Clorox reported a 13% organic sales decline for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026.

Read that number on its own and it looks like a business in genuine trouble. It is not, mostly. A year earlier, retailers built inventory ahead of Clorox’s ERP cutover, and that surge inflated the prior-year quarter. This year’s decline is largely the mirror image of that surge unwinding. CEO Linda Rendle called the results “in line with our expectations,” and on the group number, she has a case.

The number that should worry an operator sits one level down, inside a segment the ERP story does not explain.

The Comparison Effect Is Real. It Is Also a Convenient Place to Stop Looking

The scale of the distortion is not in dispute. Full-year organic sales fell 8%, and management attributes 7.5 points of that decline directly to the unwind of prior-year ERP-driven shipments. That single base effect cut roughly $0.90 off adjusted EPS for the year. Reported net sales fell 5% to $6.72 billion. Adjusted EPS fell 42% to $5.53. Gross margin contracted 520 basis points to 41.3% in the quarter, hit by the same baseline comparison plus GOJO Industries integration costs.

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Pricing power is dying in FMCG, and Reckitt just gave us the clearest proof yet.

For three years, the industry’s growth formula was simple. Raise prices, protect margin, let inflation do the rest. That formula is finished. Reckitt’s second quarter of 2026 shows what happens when a company has to find growth somewhere else, and the search reveals more about the state of FMCG than any single earnings call usually does.

Core Reckitt delivered like-for-like net revenue growth of 4.2% in Q2 2026, up from 1.3% in Q1. That acceleration matters less than what drove it. Unit volume moved from -1.0% in Q1 to +2.0% in Q2, a 300 basis point swing in a single quarter. Price and mix contributed 2.2%, with premium mix alone worth 90 basis points. For the first time in a long time, Reckitt grew because more people bought more product, not because each unit cost more.

The Volume Line Is Back, But Only for Some

This is not a Reckitt story. It is an industry story, and Reckitt is simply the clearest data point in it.

Unilever posted underlying sales growth of 4.8% in H1 2026, with volume contributing 4.2% of that and price only 0.6%. In Q2 alone, Unilever’s volume growth hit 5.5%, its strongest quarterly pace in over fifteen years. Chief Executive Fernando Fernandez called it the best volume quarter at Unilever in over a decade, with every Business Group delivering volume-led growth. Nestlé’s Real Internal Growth accelerated from 1.2% in Q1 to 1.8% in Q2, part of organic sales growth of 3.6% for the half. Even Haleon, a pure consumer health play, posted 3% organic growth for 2025 with a 6.2% volume and mix contribution in Q4.

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