. One is, people are buying bigger size products and I think people have found that's really convenient and I think about like toilet paper, the amount of toilet paper that's sold in bigger packs. The customer gets a better value and they're stocked up for a longer period of time. The other thing to me is incredibly exciting because of our strong position in Fresh and strong on brands is that customers have upgraded in quality significantly as I mentioned if you look at the growth in Private Selection. We've had huge growth in Private Selection. If you look at the growth in Fresh, on like seafood there's been great growth there. People have learned how to cook seafood, all of those things. I think once you get addicted to something that's high quality, it's hard to go back. Small example, but I remember growing up I thought macaroni and cheese came out of a box and that was fine. Now I buy my cheese for macaroni and cheese from Murray's cheese and it's a completely different experience and once you get used to that experience. It's hard to go back. And I think customers will continue to have those behaviours and they've learned how to cook. On shares, I think we think is absolutely massively critical is seamless and having an experience where our customer can easily switch between online and in-store because what we find is different shopping occasions, customers have a different need in terms of the channel to deliver that and what we find is, by being multi-channel. It allows the customer to deal with on their terms not our terms. Fresh, always important it's the number one driver on where people decide where to shop. It's the quality of Fresh. And if you were - at some of our internal meetings, you would hear us making talk about all the things that we're doing to get better on Fresh. But if you look at our customers, they tell us versus our big box we start out in a great position. But you wouldn't know them if you look at the drive internally and then our brands and then being able to personalize every experience one-on-one, those are the things that's going to allow us to continue to grow share.

[Gary Millerchip:]

I'll add a little bit of color to the guidance of 2021 as well just to help, maybe sort of frame up how we think about the year and what will happen with margins. We would expect, if within the guidance that we shared gross margin to be a to decline in 2021 and that's a combination of factors. So I wondered - it would be the example you shared at mix. I think a good example of that would be, we expect that pharmacy and health and wellness business to continue to grow in 2021 and that has a lower gross margin rate than the overall business excluding fuel, whereas obviously we've guided to our overall sales being down in 2021. We would expect some sales deleverage issue, think across things like shrink and advertising. But they would also be offset by sourcing benefits I mentioned earlier and alternative profit streams. So there's going to be some momentum in gross margin too. But net-net we think all of that results in a declining gross margin and then conversely, we would actually expect this to be an improvement in OG&A because of some of earlier on the call around the cost savings, the digital improvement in profitability and not cycling some of the COVID costs that we had in 2020.

[Unidentified Participant:]

Thanks guys, helpful. Good luck.

[Operator:]

This concludes our question-and-answer session due to time constraints. I would like to turn the conference back over to Rodney McMullen for any closing remarks.

[Rodney McMullen:]

Thanks Gary and thank you for joining us today. We look forward to sharing additional details surrounding our long-term plans at our upcoming Investor Day which will be held virtually on March 31, details surrounding the event will be shared in the coming days and we're incredibly excited to be talking to you about our focus on growth opportunities in front of us, which build upon our learning's from the pandemic, investing in seamless technology and Restock Kroger. As is our practice, I'd like to share a few final thoughts directed to our associates who are listening in today. Throughout or more than 137-year history, we worked together through good times and bad and we've always come out stronger. Team Kroger each of us, has led us through a difficult time for our country, our communities and our company and ultimately our own personal struggles as we adapted to life during an unprecedented pandemic that has lasted a lot longer than any of us would have imagined. This team, this incredible Kroger team will make its mark forever on our company's history and will be remembered for its strength and resilience, its heart and compassion, it's agility and dedication for the years to come. I'm humbled to be part of this amazing company, to all of our associates. Thank you for all you do and continue to do every day for our customers, communities and each other. That concludes our call. Thanks for joining us today.

[Operator:]

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.